Apocalypse Now: 238 Days in the Jungle

On the night of March 5th, 1977, in a rented house in Pagsanjan, in the Laguna province of the Philippines, a 36-year-old Martin Sheen had a near-fatal heart attack. He crawled a quarter mile down a road in the dark before he was found. The film he was shooting — Francis Ford Coppola's *Apocalypse Now* — had at that point been in production for just over a year, on a 17-week shooting schedule. United Artists had loaned the production its initial budget on the understanding that any cost overruns above 15 percent would be borne personally by Coppola, who had signed his Napa Valley vineyard, his houses, and his future earnings as collateral. By the morning Sheen was airlifted to a Manila hospital, the production was already $13 million over the original $12–14 million budget. It would not finish principal photography for another eleven weeks. The total cost would reach $31.5 million. Coppola was at one point so exposed that he was checking himself for symptoms of a stroke.

The script began in 1969. John Milius, a USC film student who had served as a young writer-for-hire under George Lucas, took the broad spine of Joseph Conrad's *Heart of Darkness* and transposed it onto the Vietnam War. Over the next several years he produced ten drafts, totaling more than a thousand pages of material; the central conceit — a US Army captain sent up a river to assassinate a renegade Special Forces colonel — survived from the first draft through to the screen. Lucas was originally attached to direct, in 1969, with a plan to shoot 16mm in actual Vietnam during the war. The studios refused to insure the production. Lucas instead made *American Graffiti* and then *Star Wars*, and Coppola, who had produced Lucas's drafts of the project at his American Zoetrope company, took over as director after the runaway success of *The Godfather Part II* in 1974.

Casting and pre-production stretched two years. Steve McQueen turned down the lead role of Captain Willard, citing the long Philippines shoot. Al Pacino turned it down for similar reasons. Coppola eventually cast Harvey Keitel and committed to begin principal photography on March 1st, 1976 in Pagsanjan, with the Philippine government, then under Ferdinand Marcos's martial law, providing helicopters from the Philippine Air Force at a fraction of US military rates. Within five weeks of the shoot starting, Coppola viewed the rough footage of Keitel and concluded the casting was wrong. He flew Keitel home in April 1976. Martin Sheen, who had been Coppola's second choice from the start, replaced him within days. The decision required reshooting almost everything that had been completed.

Then on May 26th, 1976, Typhoon Olga made landfall over Luzon. The constructed sets at Pagsanjan and Iba — the elaborate Do Lung Bridge set, the French plantation set, the river crossing — were variously reported destroyed at between 40 and 80 percent of their built mass. Production shut down for two months while crews rebuilt. Coppola flew his core team back to the United States to wait for the rains to clear. When shooting resumed in August 1976, the rebuilt sets had to be modified to absorb continuing weather damage; entire sequences were redesigned around what had survived.

Marlon Brando arrived to play Colonel Kurtz in late July 1976. He had been paid 3.5 million dollars in advance, plus a percentage of gross, for what was contracted as three weeks of work. He arrived dramatically overweight — somewhere between 250 and 300 pounds, well above the lean Special Forces archetype the script described — and admitted on his first day that he had not read Conrad's novel or even, by his own account, finished the script. Coppola spent his first week with Brando improvising a workaround: shoot Kurtz almost entirely in shadow, frame him from the chest up, hide the body, and develop the dialogue through long extemporised conversations between Brando and Coppola that Coppola then cut into monologue. The improvised approach is the reason almost every Brando scene in the finished film is lit from above with darkness pooling below the actor's eyes; it was a casting and weight problem solved through cinematography.

Sheen's heart attack on March 5th, 1977 was the second crisis that nearly killed the production. He had been drinking heavily on set — the famous opening hotel-room scene, where Sheen smashes a mirror and bloodies his own hand, was filmed during an actual breakdown — and was working in extreme heat and humidity. The attack was extensive enough that Coppola initially told the production team Sheen had heatstroke, fearing United Artists would shut the picture down if his real condition leaked. Sheen's brother, the actor Joe Estevez, was flown in within days and used as a body double in over-the-shoulder shots and in long shots on the river boat for several weeks while Sheen recovered. Estevez also dubbed some of the voiceover narration. The production lost about a month to Sheen's recovery; he returned in mid-April and finished his role.

Principal photography finally wrapped on May 21st, 1977, after 238 shooting days against an original 17-week (about 119 days) target. Coppola brought home approximately a million feet of exposed film — far more than any conventional editing schedule could process. He spent the next two years editing in Northern California with editors Walter Murch, Richard Marks, Lisa Fruchtman, and Gerald Greenberg. The first cut ran more than five hours. Coppola repeatedly threatened to abandon the project; he later claimed he had considered suicide more than once during the post-production. The production's cost overruns put him personally on the hook for an estimated 18 million dollars, secured against his Niebaum vineyard in Rutherford, his San Francisco home, and a future percentage of gross. He was, he later said in his wife Eleanor's documentary *Hearts of Darkness*, working with the certainty that if the film failed he would be financially destroyed for the rest of his life.

The first public screening was a "work in progress" cut at the Cannes Film Festival on May 19th, 1979 — Coppola, in his press conference, famously told the audience, "My film is not about Vietnam, my film is Vietnam," and acknowledged that the production itself had become a small-scale war in the jungle. The Cannes jury, despite the film being unfinished and unrated, awarded it the Palme d'Or, splitting the prize with Volker Schlöndorff's *The Tin Drum*. The US theatrical release followed on August 15th, 1979 in 70mm and Dolby six-track sound; the studio had reluctantly approved the special-format release after Coppola insisted the picture would not work on standard projection. It grossed approximately 78 million dollars domestically against its 31.5 million budget, and another 70-plus million internationally, ultimately clearing roughly 150 million worldwide.

Several of its production records remain operative reference points in the industry. The 238-day principal photography window held as one of the longest unbroken Hollywood shoots until *Avatar*. Coppola's per-director personal-overrun guarantee — the United Artists clause that put his vineyard on the line — became a cautionary tale in entertainment finance and is one of the reasons modern bond companies build into completion guarantees the explicit removal of director-as-personal-guarantor language. Eleanor Coppola's documentary, eventually titled *Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse* and released in 1991, used 60 hours of behind-the-scenes 16mm footage she had shot in the Philippines, including private audio recordings of her husband's breakdowns, and provided one of the most exhaustive documents of how a major studio production runs aground. The Philippine helicopters lent by Marcos were occasionally pulled mid-scene to fight actual communist insurgents in the south, requiring some sequences to be shot around the absent aircraft. The Do Lung Bridge set was lit with thousands of feet of practical neon and required generators trucked through the Laguna jungle. The PBR boat the crew rode upriver was filmed on the Pagsanjan River; Coppola later bought it. *Apocalypse Now Redux*, released in 2001, restored 49 minutes that had been cut from the 1979 theatrical version, including the French plantation sequence whose set had been damaged in the original 1976 typhoon and rebuilt twice.