Coppola's Four-Hour 'Apocalypse Now'

C A N N E S, France May 18, 2001 -- 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."

Brando's hesitation forced Coppola to use extreme camera trickery. "The only tack I could take was to photograph him from the chest up and have him look not like a fat man but a giant person," the director said. "Then I used a double who was 6 feet, 5 inches to portray him as powerful-looking."

Redux Is ‘a Better Version’

The director, who suffered a breakdown while filming Apocalypse, said he hadn't initially intended a theatrical release for the longer version: "The truth [is that] we shot the movie and there was a four-and-a-half-hour rough cut. … It wasn't viable in those days to consider more than two hours."

But with the idea of releasing an expanded DVD, Coppola took another look at the massive amount of footage he had in storage. "We had the footage and we owned the film," he explained. "We didn't anticipate the film being worthy of showing in the theaters [but] when I saw the film all put together, I realized maybe [Apocalypse Now Redux] was a better version.

"My feeling is these additional scenes relate to the theme of the piece, which is hypocrisy and [the] ability to lie about what you're doing and try to take the moral high ground. These scenes helped it be more than a war film. The ending seems more meaningful, purely by context of what was in the film earlier."

Editor Walter Murch, who worked on both versions, said, "Another reason for re-examining the film is it's coming out close to the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. A whole generation of Americans has passed and we are now returning with cultural and commercial interests. We could pose these questions to a whole new generation."