Francis Ford Coppola directing on the set of Apocalypse Now
Francis Ford Coppola talks to Steve Newall about returning to and recutting his war epic Apocalypse Now and why he wanted to make it weird.
For four decades now, Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam epic, Apocalypse Now, has made a mockery of industry insiders' predictions of disaster, due to its infamously troubled production.
The film Hollywood folks thought would never be completed has been hailed as a masterpiece since making its tortured way into cinemas in 1979. But, as its 80-year-old director explains to TimeOut, it hasn't truly been finished until now.
Apocalypse Now: Final Cut is his third version of the film and Coppola describes it as "wonderful". To celebrate its 40th anniversary, it was painstakingly restored from the original negative to ensure maximum audience impact.
Jarring news footage brought the Vietnam War into people's living rooms but Apocalypse Now hammered the reality home on the big screen. Exhaling a little psychedelic smoke into the fog of war, the film captures the surreal insanity and its confounding (and a little intoxicating) impact on the psyche. As Coppola tells us, this heady, confusing brew proved too much for the film's distributors, who thought it too weird ahead of its initial release.
"We were under pressure to try to shorten it and to make it a little more 'normal', if I could use that phrase," the director says down the phone. "We did the best we could because when a film first comes out you have no idea whether it's going to live or die. It's like a new baby that's born and you have no way to know. And so I tried to make it as short as I knew how and as least surreal as I could."
"Well, the film did come out and it did survive and it went through its first years growing and growing in audience acceptance."
Having recently noted that "the avant-garde of yesterday is the wallpaper design of today", Coppola recounted the experience that led him to reinstate previously unseen footage in 2001's Apocalypse Now Redux. When he "took a peek" at it years later, playing on television at an English hotel, his conclusion was that the film didn't seem that weird to him by contemporary standards.
So, what's it been like for Coppola to watch people and culture catch up to his films?
"I am very fortunate in that most of my films - with the exception of the first Godfather, which was a hit from day one - most of my films have been released to a somewhat mixed reaction. There are people who find it interesting or there are people who don't like it."
"What has happened is, of course, over the years most of my films have withstood the test of time. And I'm very blessed in that people 40 and 50 years later are looking at films that I made as a young person and had received a much more qualified first reaction. Now these films have become more classics and therefore they're perceived better by the audience now than they were when they first came out."
While Redux may not have been too weird for a post-millenial audience, its pacing proved a problem, with some 49 extra minutes being added to Apocalypse Now's already-substantial running time. "It was interesting but over time I started to think as a substitute version it was a little too long," Coppola says.
Final Cut strikes a balance between the two previous versions of the film and Apocalypse aficionados shouldn't be concerned that the director has followed in the footsteps of some of his New Hollywood contemporaries by over-tinkering.
"There are many, many, many parts of it that are exactly the same as in both films but it is more balanced. The overall experience I feel is much more effective because thematically and dramatically it is all-inclusive. In other words, it has sequences that the first version didn't have but then again it doesn't have sequences that the long version has. In my opinion, what it has is essential to its theme and story."
Not many of us have the luxury of going back to what we were doing 40-something years ago as Coppola did when revisiting Apocalypse Now. The process may not have been as much of a nostalgic exercise as one might expect - but the way the director describes it hints this is to the audience's benefit.
"When you're working on a film there are always two realities. There's the reality of the scene within the story and there's also what's going on on the set all those years ago and if what was going on on the set is very depressing or you were scared or you were in trouble or you were arguing with your wife … Whatever it was, time is a beautiful doctor and, as 40 years has gone by, I don't remember so much the emotions of actually the day of shooting and I'm more in the story as the audience should be."
So are you seeing Kurtz more than you're seeing Brando in scenes, for instance?
"Yes, of course. The director tries to put himself as more in the view of an audience and not think of who the personalities were. A motion picture is an illusion and you're trying to create an illusion for the audience so the audience can embrace it and the audience is who contributes the emotion. The emotion's not in the film, the emotion's in the audience and the film is the magic illusion that seduces them into expressing it."
Speaking of seduction, at the time we spoke, sabre-rattling in the Persian Gulf very much gave the impression that the United States is spoiling for a scrap with Iran. I asked Coppola if his 40-year-old film, which shaped so much of how we still picture war today, holds any lessons as another unwise conflict and potential quagmire looms.
"Well, I always wanted Apocalypse Now to be a film about morality and about the strange way that morality is expressed and how morality is often used by very righteous organisations, which then perpetrate the most horrible sins. So to me, the key sentence in the script and what I thought Apocalypse Now had to examine was the sentence - and pardon my bad language - there's a quote where Kurtz says, "We teach the boys to drop Napalm on people and yet we won't let them write the word f*** on their airplanes because it's obscene." That, to me, is the gist of what I was looking at in my examination of morality."
LOWDOWN:
Who: Director Francis Ford Coppola
What: Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut
When: Plays during the Film Festival from next Saturday
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