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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 much money,
too much equipment,
and little by little, we went insane.
This movie I'm making is not in the tradition
of the great Max OphГјls or David Lean even.
This movie was made in the tradition of Irwin Allen.
I made the most vulgar, entertaining,
exciting, action-full, sensoramic,
give-them-a-new-thrill- every-five-minutes,
have it everything, sex, violence, humor,
because I want people to come and see it.
But the questions that I kept facing or running into,
into the stupid script about four guys going up to kill a guy...
But that was the story.
But the questions that that story kept putting me, I couldn't answer.
Yet I knew that I had constructed the film in such a way
that to not answer would be to fail.
The film Francis is making is a metaphor for a journey into self.
He has made that journey and is still making it.
It's scary to watch someone you love go into the center of himself
and confront his fears,
fear of failure, fear of death, fear of going insane.
You have to fail a little, die a little, go insane a little,
to come out the other side.
The process is not over for Francis.
My greatest fear is to make a really shitty,
embarrassing, pompous film on an important subject,
and I am doing it.
I confront it. I acknowledge.
I will tell you right straight from the most sincere depths of my heart,
the film will not be good.
It's like going to school. You finish your term paper
and maybe you get a B instead of an A+ that you wanted,
so you got a B.
But I'm gonna get an F.
This film is a $20-million disaster. Why won't anyone believe me?
I am thinking of shooting myself!
Good evening.
This is Orson Welles inviting you to listen now
to The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
Imagine the feelings of a skipper of a fine frigate or a bark.
A civilized man at the very end of the world.
He'd land in a swamp, march through the woods,
and in some inland post feel the savagery,
the utter savagery that stirs in the forests and the jungles
in the hearts of wild men.
In 1939, Orson Welles planned to make Heart of Darkness
as his first motion picture.
Heart of Darkness is the story of a ship captain's journey
up the Congo River to find Mr. Kurtz, an ivory trader
stationed deep in the jungle.
A brilliant man of high ideals, Kurtz intends to enlighten the natives.
Instead, he succumbs to the primal temptations
of the jungle and goes insane.
Screen tests were done with Welles as Kurtz
and sets were designed,
but the studio backed away from the project,
fearing the elaborate production would go over budget.
Welles made Citizen Kane instead.
Heart of Darkness was abandoned in pre-production.
In 1969, Francis founded American Zoetrope,
a company dedicated to filmmaking outside of the Hollywood system.
One of their first projects was Apocalypse Now,
a Vietnam War story based loosely on Heart of Darkness.
Apocalypse Now concerns a Captain Willard on his mission
to assassinate a Green Beret colonel named Kurtz.
Kurtz has gone insane
and is conducting the war on his own terms deep in Cambodia.
George Lucas was to direct John Milius' screenplay.
Francis said that Heart of Darkness,
which was one of my favorite things I'd ever read,
he said it had been tried and no one could lick it.
He said that Orson Welles tried it and he couldn't lick it.
Richard Brooks, I think, or somebody else...
That's the best thing to tell a young writing student,
you know, say, "No one could possibly write this."
That was the first thing I tried.
The war was raging then,
and everybody was either getting set to go or to get out of it
or whatever they were going to do.
And we prepared a method of doing this whole thing in Vietnam.
We were going to do it in 16 millimeter in Vietnam.
That was John's idea. That was John's idea.
I was the one that was gonna have to go over and do it.
John is very good at being grand.
We would have been there right in time for Tet, probably and whatever.
And all these people that were in school with me
who'd done terrible things or were planning to go to Canada,
do something as drastic as getting married to avoid the war,
they were willing to go to Vietnam. They didn't care.
They wanted to carry lights and sound equipment over minefields.
And I think that Warner Brothers finally backed off on it
because they figured most of us would probably be killed
because we were so stupid.
We then tried to take Apocalypse around to all the other studios.
Nobody wanted to have anything to do with it and they just... "No way."
Why?
Because it was during the war and there was a lot of...
I don't know whether it was pressure or just fear or whatever,
but the studios would not finance a film about the Vietnam War.
People were so bitter about the war, you know,
that there were riots. Remember, we were living at a time
when there really were riots on the streets.
People were spitting on soldiers.
And studio executives, they're the last people
who are gonna get in the middle of that thing.
Studio executives are not noted for their social courage.
Without a studio, Apocalypse Now was shelved,
and Francis put his dreams for Zoetrope on hold.
He went on to direct The Godfather Parts I and II.
The films won eight Academy Awards and made Francis a multimillionaire.
In 1975, he revived his plans for Zoetrope
and chose Apocalypse Now as its first project.
I was in the position whereas I wanted to always write original work.
Original work really takes six, eight months minimum to do,
and here was the script of Apocalypse
that we could clean up and send out immediately.
So I basically said,
"Well, what if I just did Apocalypse Now?"
And in doing so,
we were able to make our company independent and further our goal.
But nothing really prepared me for the date I had
with trying to do a modern telling of Heart of Darkness
in a Vietnam setting.
Mike, would you read Kilgore?
Glenn, I'd like you to read... No. I'll wait for a minute.
I'd like Tommy, you read Willard.
Freddy's gonna read Chef.
And, Sam, you read Lance.
And, Albert, you read Chief, okay?
Let's just... What we'll do now, we'll just read it, just to read it,
to know what we're doing.
Apocalypse Now has been budgeted at $13 million.
In order to maintain creative control, Francis had to raise the money himself.
If the film goes over budget, Francis is responsible.
He has put up our personal assets as collateral.
A couple of million dollars of Francis' money was in it.
But that was Francis' style.
His philosophy was always, and remains to this date is,
"I'm gonna go and make the movie.
"And if everybody knows I'm going to make it,
"it will fall into place.
"And if I don't go forward as if I'm making it and start making it,
"nothing will happen."
My attitude towards money has always been, "I don't have very much of it,
"but if I use it in a very audacious way, it multiplies it."
If you have $1,000, but you're willing to use it, really not caring of risking,
you can make it feel like $10,000.
Marlon Brando has sent word that he will do the part of Kurtz.
Brando has agreed to three weeks of shooting at a million dollars a week.
Francis sent him a $1 million advance.
After auditioning dozens of actors,
Harvey Keitel has been cast as Captain Willard.
For the four-man boat crew who will take Willard upriver,
Sam Bottoms will play Lance.
Albert Hall, Chief.
Frederic Forrest, Chef,
and Larry Fishburne, age 14, will play Mr. Clean.
The whole thing's really fun. I mean, a war is fun. Shit.
You can do anything you want to.
That's why Vietnam must have been so much fun
for the guys that were out there.
I mean, like, I know this one dude who came back. Shit.
And he's nothing but a dope smoker, and all he does is smoke dope.
He said, "Vietnam was the best thing they could have done for my ass."
The Philippines has been chosen as the location
because of its similarity to the terrain in Vietnam.
Since the US Army has refused to cooperate
with a movie about the Vietnam War,
Francis has made a deal with Philippine President, Ferdinand Marcos.
The production will pay the military thousands of dollars per day
as well as overtime for the Philippine pilots.
In return, Francis can use Marcos' entire fleet of helicopters
as long as they're not needed to fight the communist insurgency in the south.
A band of rebels has been waging a fierce war
for control of the southern Philippine islands.
But the real phenomenon of being in that situation,
being in the middle of that jungle
and dealing with all the unfriendly elements that we were dealing with
was part of what the movie was about.
That was the first directorial decision that put us all in a circumstance
that reflected, you know, what the movie was about.
I gave him all the information that we had developed
on shooting in the Philippines.
I said, "Francis, it's one thing to go over there
"for three weeks with, like, five people
"and sort of scrounge a lot of footage using the Philippine army.
"But if you go over there as a big Hollywood production,
"they're gonna kill you, you know.
"The longer you stay, the more in danger you are
"of getting sucked into the swamp."
On March 1st, I came to the Philippines with Francis and our three children,
Gio, 12, Roman, 10,
and Sofia, four.
Francis has asked me to make a documentary film
for the United Artists publicity department.
I don't know if he wants to avoid the addition of a professional team
on an already-overloaded production or if he's just trying to keep me busy.
The heat and humidity are overwhelming.
It's the first time any of us have seen water buffalo,
rice paddies and nipa huts.
Sofia said, "It looks like the Disneyland jungle cruise."
Today, I shot some footage of the construction
at the main set, Kurtz's compound.
It is supposed to be a decaying Cambodian temple
at the end of the river
where the character of Willard will confront Kurtz.
Dean Tavoularis, the production designer,
is orchestrating the construction of the temple
out of dried adobe blocks, each weighing 300 pounds.
There were 600 people working on this thing.
In Hollywood or New York,
if you want another person, it's quite a big deal.
With the fringes and their salary, it's thousands of dollars.
So, for a dollar a day or three dollars a day,
I hope we weren't taking advantage of people, but that's what they were paid.
So, you could get not one person. You could get 10 or 20 or 100.
Ever since I was a student in college,
we used to do a thing before every production,
and since I've been making films, we did it,
and it made those films have good luck.
And what it is...
Everyone kind of just grab someone or touch someone
that's connected with everyone.
Gather round so that everybody can see.
- Good luck. - Good luck.
And then we say this word three times. "Puwaba."
- What's the word? - Puwaba.
Puwaba.
One, two, three.
Puwaba, puwaba, puwaba!
Hey!
It's the first day of shooting. There's a current of excitement.
The location is a salt farm next to a river.
In the scene, a helicopter brings Willard to meet the patrol boat
that will take him on his mission.
Okay. Stand by!
Action!
On one level, the film is an action-adventure story.
It's a story of a journey into a strange and unknown area,
but it also will hopefully exist on a philosophical and allegorical level,
so that, ultimately, my desire is that it sheds some light
on the events that took place and why they took place
and what it did to the people involved in them.
Almost we are persuaded that there is something after all,
something essential waiting for all of us in the dark areas of the world,
aboriginally loathsome, immeasurable,
and certainly, nameless.
Last night, Francis watched the footage from the first week's 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 good night 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 did a very, very unpleasant thing,
which is replace an actor in mid-shooting.
Not only unpleasant, but expensive,
since we had to throw out several weeks of work and start over.
Take one.
Action.
What do you think, Willard?
Terminate the Colonel.
Terminate with extreme prejudice.
Two days ago, Francis shaved off his beard and flew to Los Angeles.
He met with Martin Sheen at the airport.
Marty agreed to take the role of Willard.
I had some personal concerns about my own physical condition.
I was 36 at the time, and I felt old and out of shape,
and I was smoking three packs a day, not a healthy guy.
I wondered if I'd be able to keep up a strenuous schedule.
At the time I hired on, I remember it was only a 16-week shoot,
which didn't prove to be the case,
but who knew that at the time?
It is the fifth week of shooting.
It's getting hotter as we move into summer.
Every day, the project seems to get bigger.
Now, what I want is, let's say, five helicopters, right?
Then you have a camera here, a camera there.
I want two cameras at once.
We'll have a camera with Enrico inside the Loach.
In the script,
a helicopter unit led by a brash air cavalry colonel named Kilgore
leads an attack on a coastal village
in order to escort Willard's boat into the river that will lead him to Kurtz.
This scene with all the extras and special effects
is the most logistically complicated of Francis' career.
Francis was always reminding me.
He says, "Vittorio, remember, this is not just a documentary
"about the war in Vietnam.
"This is a main show in the sense that wherever America goes,
"they make a big show on everything.
"They make a big event.
"They make a big show about lights, music.
"Even the idea to put Wagner on during the battle sequence,
"it's part of the show. It's part of the opera.
"It's part of the major fantasy that American people has."
- Tell them to cut. - Cutting.
- Very good. - All cameras are cutting!
You know, just at the last scene, the third trip,
when the Huey come,
they pass too high.
Okay. This is Coppola.
All aircraft, all Hornets, all picture aircraft,
everyone land in the rice paddies. We'll have a meeting.
Because of the civil war in the south,
everyday, the government sends different pilots
who haven't participated in the rehearsals,
wrecking tens of thousands of dollars worth of shots.
All day today, a Philippine air force general was on the set.
There were rumors that the rebels were in the hills about 10 miles away.
The Filipino commanders were afraid
there could be an attack on the helicopters we were using.
In the middle of a complicated shot,
the helicopters were called away to fight the rebels.
So, what?
- They're taking away five. - Five? They said two.
Wait a second. Stand by.
We just heard they're taking away five of our helicopters.
Should we do it?
The Huey go away.
We'll do it next week.
There have been stories in the press about production problems with the film.
Has the filming been delayed?
Well, we're behind, but we have not stopped shooting at all.
I mean, it's just that the film is enormous.
I would say it's twice the scope
in terms of the production of any film I've done,
including the two Godfathers together.
And it's such an enormous film with so many different aspects.
We're out here hacking inch by inch.
We are up against, everyday, 100 problems.
It's like a great war itself.
- Change! - You mean right now, sir?
I wanna see how rideable that stuff is. Go change.
It's still pretty hairy out there, sir.
- Do you wanna surf, soldier? - Yes, sir.
That's good, son, 'cause you either surf or fight.
That clear? Now, get going.
I guess these air cavalry guys did some pretty crazy stuff.
I heard from some of the technical advisors
stories about the air cavalry that were real,
that would serve my fulfilling fiction,
that they really did, you know, like, for instance,
a guy would go into his helicopter in North Vietnam
and try to hook a bicycle and steal it with the runner.
And they would shoot at him.
He'd hover a while until they stopped shooting.
Then they'd finally hook the bicycle and stole...
It's like games to break up the boredom of being in that war.
Men play strange games.
I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
You know, one time we had a hill bombed for 12 hours.
And when it was all over, I walked up.
We didn't find one of them, not one stinking dink body.
But the smell, you know, that gasoline smell...
The whole hill,
it smelled like
victory.
Someday this war's gonna end.
It was a combination of not just Heart of Darkness,
but, like, the Odyssey.
Kilgore was like the Cyclops.
He was something that had to be overcome, had to be tricked.
And then the Playboy bunnies were like the Sirens.
This sure enough is a bizarre sight in the middle of this shit.
The war was taking on an interesting character,
and it was becoming a psychedelic war, you know.
The culture was influencing, sort of seeping into Southeast Asia.
The strange US culture that was going on
where you really get a tone that it is a rock 'n' roll war,
that things have gone a little further than anyone realized.
At the point when we were developing this,
nobody knew that there were drugs over there.
Nobody knew all the craziness that was going on.
A lot was being kept back.
So it was a chance to really make a movie
that would reveal a lot of things.
What we'd done is strung together all of John's anecdotes
and some of the things that he had from his friends
who had been fighting over there.
And it was really a quest or a trek or something
that would take us through the various aspects of the Vietnam War,
and we would see it for the insanity that it was.
At that point, we had it ending in a very large battle with the Viet Cong
and having Willard and the Kurtz character
fighting off all the Viet Cong.
And then when they bring in the helicopters to bring his men out,
he says, "No, I fought too hard for this land,"
and he shoots down the helicopter.
"I summon fire from the sky.
"Do you know what it is to be a white man
"who can summon fire from the sky? What it means?
"You can live and die for these things.
"Not silly ideals that are always betrayed...
"What do you fight for, Captain?"
Then he answers, "Because it feels good."
I never cared for the ending so much. I always thought the ending was weak.
The ending didn't top what had happened with the helicopters,
and it didn't answer any of the kind of moral issues
that got into a real gung-ho, macho kind of a comic book ending.
And my choice was to make it much more back to Heart of Darkness
than really John and George were intending.
I'd like to save the in-depth stuff for the second reading.
And I think very early on, I knew that even when I arrived there,
I was gonna take John's script and mate it with Heart of Darkness
and whatever happened to me in the jungle.
I mean, I knew that was, like, my concept.
This afternoon Francis got a call from his attorney.
Apparently, Brando is refusing to give Francis the extra time he needs
to rewrite the ending of the movie.
Brando is threatening to drop out of the project
and keep his million-dollar advance.
Yeah, but are they seriously saying that Marlon would take a million dollars
and then not show up?
And imagine, here I am
with about 50 things that are just quasi in my control,
like the Philippine government and fucking helicopters
which they take away whenever they feel like,
and they've done it three times already.
I mean, all I'm asking is for Marlon to allow me to start him a little later.
And I know it's all my fault. But I'm saying is that
do I also have to shoot the last 30 minutes of the movie
in the beginning?
Tell them to keep acting, Randy.
I assumed that there would be some malleability about Marlon,
and I also didn't realize the immensity of the constructions and stuff.
I mean, the picture's bigger than I thought. It's just gigantic.
I personally, as an artist, would love the opportunity
to just finish the picture up until the end,
take four weeks off, work with Marlon, rewrite it,
and then in just three weeks, do the ending.
I think I could make the best film that way.
It seems like such a, kind of, bright thing to do.
And I feel that the people back there
feel that postponement is like, "The picture's in trouble or something."
It's just that very intelligent, major studios
used to do things like this all the time. No, I know that.
And that's what sort of bugs me is the ludicrousness of thinking
that I'm gonna go through all that I'm doing,
after all I've been through in the past, after all the pictures I've made
and after shooting 16 weeks, that I'm not gonna finish a movie
in which I've invested three years of my life just because...
I mean, it's stupid, man.
Yeah, but even if Brando drops dead, I can still finish the movie.
I'll just get another actor.
If I can't get Redford, I'll go back to Nicholson.
If I can't get Nicholson, I'll go back to Pacino.
If I can't go to Pacino, I'll go back to someone else.
I mean, sooner or later, I can get someone for three weeks.
I mean, it's not in the cards that we're not going to finish the movie.
This is the first day of heavy rain. A typhoon is off the coast.
I've never seen it rain so hard.
Water has started coming in the rooms downstairs,
and Sofia is splashing around in it.
Francis has decided to make pasta,
and he's turned on La BohГЁme full volume.
I knew that if weather came, that I was gonna try to incorporate it.
I didn't realize that it was on such a big scale.
So I was only thinking that I got to shoot tomorrow.
Even after that typhoon hit, he began to film.
He said, "This has happened, and monsoons hit Vietnam.
"There's a lot of mud, a lot of rain around. Let's film."
Hey, don't leave without me.
We went to Iba to shoot the scene that got cut.
The set was, like, 80% demolished.
It was, like, mud up to the knees.
It was like pissing, man.
I mean, it was hitting you so hard, it hurt.
It started out just as raining a lot, and after a while, we realized
it was knocking out centers of civilizations,
and rivers were overrunning, and people couldn't get to the places...
They were all on the roofs of hotels and stuff.
We had to stop for a while.
And I realized that certain sets had been destroyed.
In order to rebuild the sets,
Francis has closed down the production for two months.
The cast and crew have been sent home.
It was an opportunity for everyone, really,
to have a little relief from the situation,
because it became apparent that it was gonna go on longer
than we realized in the beginning.
Last night, we slept outside on the lawn.
It was beautiful, so clear, with stars.
Francis tossed and turned, having nightmares.
This morning he said he'd had a dream about how to finish the script.
But now that he was awake, it wasn't any good.
He said he couldn't go on making the John Milius script
because it didn't really express his ideas,
and he still doesn't know how to make the film into his personal vision.
He's been struggling with this for so long.
He knows the material backwards and forwards.
He is practically chasing his tail.
First of all, I call this whole movie the Idiodyssey.
- The Idiodyssey? - This is the Idiodyssey.
None of my tools, none of my tricks,
none of my ways of doing things works for this ending.
I have tried so many times that I know I can't do it.
It might be a big victory to know that I can't do it.
I can't write the ending to this movie.
I was on the spot. I had gotten myself into something big.
Some people had come through, a lot of people hadn't.
And it was my job and also my financial burden
to pick up the pieces and finish the movie.
I didn't quite understand all the ramifications of the financing.
I felt that he'd do whatever he had to, we'd borrow the money.
But I really support him as an artist,
and I feel like whatever the artist needs to do
in order to get his artwork is okay.
And I always felt confident. So what's the worst that can happen?
They take away your big house, they take away your car, so what?
He was a very creative person and could make another film
and could do another job and earn his living and provide for us.
So I really wasn't frightened by it.
In fact, at that point in time, we had escalated our lifestyle.
We had this big 22-room Victorian house,
you know, a staff and a screening room.
Life was kind of complicated for me. And entertaining...
And I would have loved to have had my lifestyle
reduced to some smaller scale.
So that part of me was just fearless in that regard.
It really didn't matter if it all went down the tubes in financing this project.
It was really okay.
A melodrama is currently playing itself out in Hollywood
that for sheer emotionalism rivals anything put on film.
The embattled figure in this drama is director Francis Coppola,
who once again finds himself waging a war
to keep his dream financially afloat.
Now, if you read newspapers at all or listen to the radio, you know
that Mr. Coppola has been involved in the production of this motion picture
for more years than even he would care to count.
The press painted a portrait of me
as sort of a crazy person and financially irresponsible,
which I don't particularly think is really true.
No doubt that it was my money.
But the difference was that Apocalypse Now was about Vietnam.
That was what made it sound like such a crazy financial bet.
Did you ever consider quitting?
How am I going to quit from myself? Am I going to say, "Francis, I quit"?
You know, I was financing the movie. How could I quit?
July 25th, 1976.
We've returned to the Philippines to resume production.
Francis hopes to finish shooting in the early fall.
There is a kind of powerful exhilaration in the face of losing everything,
like the excitement of war
when one kills or takes the chance of being killed.
Francis has taken the biggest risk of his life
in the way he's making this film.
This film is now $3 million over budget,
which the distributor, United Artists, has agreed to put up.
But Francis has to pay it back if the film doesn't make $40 million or more.
That just gets me all the more focused on the present moment
and not allow myself to think about the "what-ifs" of the future.
I know that every building that's built
runs into big production overages, every bridge that's built.
Every NASA project,
any large project that involves lots of people, conditions, weather,
of a construction nature,
goes over all the time.
And a movie is no exception.
It's true that since it was my own money,
and once I felt that I was going in a direction,
I wanted to continue going in that direction.
Since it was my money, I just did it, really.
There was a sequence in the film,
so-called the French plantation sequence,
and it involved
the PBR coming ashore
to this rubber plantation still run by these French-speaking people,
and they had a whole bunch of cadre,
and they'd been fighting the Viet Minh before the Viet Cong,
and they weren't letting go.
Hey, this is French plantation discussion.
French plantation...
The whole scene is gonna be made of wisps of fog close to the ground,
and a place that's like a dream.
If you need more fog machines...
Have more than enough machines. How much do they cost?
- Can I buy the ones I already bought? - Sure.
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 over and strafe the side of that house
as though Fidel Castro had his last stand there.
I'd 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
to 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?"
Well, my idea was, as they progressed up the river,
they were, like, going back more and more in time
in a funny kind of way,
that we were revisiting the history of Vietnam in reverse.
And the first stop was in the '50s almost.
We now are with the French.
That was what I was looking for in the French plantation
that was a kind of ghostly afterview of something,
almost like they talk about the light from the stars.
We see it after the star's already dead,
you know, and it was that kind of mood.
It was like having dinner with a family of ghosts.
There were still a few hundred of them left on plantations all over Vietnam,
trying to keep themselves convinced that it was still 1950.
They weren't French anymore, and they'd never be Vietnamese.
They were floating loose in history, without a country.
They were hanging on by their fingernails, but so were we.
We just had more fingernails in it.
How long can you possibly stay here?
- Stay? - No, no. I mean,
when will you go back home to France?
Back home?
I mean, this is our home, Captain.
- Sooner or later, you're gonna... - No, Captain!
I mean, you don't know anything about the French mentality.
It was just the idea of the French still being there.
There was some speech that he gives at the end, that he said,
"If they drive us from the house, we will live in a ditch,
"and if they push us out of the ditch, we'll live in the jungle.
"All the time we will clean the blood from our bayonets."
I like that.
So when you ask me why we want to stay here, Captain,
we want to stay here because it's ours.
It belongs to us.
It keeps our family together.
I mean, we fight for that.
While you Americans,
you are fighting for the biggest nothing in history.
Our budgets were cut way down
and we didn't get the cast that we wanted.
But of course, the art department and the other departments
didn't cut theirs down, so I was very incensed
that I had this extraordinary set, that costly set.
Extraordinary decorations and stuff.
I was just angry at the French sequence.
I cut it out, out of that.
I was very unhappy on every count.
The light, the whole thing.
So everyone forget that we even shot it.
No longer does it exist.
What I'm worried about is that I'm getting into a self-indulgent pattern.
But don't you, on the one hand, feel like that's
where your gifts as an artist are working?
They're on that brink of not knowing what to do.
What if you just scream out to the heavens,
"I don't know what the fuck I'm doing!"
I've done that.
That's another form of self-indulgence.
I'm sure I've missed a whole bunch of opportunities,
and I'm gonna miss others.
But I've caught a lot of them, too.
In the end, it's how many I catch, not how many I lose.
Francis is in a place within himself,
a place he never intended to reach,
a place of conflict.
And he can't go back down the river because the journey has changed him.
I was watching from the point of view of the observer,
not realizing I was on the journey, too.
Now, I can't go back to the way it was.
Neither can Francis. Neither can Willard.
It was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world
when vegetation rioted on the Earth and the big trees were kings.
Trees, millions of trees,
massive, immense, running up high.
And at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream,
crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle
crawling on the floor of a lofty portico.
Where the company men imagined it crawled to, I don't know.
For me,
it crawled toward Kurtz.
Francis works in a very intuitive way.
So he likes to take advantage of things as he moves along through a picture.
And Francis just likes it to flow.
And whenever you do that,
you end up with a problem of having a film
at times that is way too long
and a film that doesn't have a really strong narrative line in it
that you can keep the audience hooked in.
And when you get into this anger, Albert,
don't decide where you're gonna get to.
Wherever you get to, as long as it's out of you, is okay.
Francis used to write on these little cards.
I managed to hold on to some of these.
- You want to read one of them? - Well, let me get the pages right.
And see, we put them on little cards like this.
Now we have the main boat approaching.
Now we have the birds. We don't have the birds great,
but we'll never get it great. The birds...
And then I propose that we do four close-ups.
Sam, Chief, Martin, everyone, looking at the birds,
so I can use the sound of the birds or maybe three birds going through,
and I can create the illusion of there being birds.
"Birds. Lance. POVs of blackbirds. Boat."
It was like this. This was his shot list.
Sometimes we'd get pages that would say...
It'd say "scenes unknown" on the call sheet.
You just would show up, you know.
They didn't know what they were going to do.
We didn't just go out there and, "Oh, what can we do today?"
There was a real plan for each day.
But since Francis is a writer
and was a co-writer of the script,
he could create things at the moment,
and if a new idea came up,
he would sit there up all night and write it.
Then you're gonna get into this weird speech of, "Fire, fire.
"You demons. You sons of bitches.
"Get away from us. Get away from this boat.
"Back, you walking dead, you zombies, you sons of bitches.
"Captain, you made this.
"This is your hell, your nightmare."
I felt that he just thought a lot of his actors,
we were gems who were to bring his ideas to life.
And he also took a lot of our creative input.
Why don't we go, "You want to kill us all. You're insane.
"You've gone insane. You're more of a savage.
"You're insane, savage like those people."
- Or something like that? - Okay.
You try it, though. "This is your hell."
"This dream is your hell. This is your nightmare.
"You made it, you liquor-guzzling, dipsomaniac son of a bitch.
"You bastard!"
Somehow get the idea that you... You're going mad.
You've gone mad.
Once he set that feel for us, we just started improvising
everything that was happening on the boat.
Sampan off the port bow. Let's take a look.
Lance. Bring them in. Clean, on the .60. Chef, get a .16.
Francis had us write up lists of things that we wanted our characters to do.
I remember we all decided
that we wanted to do sort of a My Lai Massacre.
We thought an interrogation of a boat
that ended in a firefight and the loss of many lives.
We wanted to experience something like that.
- There ain't nothing in here. - What's in the boxes?
Not a fucking thing.
- Look in that tin can. - Nothing.
- That rusty can. - Just fucking rice, that's all!
- There ain't nothing on it! - Check the yellow can.
Check the yellow can. She was sitting on it. What's in it?
Chef!
Motherfuckers!
- Hold it! - Come on, let's kill them all.
- Fucking cocksucking mothers! - Hold it! Hold it!
Let's kill all the assholes! Shoot the shit out of all of them.
- Chef, hold it! - Why not? Jesus Christ.
Why the fuck not?
- Clean? - I'm good.
See what she was running for?
It's a fucking puppy!
I think what it was that was me that was Clean was just that I was a kid.
And that's, I think, what my role is about.
I mean, it's about the kids that were over there
who didn't know anything about anything.
They were just kind of snatched up and used as cannon fodder for this war.
Everyone who has come out here to the Philippines
seems to be going through something that is affecting them profoundly,
changing their perspective about the world or themselves,
while the same thing is happening to Willard in the course of the film.
Something is definitely happening to me and to Francis.
Filmmaking, at least for me,
wasn't really just a matter of writing this little script
and then going and doing it as you thought that your own life
and your own experience during the making of it
was also a very strong element,
and that somehow the director works
with more than just having the script
and having the team of people and actors.
Also, the conditions and the mood of the company and of each individual
and what personally people are going through
is also one of the primary elements of the film.
I mean, what's the matter with you? You're acting kind of weird.
Hey, you know that last tab of acid I was saving?
- Yeah. - I dropped it.
You dropped acid? Far out.
Most of my character was done under the influence of pot.
We smoked a lot of that.
You know, the film crew just became our guests upriver with us.
- Did you drop any acid? - Sure.
- Did you drop any acid during filming? - Sure.
At Do Luong bridge?
No, I did something else at Do Luong bridge. I...
I didn't take any acid there. I did something else.
- What did you do? - I was doing speed then.
We were working lots of nights, and I wanted a speedy sort of edge. I...
And marijuana and alcohol...
I mean, we were bad. We were just bad boys.
Sort of crazy, you know. Slightly mad.
The whole thing was mad, you know.
We felt after a while we really weren't there.
It was like we were in a dream or something.
We'd say to Francis,
"I'm not here, Francis. I'm in Montana with Jack Nicholson."
So they'd say, "Where are you today, Freddy?"
I'd be in Waco, I could be in Des Moines...
Wherever I wanted to be.
And you would just go through your day. You weren't in that place.
...study at the Escoffier School.
That was really crazy, man,
that time in the jungle with me and Marty and the tiger.
Yeah, that was really... That was just insane.
We had this guy there with the tiger... A couple, the trainers.
He had a slight speech impediment.
He had scar tissue, like, all over his face
where he'd had some bouts with his tiger, Gambi.
You had a cat that's done that two or three times, it's no longer worth it.
Because once they put a hole in your leg...
It's usually on the joint because it's usually where they're going for,
and you can't walk for a year.
And you don't wanna do it anymore,
so you usually put the cat out and start over again.
The trainer had, like, a pig on a string, so the tiger would see him.
Then he was gonna pull him back
to make him jump at the right angle or something.
So the guy'd come around and say,
"Gambi's very hungry today, Martin. He's very hungry, Mr. Coppola.
"I'm sure he will do exactly what you want.
"We haven't fed him in a week."
- Oh, shit. - Action.
We'd come out there and Francis'd keep saying, "Get closer."
We're saying, "You get closer, Francis. You get closer."
What is it?
Charlie? VC?
Tiger!
Man, I've never been so frightened in my life,
because it was so fast, man.
Guys were running everywhere, climbing trees.
I gotta remember. Never get out of the boat.
Never get out of the boat!
And to me, that was the essence of the whole film in Vietnam,
where it was the look in that tiger's eyes, the madness,
like it didn't matter what you wanted. There was no reality anymore.
If that tiger wanted you, you were his.
Never get out of the boat.
Absolutely goddamn right.
Unless you were going all the way.
I remember complaining to Francis one day about my confusion
about all that was going down, and I said to him,
"I don't know who this guy is. Who is this Willard?"
And Francis just looked at me square in the eye and he said,
"He's you. Whoever you are.
"Whatever we're filming at the time, you are that character."
Francis said he had a dream a few nights ago
about being on the set of the Saigon hotel room
with Marty and a Green Beret advisor.
In the dream, the Green Beret was telling Francis
that what he was doing with Marty was wrong. It would never be like that.
The Green Beret said those guys were vain.
The guy would go to the mirror
and admire his beautiful hair and beautiful mouth.
In Francis' dream, he had Marty go to the mirror and look at himself,
admire his mouth.
And when he turned around,
Francis could see that Marty had suddenly turned into Willard.
Francis was going for a moment
where you see Martin Sheen's dark side,
his primeval being or something...
Some part of him that would lead you to understand
how this person could commit an assassination.
At the time of doing that scene, I was talking in terms of
showing the different levels of good and evil in yourself.
And I imagined that this guy did things that nobody had ever seen,
or he'd never talk to anyone, must still be in him.
And he must have that Kurtzian other side in him.
Fellows, get ready as soon as you can, please!
Let's go. Got to reload.
Give us a little boost here!
Okay, fellows, here we go.
They set up this hotel room, and Marty decided to have a few drinks.
He wasn't drinking at all at the time,
and they rolled the cameras without telling him what to do.
Fellows, watch your reflections in the mirror. Here we go.
Yeah, places, everybody.
Five-B, take three, camera A.
Action!
That opening sequence was shot on my 36th birthday, August 3rd,
and I was so drunk, I couldn't stand up, frankly.
Marty, go look at yourself in the mirror.
I want you to look at how beautiful you are.
I want you to look at your mouth, your mouth and your hair.
You look like a movie star.
Now frighten yourself, Marty.
Show yourself the part that's an animal.
I was so intoxicated, I didn't realize how close to the mirror I was.
So when I struck it,
I ended up catching my thumb in the mirror and split it open a bit.
Okay, cut.
Do we have a doctor?
Francis tried to stop it, and he called for a doctor.
There was a nurse standing by, and I said, "No, 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.
Talk to me.
Why did you come back? Why did you come back?
I fought him like a tiger.
It was real hard for me to reveal myself.
You fucker!
Think about it.
Your wife.
- Your home. - I...
Your car.
My...
My heart is broken!
God 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, in his personal territory,
with a man alone in his most private moment.
I pretended I couldn't remember a lot of the things I'd done that night.
Actually, I remembered it all.
Dave, give me a hand, would you?
Come on, pal, let's take a shower.
Marty is extremely generous, big-hearted man.
He's filled with a lot of love,
and...
Much unlike Willard.
And so, when you ask Marty
to examine the darker nature of this character,
it meant closing himself down a lot
and becoming very inward,
in order to find the killer
who could carry out the task and terminate Kurtz.
I think it was...
Willard was definitely responsible
for Marty's own breakdown.
March 1, 1977.
Last night at 2:00 in the morning,
Marty Sheen experienced severe chest pains.
At daybreak, he crawled out of his room and down to the local highway,
where he was picked up by a public bus.
After being taken to the production office,
he was rushed to the hospital.
Marty, it turned out, had suffered a serious heart attack.
He received last rites from a priest who did not speak English.
I really had a very close call and I realized...
It's nothing that I can put into words.
I just knew that if I wanted to live, it was my choice.
If I wanted to die, that was my choice, too.
There wasn't even any fear.
The fear only came when I realized later how close I came to the end.
That's when I got scared.
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?
You know that it's gonna be all over Hollywood in a half an hour?
If Marty is so seriously stricken,
then he must go back.
Of course he will go back, and we'll eat it,
but when I talked 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-ups, 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 winds is fucking gossip.
Gossip.
That gossip can finish me off.
If UA hears that it's eight weeks,
UA with a $27 million negative
is gonna 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? - Yes.
If Marty dies, I wanna hear that everything's okay,
until I say, "Marty is dead."
- You got it? - Right.
If it's not done, man, ship the 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.
Whenever Francis gets in trouble on a picture, and not sure...
The thing is to keep going, which I respect and admire.
You gotta keep moving forward.
'Cause, I mean, of course,
the guy had mortgaged his home and everything else
to be able to make this movie.
We shot masters of scenes.
A lot of that material we shot with a double over Marty's shoulder.
Then we went back when he came back and shot the close-ups.
So we had to find work for the shooting unit
for as long as it was gonna take to get Marty back.
Okay...
I'll shoot anything. Tell me something I can shoot.
We're out of little pickups to shoot.
I'll shoot the transition to medevac.
Or I'll do a take of this. I'll shoot anything.
Give me a break. What did I accomplish today?
You found out, number one,
that we're going to have a tremendous problem
without Marty with these scenes.
We knew we were gonna have to
at least open one major scene without Marty.
I knew that a lot.
I told you we could get through three weeks or four weeks maybe,
but after that, we were in trouble. We both knew it.
All I'm saying is, from my point of view, I'd like to do something.
I feel like I'm this Peck's Bad Boy who's, like, being unreasonable.
Can I have a club soda?
- Club soda department? - Yeah.
Who knows what Francis had put together?
And they brought me back to put the script back together,
and everybody said, "Thank God! He's returned to reason!
"Thank God! This will be all right now! This is a new day!
"This thing will finally be released."
They said, "Go in there and tell him that he's been crazy."
And all this kind of stuff.
I felt like von Rundstedt going to see Hitler in 1944,
and I was gonna be telling him
there was no more gasoline on the eastern front,
and the whole thing was going to fold.
And I came out an hour-and-a-half later,
and he had convinced me that this was the first film
that would win a Nobel Prize, you know.
And so I came out of the room like von Rundstedt,
"We can win!
"We don't need gasoline!"
He had completely turned me around. I would have done anything.
April 19th, 1977.
This is Marty's first day back on the set.
He arrived about an hour ago.
He looks tan and terrific,
just like he came back from Palm Beach.
Francis put his ear on Marty's chest to check him out.
He said he looked too good.
Part of me was afraid of what I would find and what I would do when I got there.
I knew the risks, or imagined I knew.
But the thing I felt the most, much stronger than fear,
was the desire to confront him.
What I have to arrive at in my mind is Willard's state of mind
when he arrives at the compound.
He could either arrive incredibly angry
or like a newborn baby.
And I think what he should find at the end is death.
That at the end of this whole thing,
there is a frightening...
A frightening place that just smells of death.
In the script,
Kurtz has trained a tribe of local Montagnard Indians as his private army.
Rather than dress up Filipino extras everyday,
Francis has recruited a tribe of Ifugao Indians
from the mountains to the north.
There is a rumor on the set that, until recently,
the Ifugao were practicing headhunters.
Last Saturday, they had a feast.
The old men of the tribe sat in the priest's house and chanted.
I wanted to film the ceremony,
so their mayor asked permission for me to shoot.
I was told if I entered, I could not leave during the first set of chants.
I was interested in documenting, photographing the actual ritual
that they performed.
They began at night, inside their hut up on stilts,
and they drank a lot of rice wine and chanted,
and they told a long story in their own language.
This went on during the night.
The next morning, they began to kill some chickens and look at their bile
and tell the fortune of the tribe.
And then they killed some pigs in a very sacrificial way.
By this time,
I felt that there was something very profound and moving
about this experience,
so I ran back to the house to get Francis,
and I said, "You know, you've got to see this,
"because they're going to kill a caribou."
He was writing and didn't really wanna come,
but I really encouraged him to come back to the location.
And we got back there just maybe 10 minutes
before they killed this caribou in this ritual way.
The caribou was standing there,
and they just seemed to come out from nowhere
and just kill it very quickly with these big machetes,
and it fell to the ground.
There was something very beautiful and strong and profound
about these people who killed this animal,
and then they all ate it at a festival,
kind of like Thanksgiving.
As Francis and I were getting ready to leave,
the mayor asked if we would do the priest
the honor of accepting the best part of the caribou
that is usually reserved for him, the heart.
We thanked him.
Through a translator,
he said that he would like his picture taken with Francis.
I took a photograph
of the two priests and Francis standing there together.
It was enough like people in war who get set up like little tribal chieftains
to stimulate the imagination along those lines.
A film director is kind of one of the last truly dictatorial posts left
in a world getting more and more democratic.
So that, plus being
in a distant, Oriental country,
the fact that pretty much it was my own money
and that I was making it on the crest of the acclaim of the Godfather films,
you know, I was wealthy,
did contribute to a state of mind that was like Kurtz.
What did they tell you?
They told me that you had gone totally insane,
and that your methods were unsound.
Are my methods unsound?
I don't see any method at all, sir.
Thirty-eight takes
and Francis said the scene was never the way he wanted it.
The people who were playing the severed heads
sat in their boxes buried in the ground
from 8:00 in the morning till 6:00 at night.
All day they were there in the hot sun with smoke blowing on them.
Between takes, they were covered with umbrellas.
It's nice because this is the moment when Chief dies,
that he looks up and sees this harlequin figure
waving all the people away.
He sees, essentially, Dennis Hopper. Know what I mean?
Zap them with your siren, man. Zap them with your siren.
I have Dennis Hopper playing a spaced-out photojournalist
with 12 cameras who's here because he's gonna get the truth,
and it's all, "Man!" You know?
And he's a wonderful apparition.
I'm an American. Yeah.
An American civilian. Hi, Yanks.
Hi, American.
I didn't know till two weeks before I came in
I was even going to be in the picture,
much less play the photojournalist guy in tatters and rags, taking photographs,
trying to explain what this was all about and how it's blowing his mind away.
I was not in the greatest of shape, you know,
as far as, like, my career was concerned,
and it was delightful to hear that I was gonna go do anything anywhere.
And I really appreciate Francis' writing,
even though he does drop it on you sometimes,
and it does take you sometimes, an idiot like me, a whole day to learn it.
Why didn't you say that to him in the scene?
- Who? - Something clever like that.
When he says, "Who are you?" Why didn't you say, "Who are you?"
- Because I haven't learned my lines yet. - I know. You've had them for five days!
- The other thing I'd like to say is that... - Those glasses...
These glasses, I can't see anything through them.
But, like, every crack represents a life I've saved.
You know what I mean? They represent a life I've saved.
Say all that in the scene.
I do, but you see, the director says, "You don't know your lines."
Well, if you know your lines,
then you can forget them. You can know, more or less...
Oh, I see, but that's what I'm trying to do.
Forget those lines.
No, but it's not fair to forget them if you never knew them.
I'm not gonna help you. You're gonna help him, man.
You're gonna help him.
I mean, what are they gonna say, man, when he's gone, huh?
'Cause he dies when it dies, man. When it dies, he dies.
What are they gonna say about him?
What are they gonna say? "He was a kind man. He was a wise man.
"He had plans. He had wisdom." Bullshit, man!
Am I gonna be the one that's gonna set them straight? Look at me. Wrong!
You.
For years, Francis has dreamed
of a group of poets, filmmakers and writers
who would come together to form American Zoetrope.
This morning I realized that this was it, right here in the heart of the jungle.
When you stop looking for something, you see it right in front of you.
I'm not disclosing any trade secrets, but I want you to understand now
that Mr. Kurtz had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land.
I mean, literally.
A group of natives appeared bearing a stretcher.
I looked down on the long, gaunt figure of Kurtz,
the hollow cage of his ribs,
a bald skeleton head, like an ivory ball.
What did you do with Marlon Brando when he arrived?
Well, he was already heavy when I'd hired him,
and he promised me that he was gonna get in shape.
And I imagined if he were heavy, I could use that.
But he was so fat, he was very, very shy about it.
Immediately when I saw him, I said, "Well, I'll write this as a man
"who really, you know, had indulged every aspect of himself."
So he was fat, and he had two or three tribal girls with him
and was eating mangoes and kind of go the other way.
And he was very, very adamant
that he didn't wanna portray himself that way.
I mean, clearly, he had just, kind of, left me in a tough spot.
The clock was ticking on this deal he had.
We had to finish him within three weeks,
or we'd go into a very expensive overage.
So the whole company was sitting up on the set, around the camera,
the crew all poised to go and shoot,
and Francis and Marlon would be talking about the character.
And whole days would go by.
And this is at Marlon's urging,
and yet, he's getting paid for it.
One of the things Francis said to Marlon in the beginning,
"Read Heart of Darkness. This is what we're going for."
And Marlon really worked hours with Francis,
trying to develop the dialogue
and develop what it was that he said in these circumstances.
And, of course, after Francis had some dialogs with him,
he realized that Marlon had never read Heart of Darkness,
and it was a complete shock.
Marlon's basic notes, as I understood them,
as I just glanced at them, were all motivation things.
In other words, it's like getting in to saying, "Why is he going on a boat?"
And I can't answer them,
because it's too late for me to change the structure.
So what I really need from him are the facts about who he is.
And in a way, I don't even care.
Is he a fat guy who's got his shirt off and starting to wear necklaces?
Or is he bulging, is his uniform bulging at the buttons?
But I know that this guy's a fucking traitor...
You don't let me talk to you.
See, my problem is not only I have to come up with a scene,
but it's gotta have the right shape to fit in the jigsaw puzzle.
Maybe I ought to get Dennis Hopper in this scene,
so it's just not with two characters.
- You know. - No, I don't know, Francis.
You know, I don't. Nobody's told me.
I mean, I have been afraid
to even put Dennis Hopper and Marlon together
'cause, Christ, I haven't figured out what Marty's going to do with Marlon.
What happens if I got crazy Dennis Hopper in there?
- I know nothing. - I'll tell you.
- But you don't let me tell you. - Oh, I see.
Kurtz found out that he was an assassin
who was sent to kill him.
- I know that. I have that information. - Yeah.
Okay, that's what I'm saying.
Okay, just do what I ask.
When I say you just explain the poem and the reason you're explaining is...
But, you see, I need to know reasons.
I'm telling you the reason.
I can't ever talk more than a fucking sentence!
The reason that you're explaining the poem to him
is because you want to indicate to this guy
that he does not understand Kurtz, that Kurtz is a strange man.
What you're trying to express is that he's, kind of, in the twilight zone,
that his twilight zone is our twilight zone.
It's America's twilight zone.
So that he will not judge him.
So that he will accept him as a great man and help him.
Okay, man.
There's no good, right, wrong, bad.
One through nine and back to one.
No fractions, no maybes, no supposes.
You can't travel in space.
You can't go out into space, you know, without like... With fractions.
What are you gonna land on? One-quarter? Three-eighths?
What are you gonna do when you go from here to Venus or something?
That's dialectic physics, okay?
Dialectic logic is, "There's only love and hate."
You either love somebody or you hate them.
Mutt!
You mutt.
So what I should do...
What I should do is just shoot for the next three weeks irrationally.
In other words, if I did an improvisation every day
between Marlon Brando and Marty Sheen,
would I, at that time, have more magical and, in a way, telling moments
than if I just closed down for three weeks
and write a structure that then they act?
And the answer would be
I'm much better off to do an improvisation everyday.
Two-sixty, take 3.
What is the blood lust?
The blood lust...
The blood lust,
they say,
all the men that I've read about,
they say that the human animal is the only one that has blood lust.
Killing without purpose.
Killing for pleasure.
You can see light through this.
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...
I swallowed a bug.
It's irresistible when a bee discovers honey.
He's irresistibly driven...
My... My friend laughs.
He's my critic.
My only critic perhaps, outside of myself.
I mean, in a way, I'm like on a room with all the floors covered with Vaseline
and all these new elements are coming at me.
And I'm trying to go ahead,
but now I've got Marlon Brando as an incredible joker to play.
And he's like a force of his own 'cause he don't give a shit.
I want a character of a monumental nature
who is struggling with the extremities of his soul
and is struggling with them on such a level
that you're in awe of it and is destroyed by them.
It takes bravery.
The deepest bullets are not to be feared.
Phosphorous, napalm are nothing to be feared,
but to look inward, to see that twisted
mind that lies beneath the surface of all humans
and to say, "Yes, I accept you.
"I even love you because you're a part of me.
"You're an extension of me."
- What? - Can you walk now?
Why are we in Vietnam?
It's our time to grab this moment in history.
It's our time to...
- To teach. - Microphone.
I can't think of anymore dialogue to say.
And I am feeling like an idiot
having set in motion stuff that doesn't make any sense,
that doesn't match, and yet I am doing it.
And the reason I'm doing it is out of desperation,
'cause I have no rational way to do it.
What I have to admit is that I don't know what I'm doing.
Well, how do you account for the discrepancy
between what you feel about it
and what everybody else who see it feels?
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 of!"
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"?
There's almost anything I'd do to get out of it.
I'm already thinking about what kind of sickness I can get.
I'm in the rain on the platform thinking if I just moved a little,
I'd just fall 30 feet.
It might kill me, but it might paralyze me or something.
It'd be a graceful way out.
Did you ever fear for his sanity?
Well, he did, at one point, he fainted, kind of...
He had a collapse.
And he told me
that he could see himself going down a dark tunnel,
and he didn't know if he was dying or leaving this reality
or what was happening to him.
But he'd gone to the threshold,
maybe, of his sanity or something.
It was scary, but also kind of exhilarating or thrilling
that he would take such risks with himself
in his experience to go that far.
And I think this film was all about risking,
risking your money,
risking your sanity,
risking how far you could press your family members...
I mean, everything that he did,
he went to the extremes to test those fringe regions
and then come back.
Nothing is so terrible as a pretentious movie.
I mean, a movie that aspires for something really terrific
and doesn't pull it off is shit, it's scum,
and everyone will walk on it as such.
And that's what poor filmmakers, in a way, that's their greatest horror,
is to be pretentious.
So here you are, on one hand,
trying to aspire to really do something,
on the other hand, you're not allowed to be pretentious.
And finally you say, "Fuck it! I don't care if I'm pretentious or not pretentious,
"or if I've done it or I haven't done it."
All I know is that I am going to see this movie,
and that, for me, it has to have some answers.
And by "answers," I don't mean just a punch line.
Answers on about 47 different levels.
It's very hard to talk about these things without being very corny.
You use a word like self-purgation or epiphany,
they think you're either a religious weirdo
or, you know, an asshole college professor.
But those are the words for the process, this transmutation,
this renaissance, this rebirth,
which is the basis of all life.
The one rule that all man,
from the time they first were walking around,
looking up at the sun,
scratching around for food and an animal to kill,
the first concept that, I feel, got into their head
was the idea of life and death.
That the sun went down and the sun went up.
That the crop, when they learned how to make a crop, it died.
In the winter, everything died.
The first man, he must have thought,
"Oh, my God, it's the end of the world!"
And then all of a sudden, there was spring,
and everything came alive, and it was better!
I mean, after all, look at Vietnam.
Look at my movie. You'll see what I'm talking.
The horror.
The river, sleepless,
crowded with memories of men and ships,
hunters for gold and pursuers of fame.
What greatness has not flowed on the ebb of that river
into the mystery of an unknown earth?
The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths,
the germs of empires.
The river is black tonight, my friends.
Look, it seems to lead into the heart
of an immense darkness.
To me, the great hope
is that now these little eight-millimeter video recorders
and stuff are coming out,
some people who normally wouldn't make movies
are gonna be making them.
And, you know, suddenly, one day,
some little fat girl in Ohio is gonna be the new Mozart
and make a beautiful film with her little father's camcorder.
And, for once, the so-called professionalism about movies
will be destroyed forever, you know, and it will really become an art form.
That's my opinion.