The inside story of Apocalypse Now: ‘Martin Sheen refused to work with corpses'

Times

29-06-2025

In May 1979 Francis Ford Coppola took Apocalypse Now to the Cannes Film Festival. It wasn't finished, despite two years of postproduction, as the director of The Godfather struggled to carve a film from his chaotic 238-day shoot and more than a million feet of footage. His hope was that the 139-minute work-in-progress print would at least extinguish reports that his transposition of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the 19th-century Congo to the Vietnam War was an overblown mess.
In fact it won the Palme d'Or. At the press conference, Coppola told the world's media, 'My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam,' speaking both to the film's scale and his ego. 'We had access to too much money, too much equipment and, little by little, we went insane.'
Twelve years later Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, a documentary directed by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, premiered at Cannes to rave reviews. Assembled from 16mm footage shot by Coppola's wife, Eleanor, their astonishing chronicle captured all the behind-the-scenes drama as Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) journeyed upriver to assassinate the rogue Special Forces officer Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando).
There were the set-destroying typhoons; the leading man Harvey Keitel being let go a week into filming; his replacement, Martin Sheen, suffering a near-fatal heart attack; the Filipino army recalling its loaned helicopters to fight a communist insurgency; and the horror (the horror!) of Brando, who was pocketing $1 million a week, arriving overweight and underprepared for the film's final scenes.
'It was extraordinary,' Bahr says of that initial Cannes reception. Sitting in his Los Angeles home, the man who went on to create the US comedy series MadTV (based on the satirical magazine Mad) exudes the benevolent air of someone who still can't quite believe that he managed to corral the chaos of Apocalypse Now — or, indeed, was allowed to. Next month a restored print of his documentary will get a cinema release, before coming to Blu-ray.
Bahr had never made a film when he contacted the Coppolas in 1989, on hearing of Eleanor's unseen reels. 'They said, 'Sure, the [80 hours of] footage is just sitting in a vault.' We looked at it and thought, 'This is gold.' So we put together an eight-minute reel, and sold it based on that. They shipped all the footage down. It was just a bunch of boxes. Chaotic. And there was this shoebox of audio tapes with dates on them — Ellie taping Francis at night, in utter despair. How he was failing, how terrible the film was. Right then I knew what the heart of the movie was.'
Bahr's breakthrough was to introduce a metatextual narrative articulating Coppola's Kurtz-like journey into darkness. ('My greatest fear is making a really shitty, pompous film on an important subject!' he can be heard raving. 'I will get an F. I'm thinking of shooting myself.') To Coppola's credit, he rarely interfered, allowing for a warts-and-all portrait of his obsessive behaviour. With one exception.
Bahr smiles ruefully. 'I did an interview with Martin Sheen and he talked about when he first came to the Kurtz compound, and there were all the dead bodies strewn around, and he said, 'This looks very realistic.' And the art director said, 'Yeah, we got them from the medical school.' And [Sheen] flipped out and said, 'No! I will not do this!'' The corpses were removed, replaced by made-up extras. 'Francis had put the crew in a state of mind where everything could go. That was his aesthetic — everyone was supposed to go to this extreme place that Kurtz goes.' Even so, the Coppolas vetoed this part of Sheen's interview from Hearts of Darkness.
On set for stretches of the shoot were Francis and Eleanor's three children, Gian-Carlo (who died in a boating accident in 1986, aged 22), Roman and Sofia. Roman was ten when filming began, and recalls it primarily as an adventure. The costume department made him a Patrol Boat, River (PBR) uniform, and the make-up team covered him in fake scars and wounds. Most thrilling of all was witnessing the famous airstrike, as helicopters blasting Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries gratuitously firebomb a Vietnamese village. 'I remember the explosions, the helicopters flying through the air,' Roman tells me. 'It was a very sensual, exciting time for a kid to be in that setting.'
As for his father putting up his personal assets as collateral when the film's budget spiralled from $12 million to $25 million, Roman seems every bit as unfazed as his mother is in Hearts of Darkness. 'She was a very thoughtful and in-tune person,' he says. 'She was clearly supportive of my dad and recognised that he was an artist making some striking, original work — work that needed to go through these steps of uncertainty and difficulty to get to the other side. You know, my dad has always been a dynamic person, taking on adventures — as recently, with Megalopolis, [which demonstrated] a similar instinct to just follow his passions. Our family always supports that. I think that's the beauty of a life in art: you're an explorer, an adventurer.' Megalopolis was dedicated to Eleanor, who died, aged 87, in April last year.
There are clear parallels between Apocalypse Now and Megalopolis. Premiering at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Coppola's first movie for 13 years was self-funded to the tune of $120 million; he had sold off a portion of his wine-making business to finance an idea he had been wrestling with since the early 1980s. Just as Apocalypse Now riffed on Conrad (with elements of The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy and the poetry of TS Eliot thrown in), so Megalopolis drew on Roman history with side helpings of Shakespeare and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Apocalypse Now reflected on American interventionism; Megalopolis drew comparisons between contemporary US politics and the collapse of the Roman republic.
'Yeah, I do see the parallels,' says Bahr, who found much to admire in Coppola's more recent epic. 'I felt it was what Francis always saw himself as — which was a master creator, not just a film-maker, but touching on architecture and societal issues. I think he was playing with what was always his dream for Zoetrope [the San Francisco-based studio Coppola co-founded in 1969, which aimed to democratise film-making]. He always bucked the Hollywood system because it was so restrictive.'
If Megalopolis and Apocalypse Now were huge gambles, Bahr had to take some of his own to bring Hearts of Darkness to the screen. In 1990 he wangled his way on to the set of the Mob comedy The Freshman, with the sole purpose of asking Brando to grant him an interview.
'They'd finished shooting for the day and Brando was on his way to his trailer,' he says with a grin. 'I chased him down. He looked at me like, 'Who's this asshole?' I gave him my whole spiel and said, 'I would love to interview you.' He said, 'Kid, I do my shit and I go home.' Then he walked into his trailer and shut the door.'Hearts of Darkness is in cinemas from Jul 4; the collector's edition Blu-ray is released on Jul 28 Do you have a favourite moment from Apocalypse Now? Let us know in the comments below.