Episode 4: “Little by Little, We Went Insane”
‘Do We Get to Win This Time?’ is a podcast about how Vietnam movies have shaped the way we think about the Vietnam War. In Episode 4, host Brian Raftery tells the story of Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now.’
Do We Get to Win This Time? is a podcast about how Hollywood has depicted and defined the Vietnam War. You can listen on the Big Picture feed. The following is an excerpt from Episode 4: “Little by Little, We Went Insane.”
In late 1975, Francis Ford Coppola began putting together what he described to the press as his “orgiastic” Vietnam film. But even in those early days, it was clear that making Apocalypse Now was going to be a monumental task.
When a few big-name actors turned down the film—names like Al Pacino and Jack Nicholson—Coppola became so frustrated that, one day, he threw his five Oscars out a window.
“He was kind of known for these sort of operatic outbursts,” says Eleanor Coppola, Francis’s wife of 60 years. “Maybe a couple were scuffed, but the broken ones that were broken in half and the guts were pouring out, Francis’s mother took them to the Academy, and she said, ‘My son’s housekeeper knocked these off the shelf. What can I do?’ And she got them replaced.”
With his new Oscars safe and sound at home, Coppola flew to Manila in late 1975 to start scouting locations. He wouldn’t return from the jungle for good for nearly a year and a half.
The public first got word of trouble on the set of Coppola’s film in the summer of 1976. That’s when wild stories about Apocalypse Now began appearing in the press. Stories about crew members bringing gallons of gasoline into the jungle to create the napalm scenes. About Coppola firing Harvey Keitel—his first choice to play Willard—just as shooting began. And about Coppola borrowing helicopters from the Philippine government after being turned down by the U.S. military.
Coppola was really pissed about the helicopter thing. The government had given John Wayne all sorts of military toys for The Green Berets, but Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld refused to help with Apocalypse Now. Coppola took his complaints to reporters. “With my film,” he said, “the department has done its best to turn its head.”
Quotes like that spread through newspapers across the country. You have to remember: Coppola, then in his mid-30s, was a rare superstar director—a swaggering genius whose self-assuredness was never in doubt.
People were waiting for his next masterpiece. Or his first disaster.
Francis Ford Coppola wasn’t just frustrated by all of those nasty stories; he was confused by them. After all, he was an artist taking on a difficult subject. Shouldn’t people root for him?
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“I thought of myself as going off and doing a heroic production using my own money, trying to make a film that was set in Vietnam,” Coppola said in a 2007 audio commentary for the film. “Which, of course, no one had tried to do up until that time.”
About the money: Apocalypse Now was originally budgeted at $12 million. But what had once been a four-month shoot was now plagued with delays. In May 1976, a typhoon crashed into the film’s set, stranding lead Martin Sheen and a hundred other cast and crew members for days. (They were eventually relocated to a hotel, where many of the Apocalypse team members came down with dysentery.)
Filming shut down for months. But things didn’t get easier when Coppola picked it back up in July of that year. Sometimes, a $60,000 shooting day was lost so Coppola could work on John Milius’s script—which the director was rewriting mid-production. United Artists, the company releasing Apocalypse, took out a loan of around $16 million to keep things going. As collateral, Coppola put up his house, as well as his future Godfather earnings.
No one knew how or when production on Apocalypse Now would end. Partly because they didn’t know how or when Apocalypse Now the movie would end.
