WHAT WENT WRONG - Apocalypse Now

Episode Date: July 7, 2020

This week Chris & Lizzie forge a path through Francis Ford Coppola's horrendously long production - a film that became a war in and of itself. Join them on a journey through 238 shooting days plagued by typhoons, dysentery, heart attacks and drugs (lots and lots of drugs).Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast that covers movie disasters, and that's the general gist of it. You want to take that one more? I think that was good. Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, Your Favorite Podcasts that covers movie production disasters on both blockbusters and absolute dumpster fire. Chris, what's the word when a movie bombs? I'm actually forgetting. Flops. Flops.

Hollywood Flops. It covers those as well. This week we are covering what is certainly not a flop. I don't think, although I could technically be wrong, but it's one of the most famous movies of all time. I would say most famous war movies of all time, certainly the iconic film Apocalypse Now. I'm very excited.

honestly it looks like a mess on the surface to a certain extent so I'm excited to see to hear what happened indeed we are covering Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 war film Apocalypse Now Lizzie had you seen Apocalypse Now prior to watching it in preparation for this podcast yeah definitely and certainly way too young what I'm learning as an adult is that my mother should not have shown me the movies she did at the age that I saw them I definitely saw this one of I was like probably 12 or 13. I think she fast forwarded through certain parts, but yeah, I've seen this a couple of times. Got it.

And what were your impressions upon re-watching it for this podcast? I mean, the first thing that really struck me that I hadn't noticed before is it's very funny. Very funny. The first, like, third of it is very funny. Super dark comedy, very, like, pitch black comedy. Not so funny at the end, but definitely funny for, like, the first half with some darkly comic explorations of the military's presence in Vietnam. So if you don't know or you haven't watched it,

this movie is a loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, updating the setting to the recently concluded Vietnam War. The Vietnam War ended in 1975 and the movie started filming in 1976. We follow Captain Benjamin Willard, played by Martin Sheen, as he makes his way into Cambodia on a top secret mission to terminate with extreme prejudice, Colonel Kurtz, a decorated soldier operating with impunity somewhere between warlord and deity, played by the one and only Marlon Brando. Have you read Heart of Darkness? A long time ago.

Okay. I have. Very loose adaptation. I was going to say, I remember reading it and thinking that there's almost no correlation other than the fact that he's going up a river towards a Colonel Kurtz. Yep. That's pretty much it. So Apocalypse Now is wildly heralded as one of the greatest war movies, if not movies ever made.

It was financially successful, but its production was infamously troubled. So let's hear from Francis Ford Coppola himself. This is Francis Ford Coppola speaking at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where Apocalypse now premiered. My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like. It was crazy.

And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too many, too much money. So that is So that is Francis Ford Coppola At Cannes talking about his movie that he just premiered for critics Not great!

And he's not exaggerating From cast replacements to catastrophic weather To Marlon Brando being Marlon Brando The planned 16-week shoot dragged on for 238 shooting days across two years in the Philippine jungles, nearly killing one of the movie stars, and almost bankrupting Mr. Coppola. So quick question, because the clip that we just heard, he's saying this was Vietnam. Was he involved in Vietnam at all?

Did he have any actual frame of reference, or is he just assuming that this was... He's just assuming. He was a pacifist. He was not in Vietnam. Okay. So speaking of, though, while Apocalypse Now was released in 1979, its story starts a decade earlier. So John Milius, who is a recent USC graduate and classmate of George Lucas. George Lucas is Francis Ford Coppola's assistant at the time.

Oh. John Milius decides he's going to try to adapt Joseph Conrad's heart of darkness for the screen. Why? Because everybody else said it was impossible. Orson Wells had tried to make it into a movie and failed. and so Milius decides he's going to be the one to do it. Nothing like early 20s hubris. But he has a brilliant idea.

All of his friends are going to Vietnam. In fact, he wanted to go to Vietnam. He tried to sign up for the Air Marine Corps. No one wanted to go. Yeah, no, he wanted to go to Vietnam. And then he says in an interview, he's like, after I got kicked out for having asthma, I realized I was going to have to live past 25,

so I should probably have a career of some kind. And he decides to write Apocalypse Now. It was originally called the Psychicist. soldier and he basically takes the allegory of heart of darkness and then combines it with all the stories that his buddies were telling him from Vietnam. So a lot of the stuff in the movie is coming from soldiers in Vietnam. Interesting. That John Milius knew who were going there.

So he writes the script and George Lucas is going to direct it. Oh, wow. Yeah, they sell the movie to Warner Brothers in 1969 and that plan, here's the plan. Milius says he wants them to go shoot the movie in Vietnam while the war is happening on 16 millimeter film for one and a half million dollars. George Lucas is going to direct it. Millius is so excited. He's going to go see all of his friends in Vietnam and they're going to film a movie with them during the battle. George Lucas doesn't seem nearly as excited. He's like kind of half in half up. And apparently Warner Brothers, after buying the script,

realizing what they've actually gotten into, they quickly like back away from the project knowing that everyone's going to get killed. So then George Lucas of course gets locked up prepping for Star Wars. And so the project goes into limbo. And so somewhere in this space, Coppola takes over the rights to the material. And he basically plans on producing it under his newly formed company American Zoetrope. But then Coppola goes on to direct The Godfathers, parts one and two. He becomes a multimillionaire.

He wins eight Academy Awards. And now he can do whatever the fuck he wants. He's the most famous filmmaker in the world. at this point. So this is two years before Star Wars has come out and a year or so before Jaws. This is like when he's just prepping this movie. So he's made Godfather's parts one and two. He's the most successful movie in the world. Just for frame of reference, this is what, 19703? 1973, 74. So he's trying to figure out what to do next and he finds the script for Apocalypse now. And he's like, oh, great, this can be my next movie. He doesn't have to take

the time to write something new. He's going to make this one. And you know what? He hates the Hollywood Studio system. So he says, I'm going to finance it myself. He says, for $10 million, we can go shoot this, the first major dramatic movie about American involvement in Vietnam War. So this is before coming home. This is before the Deer Hunter. No one has made a movie about the Vietnam War. We are literally still engaged in the Vietnam War. Okay. So Coppola says fuck it. He's going to do it. And who do you think, Lizzie, the first cast member that he gets on board for the project is? Gotta be Marlon Brando. Marlon Brando.

He'd just done the godfather with Coppola, won an Oscar for it, and he agrees to play Colonel Kurtz. And you'd think that Brando would cut Coppola a break because they just had a great react. No, Brando asks for a million dollars up front. And then a million dollars per week of filming. Yes, listen. For three weeks of filming. And then 10% of the back end. So Marlon Brando bends.

bends Coppola over a barrel before they even get close to making a movie. And Coppola's like, well, I got to have him. He's like, got to be Kurtz. Oh, God. All right. And Brando already was starting to have some problems with his weight. And he's supposed to be playing a green beret living in the jungle. So Coppola is like, hey, can you just make sure that when we go film your scenes in a year, you've like lost some weight?

And Brando says, no problem. I think we can guess where that ends up a little bit later. Listen, Marlon Brando does whatever Marlon Brando wants. There's no way he was going to stop eating cheesecake. So he has his Colonel Kurtz, and he's got to find Captain Willard, the movie's protagonist. So he wants Steve McQueen. But Steve McQueen says he wants $3 million also. And at this point, he's like, I have $10 million to make this movie.

I can't give it all to the actors. So he says he can't work with Steve McQueen. McQueen also didn't want to live in a jungle for 16 weeks. Fair. So Coppola's moves on to lesser-known actors, and he lands on not Martin Sheen, but Harvey Cattell to play Captain Willard. Oh, that would have been good. So he's, yeah, he's got his Kurtz, he's got his Willard, he gets Robert Duval to play Kilgore and the rest of the cast. And then he starts scouting locations.

And so he initially wanted to shoot it in the United States. He looks at Georgia and Florida, and he also looks at the Cairns region of Australia, which if you remember, is the exact location where they shot Island of Dr. Moreau. Oh, no. The place that just is like, raining constantly. Yes, raining constantly. And the reason he doesn't shoot in the U.S. or Australia is that both are involved in the Vietnam War and the Pentagon and Australian Defense Ministry say, go fuck yourself.

We're not going to help you shoot a movie about the Vietnam War that we're engaged in right now. Sure. So Coppola turns to his, you know, new friend Filipino president, Ferdinand Marcos, who's a dictator. So Marcos says, Coppola, come use our country's American-made military equipment and our pilots in exchange for a portion of your budget. Coppola would also employ literally hundreds, if not thousands of Filipinos, as both the cast and crew for the production.

Okay, a little problematic, but whatever. Oh, very problematic. The team heads to the Philippines in early 1976, and they start construction on multiple sets. So if you watch the movie, Lizzie, there's a lot of big set pieces, right? all constructed from scratch. Oh, wow. The temple at the end is made from scratch.

The production designer hired 600 Filipino workers at $1 to $3 a day to build that entire temple. I almost pulled a quote of him saying, like, I hope we weren't being exploitative, but that's literally the amount of money they asked for. Oh, no. And they were literally building it out of dry Adobe blocks. And they built that entire temple. They built, they had to build a lot of these sets twice. We'll get into that.

They built the Playboy stage. They built the village that Kilgore destroys. That's insane. They built everything for this movie. Wait, wait. So is that stuff in the Philippines? Yeah. It's all in the, they built all of this in the Philippines.

That's why they were shooting. Okay. Oh, yeah, they shoot all of this in the Philippines. The entire movie, they're in the Philippines. It's Coppola. His whole family comes, too. It's like, Sophia Coppola is like six years old, running around in the Philippines while they're like flying helicopters everywhere.

His wife is, there. It's an insane production. The Dolong Bridge, everything, all the Philippines. And meanwhile, Copla's wife comes along, Eleanor Coppola, and she starts recording a video production diary that's supposed to go to United Artists, the distributor, for promotional material. This would later become the material for the famous documentary Hearts of Darkness, which we pull a lot of material from for this podcast, which basically chronicles how Coppola loses his mind while he's making this movie. So Eleanor Coppola is like documenting her husband's insanity, like as he's making this movie.

And they have a remarkable relationship that we'll get into. So Coppola starts filming on March 20th, 1976. He gets through a week of shooting and let's let his wife, Eleanor Coppola, describe his reaction to the first week's worth of dailies. Last night, Francis watched the footage from the first week shooting. They were the scenes with Harvey Keitel who plays Willard. afterward he sat down on the couch with the editors and said well what do you think i went upstairs to say goodnight to the children and when i came down 15 minutes later francis had made the decision to replace his leading man we bit the bullet and uh and did you know a very very unpleasant thing which is

replace an actor in mid shooting spent not only unpleasant but expensive since we had to throw out several weeks of work and start over and that was fratroning Red Rousse, one of the producers on the project. So they literally had to throw away a lot of the footage. So basically what Coppola said is that Keitel didn't have the interiority that the character needed, the introspection. That makes sense. He's very, he's significantly more like not bombastic, but there's a lot more sort of like

external stuff. Yeah. So Willard basically doesn't talk the entire movie. It's all just voiceover. And it needed to be this internally conflicted performance. And I guess Keitel wasn't giving it to him. Coppola fires him. Apparently, according to Walter, Walter Merch, the editor of the film, there is one shot of Harvey Keitel in the project.

And it's him, Willard, early in the movie, getting on the PT boat and them going away into the sunset. And that's, that's Keitel's back. Oh, wow. That's like in the project. And I didn't shoot it with Martin Sheen. But anyway, so Coppola flies back to the United States from the Philippines, like less than a month into shooting. Meets with Martin Sheen, sheen agrees to take on the role of Willard, and they head back into the jungle. So literally three weeks into shooting, they're three weeks behind.

schedule. So Martin Sheen, how, like, what is he done prior to this? Is he well known or is this like a big break for him? It's pretty big. He was known, but he was not at the level that financiers and investors wanted. In fact, when Steve McQueen was briefly flirting with the project, Coppola was able to get an additional $5 million of investment from European investors. But when McQueen dropped the project, he lost that financing instantly because they considered Sheen and Kytel not to be international movie stars at this point in time. So they start filming again at the end of April with Martin Sheen. Everything's looking good.

And then all the sudden, two weeks later, mid-May, typhoon Olga hits the Philippines. This is a typhoon that killed 200 people in the country. It destroys almost every set, $1.3 million worth of work. The entire country's underwater, like phone lines are down. much of the crew developed dysentery. Coppola himself is like suffering from malnutrition and dehydration. And they basically decide, we have to shut down production for two months and rebuild all the sets.

Oh, no. So like they're literally two months into filming and they shut down for two months. And Coppola flies back to Napa. And they're pooping themselves. Yes, they're also pooping themselves. That's bad. So his movie's already millions of dollars over budget, months behind schedule.

And he realizes this is going to cost a lot more than $10 million. So he starts putting up his personal assets as collateral to secure loans for the film, including his estate in Napa, his car, and other, like, rights to some of his other projects. And he secures, like, a private loan from a bank and gets United Artists, the distributor, give him another $3 million. But if the movie doesn't hit $40 million at the box office, Coppola is liable for that $3 million, too. Wow. So Coppola is, like, literally banking his entire life on this.

And there's a great quote from his wife where she basically is like, I just wanted to support him in whatever way I could. And you know what? If we lost the house, like, we'd figure out a way through it. She is the most relaxed person I have ever heard through this entire process. I feel like you'd have to be married to Francis Ford Coppola. Absolutely. So on July 26th, 1976, they make their way back to the Philippines to start filming again.

So they started in March. They're in July. A lot of movies would have finished in that period of time already. and they've barely gotten started. They keep chugging through production. They quickly pass 100 shooting days and more and more delays start coming in like weird forms.

For example, very famous scene that you mentioned is very funny, although horribly dark, the sequence with Robert Duvall, which is like the Ride of the Valky sequence where they're playing Wagner as they're blowing up the local village, in order to go fucking surfing.

In the middle of shooting that sequence, which requires the coordination of like 14 helicopters, hundreds of extras and explosives. It's an insane sequence. In the middle of that sequence, the Philippine government radios in and says, we need all of our helicopters back because there's a communist rebel uprising 10 miles away from the production, and we need them to go fight. Oh, my God. So they have to strip the American decals off the helicopters, send the pilots into battle,

and they don't know when they're getting their helicopters back. And this would happen over and over again. They'd be filming a scene and all of a sudden, the pilots get called into battle. They got to go fight communist rebels and then they get brought back to set. Oh, my God. And they got to apply the decals. And then the other issue is they're switching out pilots every day. So the Philippine government isn't sending the same pilots to them on a daily basis.

So like a pilot that knows the pilots then. You can't. And not only that, they don't know the choreography. So they have to reteach everybody like the blocking of the scene. every day as it's happening. It's brutal. Not only that, there are two other things

that are kind of happening simultaneously. On the one hand, Francis Ford Coppola is extremely specific in terms of what he wants and how he wants to show it on screen, which I think shows up in the final film. Yeah, for sure. So here is Francis Ford Coppola

directing the production design team on a dinner scene that doesn't even end up in the final version of the movie. Hey, this is French, plantation discussion. The whole scene is going to be made of wisks of fog close to the ground and like a place that's like a dream. If you need more fog machines, have more than enough machines.

How much do they cost? So, can I buy the ones I already bought? Okay, I'll give them to you as a gift after the show, but have enough of them. Now, I want some real machine guns, get the PC to go of and strafe the side of that house as though Fidel Castro had his last stand there. But like three or four French people, and I'll spend money for it, but I don't want to fly them from France. If you can't get them from Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Okinawa, then I will fly them from France. White wine should be served ice cold. Red wine should be served at about 58 degrees should be opened approximately an hour to an hour and a half, even two hours before served.

I want a French ceremony that is right out of a fucking... I want the French to say, my God, how did they do that? So Coppola knows exactly what he wants to the degree at which the wine should be served. But then he'll shoot things and be so dissatisfied with it that he doesn't want to put it in the final movie. So apparently he shot this sequence called the French Plantation Sequence, which is in Apocalypse Now Redux and the final cut that got later released. But when he watched it, he realized that his production design, team and camera team did such a good job shooting the scene that he didn't feel like the actors were

worthy of what they created visually and he was so mad about the actors not being good enough for the surrounding visuals that he just said fuck it throw the footage away i don't even want anything to do with it so cobal is really picky but that being said he wanted to be able to quote find the movie while he shot it so he would oftentimes like turn to the actors for improvisation and inspiration. He famously threw away John Milius' original written ending, deciding that he would come up with something better while on set. So he went into the project not having an ending for the movie.

As a result, some days the crew had no real plan to go off of. Call sheets would go out with no scenes listed. They would just say scenes TBD, and the actors had to show up and just be ready to do anything. Coppola would write new sequences overnight, inspired by dreams and visions, and then he would just shoot those sequences the next day. It just sounds like Coppola is Colonel Kurtz at this point.

The thing is he's having a really hard time, as he says, finding the movie. And he's interviewed over and over again in the hearts of darkness. Right. And part of the issue is in John Millius's original script, apparently the movie's fairly conservative and pretty pro-military. Whereas Coppola wanted to make, basically a pacifist film that was very anti-military. And so the middle ground that he and Millius found was, let's make a movie that's about the corrupting power of being an invading

force and what that does to man. But they couldn't come up with an ending as a result. Wow. I would argue it's still very anti-military. It is very anti. I think he did a lot of that on set. You know what I mean? Like, for example, the scene where they mow down that boat full of innocent, people. That was a scene that the actors actually wanted to put into the film. They thought that they should do a version of the Maile massacre that they're involved in as a damning indictment sort of scene. And so Coppola wrote that into the movie. So to his credit, Coppola, like he wanted the actors to bring things to set. He wanted his cinematographer to bring things to him. What I liked about watching this documentary and I liked about Coppola's style was that he truly wanted collaboration from

those around him. But the problem is, uh, it results in people getting pushed pretty far. And so adding fuel to the fire, Martin Sheen, who's a notably big-hearted person, is having a really hard time getting a handle on Willard's motivation. So Captain Willard's this quiet, brooding military man. And Martin Sheen's like, outgoing, lovely human. And Coppola is just like, you need to find him inside of yourself. I can't direct you in scenes to get to this place. You need to find him inside of you. And so one night, Coppola has a dream of Martin Sheen in a hotel room with a tiger, and he writes up a new opening scene for the movie. They set the scene up. It's supposed to be a hotel room in Saigon, and Martin Sheen, who's an alcoholic at this point in time, gets shit-faced before they start

filming it. There's no plan. There's no direction. Coppola just tells him, to expose his soul to the camera and show him both the good and evil inside of himself. Martin Sheen is apparently so drunk he can hardly stand up. So if you remember in the movie, this is the scene that's intercut with helicopters at the very beginning. And it's got Martin Sheen covered in blood. Also naked. And naked.

So Coppola tells Shane to show him the good and evil of himself. And Sheen starts doing this pretty nuts, like, jujitsu-y sort of taekwondo moves at the beginning. It's his 36th birthday. He's having a self-described spiritual crisis. Things aren't great at home with his wife and his kids. He's so drunk, he can barely stand up. He gets in front of the mirror. He sees himself in the mirror, and he strikes at himself, punching the mirror, and inadvertently slicing his hand open. Oh my God, that was real? So here's Martin Sheen on what was really happening in that scene. Do you have a doctor?

Francis tried to stop it And he called for a doctor There was an earth standing by And I said no Let it let it go I want to have this out right here and now It had to do with facing my worst enemy myself I was in a chaotic

spiritual state inside And you'll hear footage Not used in the movie of Sheen moaning In front of the camera Oh No No I fought him like a tiger.

It was real hard for me to reveal myself. You fucker! White. Oh. Damn it. The room had been charged with the possibility that Marty might lunge at the camera or attack Francis. There was an electricity in the room.

Anything could happen. They were inside somebody, his personal territory with a man alone in his most private moment. I pretended I couldn't remember a lot of the things I've done that night. Actually, I remembered it all. So he is clearly having a bit of a spiritual meltdown in this moment. And it translates to an incredible performance. He's literally covered in his own blood in the beginning of that scene.

That's not makeup. And the breakdown that happens is very much real. And Sheen actually later describes it in interviews as, a moment that was incredibly uncomfortable, but a performance that he's still to this day deeply proud of. And I think what's interesting in comparison with The Exorcist last week, in which Linda Blair and Ellen Burstin gave incredible performances, that to be honest, it doesn't seem like they're necessarily that proud of because they were coerced. I think Linda Blair is, but she does credit, not to go on a tangent, she does very much credit Friedkin with her performance, which is interesting.

Sure. And I think what was interesting in this is, section is that in Coppola being up front with Sheen getting his consent and then actually trying to stop the scene, you know what I mean? When he was hurt, I think that that got Sheen's buy-in to a certain extent. Just worth meant, now, Sheen was shit-faced when he shot it. That's not great. I don't think you should let your alcoholic actor get drunk. Yeah, although I don't think, I don't know if Coppola knew he was an alcoholic at the time. It's just, sheen's own admission. He said he's smoking two packs a day he was an alcoholic and he'd been in the jungle

filming this movie for nearly a year at this point in time. So it was a brutal place to be, but by shooting the scene, they have found the opening to their movie. Now, Sheen wasn't the only one leading an unhealthy lifestyle during this movie. So Coppola himself

lost almost 50 pounds while he was shooting it because he was so stressed. And here is actor. Sam Bottoms, who plays Lance, the surfer, on his drug use during the film. Most of my character was done under the influence of the pod. We smoked a lot of that. You know, the film crew just became our guests upriver with us. Did you drop any answer? Sure. Did you drop an answer during film? Sure.

to Dolong Bridge? No, I was, I did something else at Dolong Bridge. I, I didn't take any acid there. I did something else. I was doing speed then. We were working lots of nights, and I wanted sort of a speedy sort of edge. I, I, um, and marijuana and alcohol.

I mean, we were bad. We were just bad boys, you know. Oh my God. Yeah, so there's a lot of drug use on the program. project. Dennis Hopper apparently was so hooked on drugs that the crew was supplying him with a constant stream of cocaine in order to keep him focused on set. I mean, that adds up. It does. So, on March 1st, 1977, after nearly a full year of filming, Martin Sheen suffers a heart attack. He's only 36 years old. At 2 a.m., he crawls out of his room, crawls down the road to the local

highway. He's picked up by a passing public bus that drops him off at the production office. They take him to a hospital and he's read his last rights by a priest who doesn't speak English. Oh, no. Now, Coppola knows that the minute Martin Sheen's heart attack hits the United States information of it, it's going to be a shit show. And this is when he legit starts freaking out. Here's Coppola on Martin Sheen's heart attack, introed by one of his producers. I remember the phone ringing and my secretary said, Marty's had a heart attack and Francis doesn't want to admit it. Dave Salvin let Melissa tell Barry Hirsch that Marty had a heart attack.

What the fuck is that? What the fuck is that? Do you know that it's going to be all over Hollywood in a half an hour? If Marty is so seriously stricken, then that he must go back. Of course he will go back and we'll eat it. But when I talk to the doctor, they didn't know Marty's a young man. He probably would be able to be up and about in three weeks. I said, could he do non-strenuous work such as just close-up sitting and acting?

He said possibly yes. That's all I need to hear from the doctor. So what's going on in fucking trade wins is fucking gossip. gossip. That gossip can finish me off. Because if UA hears that it's eight weeks, UA with a $27 million negative is going to force me to complete it with what I've got, and I don't have the movie yet. Right. All right. Now, you understand exactly. If Marty dies, I want to hear that everything's okay until I say Marty is dead. You got it? If it's not done, man, shipped a whole office out of here. You know what I'm saying?

Yes. Okay, I'm really scared, guys. The first time I've been scared on this movie. Intent, yeah, Copla is not in a good place. No. Copla has been backed into a corner. He's been shooting a movie for a year, and he just lost his lead actor for seven weeks.

Martin has to go into bed rest. Coppola is literally just trying to think of stuff that they can film. Marlon Brando? They're shooting scenes... Not on set yet. Oh, boy. So they're shooting scenes with a background actor. posing as Willard, they shoot all the coverage that doesn't require his face, and then when he's

back, they're going to shoot all of his close-ups. So that's what they do for seven weeks. Seven weeks later, Martin Sheen returns to set. It's been a year since he started working on this movie. He's had one heart attack, and the first thing Coppola says when Martin Sheen gets to set is, you look too healthy. Oh my God. So in all of this craziness, Coppola still hasn't come up with an ending to the movie. So his plan was to shoot everything but the third act, take a four-week break, write the ending to the movie, and then come back and finish the film. But Marlon Brando is tired of waiting. So Marlon Brando says, I want to film now. And he says, if I don't film now, I'm going to keep the $1 million that you already paid me and I'm going to sue you for the rest of it.

Listen, I know Marlon Brando was a total nightmare and probably like maybe not a great person. I don't actually know, but I love it. them. Yeah, oh no, no, just the best. So Coppola has no choice. He has to keep going with the movie. Once again, he just has to keep going. He's been shooting forever. And so as we mentioned, Brando was overweight when Coppola first met with him. He said he would lose the weight. And let's hear about what happened when Brando showed up to set from Coppola and Dennis Hopper. The Marlon character didn't appear until at the end. And, you know, when he showed up, he was he was heavy and it made it a little difficult because how are we going to dress him like a green beret marine colonel and

when I suggested to depict him as a man who was indulging his senses and you know be there with you know his arm around two girls and eating eating he didn't want to be I mean he's shy about his weight he weighed into 360 pounds or something marlin for apocalypse and and you know he was on a million dollar a week contract uh Francis was very upset because because he found out that he hadn't read the book, Heart of Darkness. And Francis said, we've got to stop shooting him. And basically went off for a week with, I call it the million-dollar riverboat scene, where they go off and pay Marlon a million,

and 900 people sit and wait. Well, I think, it's my own opinion, that Francis read him the book. So Dennis Hopper thinks that Francis Ford Coppola literally took Marlon Brando offset for a week, it cost a million dollars so he could read him hard of darkness. Yeah, I'm team Marlon on this one. It's not an easy book to get through. And if you have to read it, I guess having Francis Ford Coppola read it to you is preferable. No, it's a good place to go. So, so Coppola at this point, he has two, he has two choices. He has Marlon Brando for three weeks. It's going to cost $3 million. He can either shut down the production for two weeks and come

up with an ending to the script, or he can improvise as many scenes between Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen as possible and just hope there's enough magic in those scenes to cut together some tort of ending for the movie. Now, based on what you saw, Lizzie, which way did you think he ended up going? I mean, this is, this is the improv Olympics, for sure. It is the improv Olympics. So Marlon Brando basically got to improvise all of his dialogue at the end of the movie. That's pretty impressive. I mean, most of it makes no sense, but like it's great. There is literally a clip where Marlon Brando's walking away from camera and you can hear him say, I can't think of any more dialogue today. That was the end of the scene.

I just want to play you a brief clip. It's my favorite Marlon Brando improv moment from the movie that I could find. You take the ones that are made for garbage detail. You take the others who are made to think but who can't act. You take follow the book. No, it's not. Oh, no, it should be. It should be.

He was just riffing. So at this point, Coppola is like literally openly fantasizing about falling off a cliff or coming down with a debilitating illness, anything that can protect him from having to finish the movie. He's convinced that the movie's going to fail. Go ahead. I have one question. So you're saying he improvised a lot of his lines. There's obviously two lines that stand out to me right away as being some of the most famous from this movie. And I'm wondering if they were ones that he actually came up with.

The first one is that, you know, the, I saw a snail right on the edge of a straight razor. Do you know, do you know anything? I don't know if that one's improvised or not. I hope it is. Okay. But I could also see John Millius. That feels like a John Millius line also. And then the other one, obviously, is the horror, the horror.

Which is from Heart of Darkness, the book. Okay. So Coppola at this point is flying by the seat of his pants, and he is nervous. Here is a brief clip of him talking to his wife at the time. And I'm feeling like an idiot, having set in motion, stuff that doesn't make any sets that doesn't match. And yet I'm doing it.

And the reason I'm doing it is out of desperation because I have no rational way to do it. What I have to admit is that I don't know what I'm doing. How do you account for the discrepancy between what you feel about and what everybody else who sees? Because they see the magic of, what has happened before. I'm saying, hey, it's not gonna happen.

I don't have any performances. The script doesn't make sense. I have no ending. I'm like a voice crying out, saying, please, it's not working. Somebody get me off this, and nobody listens to me. Everyone says, yes, well, Francis works best in a crisis. I'm saying this is one crisis, I'm not gonna pull myself out. I'm making a bad movie, so why should I go ahead?

I'd rather, I'm gonna be bankrupt anyway. why can't I just have the courage to say it's no good? So Coppola is not doing well. That's from the set. That's like he's talking to his wife on set while he's filming the movie. He doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. And he actually has the self-awareness to admit it. And we've talked a lot about, you know, how, no matter how much you plan,

everything that can go wrong will go wrong while making a movie. It also seems like their plans weren't great. That's the thing. It's like beyond that, he didn't really have. have a plan he wanted to find the movie on set. But here's the flip side of that rule. It turns out that Francis Ford Coppola is really, really talented, and that Martin Sheen is really, really talented. And Marlon Brando is really talented. And the DP was really talented. And sometimes when you put enough talented people together, magic can happen. And so back against

the wall, Coppola needs a miracle. He needs an ending to the movie. The project's been cursed from the get-go. And out of left field, inspiration strikes. His wife, Eleanor Coppola, is filming the local tribe that they've hired to play Colonel Kurtz's followers as they start a ritual of some sort. She's watching as they set up a water buffalo to slaughter, and she runs and grabs her husband. And she says, you have to see this. And she drags him up. and he watches them slaughter this water buffalo, and he finds the ending to his movie. Willard can sacrifice Kurtz just as the villagers do the buffalo. The villagers are going to sacrifice another buffalo the following night,

and he sets up the filming for the climax of his film. So after 238 days of filming in the jungle on May 21st, 1977, after being in the jungle for two years, Apocalypse Now wraps up production. the release dates pushed four times and they shot 1.5 million feet of film. Oh my God. Another quick question. Sorry.

Anybody have a problem with them filming an actual water buffalo being hacked up? Not at the time. It doesn't seem like. Although he did have to defend it later. And his defense was this was something that their tribe was doing. Yeah, that's what it looked like. So I'm going to film it. He didn't.

He said, said, in his defense, he said, they asked if I wanted to have a second water buffalo ready in case the first take went wrong. And I said no. He said, no. He said, I'm not going to kill an animal for my movie, although one construction worker did die during the production of the apocalypse now. Yes, I couldn't find much information about it, but during the construction, I believe, of the temple, a Filipino worker was crushed by like a falling rock at one point. It was tragic. I just couldn't find a lot of information. about it. So Coppola takes two years to edit the movie and eventually they take a work in progress to Can and

it shares the top prize, the Palm to Orr, with the Tin Drum, a German film. If you remember at the top, the film's budget was initially $10 million. The final budget was $31.5 million. You know what? Not that bad. Coppola put in just over $20 million himself. Oh my God. So Coppola eventually locked a 150-minute cut of the movie. It's released in August of 1979. Critical reactions are mixed, but it's a huge box office success. It ends its theatrical run at over $150 million in worldwide sales. It's nominated for eight Academy Awards and at won two. Best cinematography and best sound. Coppola continues to fiddle with the movie for the next 40 years. He releases Apocalypse Now Redux in 2001, which added 49 minutes to the movie. Don't need them. And then Apocalypse Now the final cut, which pulled out 20 minutes of those.

and left the running time at three hours. So, you know, to follow Coppola through the movie, not many people are willing to put their money literally where their mouths are, like Coppola did on this project. He owned it in a way that few people do. And I want to play a clip before we go into what went right. Here's Coppola talking about his financial stake in the movie and how it relates to his movie philosophy on the,

the Merv Griffin Show shortly after the film's premiere in 1979. I believe that filmmaking, as probably as everything, is a game you should play with all your cards and all your dice and whatever else you got. And so each time I make a movie, I give it everything I have.

And I think everyone should, and I think everyone should do everything they do that way. For example, how much did Apocalypse now cost to make? $31 million. $31 million. Have you ever had nightmares Francis, that if it had been a disaster, which it certainly isn't, if it had been a disaster, what would you have done?

Well, being realistically, I mean... Bankruptcy? No, I mean, bankruptcy. I'm a large motion picture director. I can go out and get a job and make in a year what most people don't even dream about ever having in their lives. So it would be a sin for me not to risk what I had earned because I can make it back again. And that's what, to me, the trust is.

The reason I can make that much money is because I'm going to really give it my best shot. And that means in the apocalypse case, that meant putting up all the stuff you were. So I did it. I mean, to me, it is not as amazing. I'm surprised that people are surprised. That wasn't a nightmare to you? No. That is respectable.

I think so, too. He wanted to take his shot, and he took his shot. And he had about a million opportunities to quit this movie. His actor had a heart attack. his other actor showed up 90 pounds overweight. Marlon Brando shaved his head without permission five days after showing up on set. And Coppola ran with it. He said he loved it.

He just needed to figure out a way to weave this story together. And I think he came up with something hallucinatory and clearly transcended. He, of course, nearly lost his mind on the way. And it maybe broke him as a filmmaker. I don't think he necessarily made a movie as good, like afterwards. Dracula, Chris? Okay. I like it.

But this is definitely an example of after everything going wrong, somehow the movie went right at the end of the day. Lizzie, what went right for you as a viewer? And after hearing this story, what do you feel went right with this project? Well, I do think this is an interesting one to follow The Exorcist with because it does feel like the actor's performances are their own in a way that that the Exorcist didn't. So I guess what went right is,

actually, the performances are completely their own based on what you're saying about Marlon Brando and the way that he found the movie. So I would say like the sort of individuality of the performances in this and the specificity of them and the differences, it's really amazing. And I would also just, again, come back to Robert Duvall's extremely funny performance. as something that I think as an adult stands out to me so much more than it did as a kid.

I just, I didn't get it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think for me what went right is that it can be tempting when you're making a movie, and I can speak a little bit from experience, to fall into the trap of being heartbroken over watching it become something that you didn't intend it to be, over watching it not become what you'd hoped it would be. And what Coppola, I think, did so well with this project is that as it continued to become something else, instead of running away from that, he ran towards it. And I think in doing that, he was able to make something entirely unique as a result.

And I think few people are able to pull that off. Yeah, it's like, to a certain degree, he was able to remove his ego from this, which is, that's interesting. what I thought, that's not what I thought about this movie at all. That's not what I, I thought we'd come away with. But yeah, if anything, going into this, I thought it was going to be like his stubbornness in making it one specific way that was going to be the downfall. But if anything, I think he was remarkably flexible in the face of just absolutely horrifying obstacles, you know, in getting it done. And without that flexibility, it never would have happened. To wrap things up today, I do want to pivot for a moment.

after this episode, we've now had more than a few chuckles at Marlon Brando's expense on this podcast. The films that we've discussed have come late in his career when his gluttony seemingly overwhelmed his talent. As David Thompson wrote in 2004 in the New York Times, performances date, of course, and film is a dire, cruel medium that lets us laugh at things that once moved people to the depth of their being. The Brando, whom became a model for the actor's studio style, the Stanislavski method, or L.A. Kazan's intensity, however you want to call it, already looks like a figure from history.

Of course, we wanted so much more from Marlon Brando, but he went west to a city he never liked and a business that he despised. He wanted everything, and he wanted to be the hero. Though he grew vast and decrepit, he may never have grown up, It is striking and not entirely beyond the bounds of great dramatic timing that his death comes at a moment when America's maturity is tragically necessary, yet tormentingly distant. If only we feel now that he is gone, if only he could have tried again. Which I thought was something very beautiful to say about Marlon Brando.

And I'd like to wrap up with... I love Marlon Brando. Some words from Martin Sheen, a number of years after the project, about working with Marlon Brando, and a particular moment of inspiration that was clearly pulled from Brando's life itself. There's no acting with Marlon. There's behavior and there's honesty and truth. As soon as you start acting, he will pull you out of that. You know, he'll say, without saying don't act, he'll say, be human, be open, be free.

trust come follow me be ruled by me be secure in this you know he doesn't look over his shoulder he doesn't make any apologies he doesn't edit whatever he is is so this scene required me to sneak up on Marlon while his back is turned with this this farm implement and bash his brains out and the camera is dollying with me and it gets up over my shoulder and he's supposed to turn just as I bash him and this This particular take, I'm creeping up and the camera's moving and everything is time perfectly. I raised the implement to hit him. He turns around, looks me right in the eye and says, pray for your father.

I dropped the farm implement. I became tongue-tied. I could believe what I'd heard. That does it for this week's episode of What Went Wrong. Thanks so much for listening, guys. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. by David Bowman with cover art from Euthano UO.S.