Coppola's Four-Hour 'Apocalypse Now'

C A N N E S, France May 18 -- Proving that you can go home again, Francis Ford Coppola's new, nearly four-hour-long version of his harrowing Vietnam classic, Apocalypse Now, is being hailed as the great film of the Cannes Film Festival, more than 20 years after its initial release.

Coppola, who won the Palme D'Or (the festival's top prize) when he showed Apocalypse as a "work in progress" in '79, unveiled the highly anticipated Apocalypse Now Redux outdoors at Cannes Sunday night. It was the first time in festival history that a film was shown to the public under the stars.

Apocalypse Now Redux will be released in U.S. theaters on Aug. 15.

A new generation of moviegoers will still be able to see Robert Duvall's demented Lt. Col. Kilgore boast how he loves "the smell of napalm in the morning," but they will also be able to view two sequences cut from the original: a ghostly French plantation segment in which Martin Sheen's Capt. Willard makes love to the owner's daughter, and a never-seen Playboy Bunny love-fest — which was filmed just as Hurricane Olga arrived in the Philippines and completely destroyed all of the film's sets.

Pricey Production and Camera Trickery

Of course, that natural disaster was merely one of many troubling developments that plagued the $30 million picture, which Coppola financed himself by mortgaging his beautiful California home and tapping his savings. The Philippines shoot was expected to wrap in five months but took 18. There were serious leading man problems — Harvey Keitel left after two weeks, and his replacement, Martin Sheen, had a heart attack. And Coppola's highly touted reunion with Marlon Brando, whose comeback he'd engineered with The Godfather, was nearly capsized when the star showed up looking like a beached whale.

"Brando's Kurtz in the original script was a special services colonel, and he promised me he'd arrive trim, but he was very overweight," Coppolla recalls. "I didn't know what to do. When I suggested we show him in the jungle and say he'd gone to seed and have him eating and drinking, he didn't want to be portrayed as being heavy."