More Information

When I started With "Apocalypse Now," my intention was to create a broad, spectacular film of epic action-adventure scale that was also rich in theme and philosophic inquiry into the mythology of war.

But by the spring of 1979, we were terrified that the film was too long, too strange and didn't resolve itself in a kind of classic big battle at the end. We were threatened with financial disaster. I had mortgaged everything I owned to personally cover the $16 million overage. And the press kept asking, 'Apocalypse When?' So we shaped the film that we thought would work for the mainstream audience of its day, keeping them focused on the journey up river and making it as much a 'war' genre film as possible.

More than 20 years later, I happened to see the picture on television. What struck me was that the original film—which had been seen as so demanding, strange and adventurous when it first came out—now seemed relatively tame, as though the audience had caught up to it. This, coupled with calls I received over the years from people who had seen the original 4-hour plus assembly, encouraged me to go back and try a new version.

Over the course of six months, beginning in March 2000, we edited and remixed a new rendition of the movie from scratch. Rather than returning the 'lifts' taken out of the film during the original editing, we re-edited the film from the original unedited raw footage—the 'dailies.'

This time we weren't working out of anxiety, so we were able to think more about what the themes were, especially about issues related to morality in war. I feel any artist making a film about war by necessity will make an 'anti-war' film and all war films are usually that. My film is more of an 'anti-lie' film, in that the fact that a culture can lie about what's really going on in warfare, that people are being brutalized, tortured, maimed and killed, and somehow present this as moral is what horrifies me, and perpetuates the possibility of war. One line in John Milius' original script suggested this: "They teach the boys to drop fire on people, but won't let them write the word ‘fuck’ on their airplanes." In the words of Joseph Conrad: "I hate the stench of a lie."

This new, complete and definitive version extends this idea to all young people, boys and girls, who are sent out to function in an established immoral world expected to function in a moral way. The result is a film that has 49 minutes of never-before-seen footage; is more attentive to theme, and is sexier, funnier, more bizarre, more romantic and is more politically intriguing. The new material is spread throughout the film, and highlighted by the addition of the French plantation sequence, an expanded Playboy playmates sequence, new footage of the navy patrol boat near the start of its journey up river, and a new Brando scene—one that perhaps couldn't be shown twenty years ago as it provides clear facts as to how the American public was lied to.

Ultimately, my aim with "Apocalypse Now Redux" was to achieve a richer, fuller and more textured film experience that, as with the original, lets audiences feel what Vietnam was like: the immediacy, the insanity, the exhilaration, the horror, the sensuousness and the moral dilemma of America's most surreal and nightmarish war.

—Francis Ford Coppola
May 2001

The New Footage

The new scenes in "Apocalypse Now Redux" include:

1. The much-discussed French plantation sequence, which includes a riverside encounter, the funeral of Clean, a rancorous dinner, and Willard’s seduction of (and by) Roxanne, a young French widow (played by Aurore Clement). At the dinner, the patriarch of the French plantation, Hubert deMarais (played by the late Christian Marquand), asks rhetorically: "Why do we stay here? It keeps our family together. We fight to keep what is ours. You Americans fight for the biggest nothing in history." This sequence, Coppola says, "captures an exotic yearning, a groping for long-vanished ideals and a crumbling way of life that presages and essentially predicts the folly of America’s experience in Vietnam. These characters are sort of ghosts like Bunuel has ghosts: people who are trapped in their own thinking from years ago. I always loved this scene because here, the men on the boat truly leave civilization behind, and go back in time."

Adds Aurore Clement: "I think the plantation really adds something because earlier you have all these scenes of men and fighting and death and war, and then comes this scene about sweetness and life and sensuality and love. It’s one of the rare erotic scenes in a war movie – and it’s a beautifully erotic scene. It’s about the two sides of humanity: the one who loves and the one who kills." "Aurore’s character gives Willard a sense of life and a sense of soothing, before he goes on to face the extreme madness of Kurtz," notes Coppola. In shooting the sequence, Coppola recalls asking the actors to improvise their dialogue, suggesting they use real political arguments they might have had at their own family dinner tables. The result was a sense of a real meal with its conversations and agendas unfolding with each course. Coppola 's longtime collaborator, editor Walter Murch, notes: "In 1979, we had tried the plantation sequence as early as after the sampan massacre (eliminating the burial of Clean). In the new version, we let Clean die, we allow a pause as the boat passes the tail of a downed B-52 bomber, and then out of the fog comes this apparition of a plantation." Murch says entering and exiting this sequence through the fog made him "comfortable with this diversion into the past, with people who had so dominated that part of the world for the last 150 years." Production designer Dean Tavoularis recalls his search for the perfect setting for the sequence: "I wanted to create something kind of ghostly, a place you barely can believe exists, because they are way up river when they find the French plantation," he explains. "We built the structure near a river, with a balcony, and then I found a wealthy collector who lent us all kinds of colonial furniture. It has that feeling of lost elegance."

2. An expanded Playboy playmates sequence. The unforgettable Playboy playmates, who are choppered away in the original film, make a second appearance in "Apocalypse Now Redux," in a scene Coppola always wanted to include. In this sequence, the Playboy helicopter has run out of fuel and landed in desperation at a remote Medevac base along the river. When Willard and his crew meet up with them, an unusual barter ensues. As Willard leaves the boat, the Chief (Albert Hall) asks: "Captain, are you giving away our fuel for a Playmate of the Month?" "No, Playmate of the Year," Willard replies.

Coppola remembers: "This was never even in the assembly because it was shot during the typhoon when we had to stop shooting, and the scene was never completed. But in this new version Walter found a way to get in and out of the sequence."

He continues: "In their way, the girls are the corresponding characters of those young boys on the boat, except they’re being exploited in sexual ways. But it’s the same thing, you know how they’re being consumed—used up by a society that calls itself moral and yet isn’t."

Adds actor Sam Bottoms who plays the California surfer Lance: "One of the things that’s really beautiful to me about the new version is the inclusion of the feminine spirit – those bunnies and their innocence. I think it’s absolutely necessary."

3. A new scene with Marlon Brando, giving a deeper glimpse into the mind of Kurtz. Here, while holding Willard captive in a metal shed, he expounds upon the insanity of the war. He quotes an American intelligence analyst recently returned to Vietnam to sound out the situation for President Nixon. Says Kurtz: "He told the President last week that: ‘Things felt much better, and smelled much better over there.’" Then he asks Willard: "How do they smell to you, soldier?"

The deletion of this scene was one of the last cuts the filmmakers made in 1979, in the interest of time. Restoring this philosophical scene, Murch says, "sets up the last scene in the film much more effectively."

Adds Coppola: "We always wanted to keep Kurtz as much a mystery as possible and Brando's extraordinary performance fished out the portrait of this man in little razor slices. We always wanted to add a little more of Brando and I think this scene contributes to the sort of anti-lies theme, and sets the rationale for his behavior, or for his madness, if you prefer to call it that."

4. New footage of the navy patrol boat near the beginning of the journey up river: "There’s more camaraderie now," Coppola says. "Willard jokes with his crew. They enjoy the conspiracy of stealing Kilgore’s surfboard. They all start off kind of normal—and that naivete helps underscore the tragedy of what befalls them as their journey unfolds." Says Bottoms: "There’s a better understanding of the characters now and their own personal madness."

Says Coppola of the new footage: "I am very satisfied that this version is ‘Apocalypse Now’ at its greatest potential. My way of confirming that is that when we cut the additional sequences we went back to the original negative and all this material was literally added to that. So this is the only version of ‘Apocalypse Now’ that now exists, technically speaking."

I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor.
That’s my dream, it’s my nightmare.

Why were these scenes cut from the original version of the movie?

In the spring of 1979, Coppola remembers: "We were terrified that the film was too long. It was a pretty weird movie, and we were very concerned that we had maybe veered too far from the kind of classic war genre film. It was long and strange, and it didn’t resolve itself in a kind of classic big battle at the end. So we shaped the film that we thought would work for the audience of the time." That meant being more attentive to narrative drive, with fewer diversions as the crew progressed up the river.

"We were under a lot of pressure—threatened with financial disaster," Coppola says. "They were going to take away our house over this picture. It was scary. There was lots of speculation about the viability of the picture from the press, so we were on the defensive when we cut it and wanted to prove to the contrary. We were making a decision to show the film that we thought the mainstream moviegoing audience of its day could deal with—keep them focused on the journey up river and kind of make it like a genre film."

Coppola recalls: "The joke of all this is that we were so sure we were going to be wiped out by ‘Apocalypse Now’ that I thought, ‘Well, next let me make a commercial movie that will save us—‘One From the Heart.’ And of course ‘Apocalypse’ turned out to be a very good-grossing picture, and ‘One From the Heart’ wiped us out. The cure was worse than the disease."

This is the end, my only friend, the end.

"It’s the same ending," Coppola says, "but now that the body of the film is more far-ranging and more free, the ending feels more appropriate and more satisfying than it did before."

When "Apocalypse Now" was first released in 1979, all the prints were in 70mm format— without main titles or end credits (audiences were given a program handout instead). "But then when the film was about to have its normal 35 millimeter release, the idea of giving out a program was no longer feasible," Coppola says. "Perhaps I made a mistake by deciding that, since we had to put credits on the end, why not just run them over the explosions"--from the destruction of the Kurtz compound. ("We had built quite a formidable structure there in the Philippines that was not meant to be permanent, and we were required by law to remove it. So we decided to blow it up and photograph it.")

"But the appearance of these prints seemed to reinforce the idea that there were really two options for the ending—one more war-like than the other. This was not my intention, so as soon as I realized that we had caused this misunderstanding, I pulled all the prints of that version back and re-issued the prints with the end credits over black. I wanted the film to end on a more pacific note: Willard throws down his weapons, and all the tribesmen throw down their weapons as well."

"The new version tries less to conform to a narrow idea of what a war film is," Coppola says. "And, being able to range more freely, it gets to the theme in a more-convincing way. So that the end, which is so strange and philosophical, seems more motivated and appropriate than it did before."

I love the smell of napalm in the morning . . . smells like victory.

"A few years ago, I was sitting in a London hotel, and I noticed ‘Apocalypse Now’ was going to be on television," Coppola says. "And I always enjoyed the opening, so I started watching, and I ended up seeing the whole movie. What struck me was that this film—which had been seen as so demanding, strange and adventurous when it first came out—now seemed like something that the audience had caught up to. That encouraged me to go back and try a new version. I thought, now that the film has been around for a while and has become something of a classic, we could edit it with more attention to what the themes are." His first call was to Murch. Together, beginning in March of 2000, they started to edit the new version of the movie from scratch.

"Rather than returning the ‘lifts’ taken out of the film during the original editorial process, we re-edited the film from the original unedited raw footage—the dailies," Coppola says. The entire process—including editing and sound remixing—took six months (from March through August of 2000).

Murch says "There was a certain part of me that was agitated about going back into the jungle. I had spent two challenging, draining years of my life on this already, and I knew we were up against an original assembly that ran more than 5 hours, and in dailies some 1.25 million feet of film—the film and magnetic track alone weighed seven tons. But about 10 days into the process, it felt perfectly natural." This time, Murch was editing the film digitally, creating what he calls "a wonderful juxtaposition of using the latest technology on a film made at the dawn of the modern video era."

"Only once we had cut the scenes together for the new version did we go back and look at the original cut to make sure we hadn’t missed anything," Murch says. "The film now has greater continuity on a technical and emotional level—and in terms of character development. It’s more what Francis wrote and intended and couldn’t quite get done 22 years ago. Ironically, by adding footage in many places, we managed to make the film feel shorter."

Terminate with extreme prejudice.

Reaction to the New Version

For many of the cast and crew of "Apocalypse Now" seeing the "Redux" version was a revelation, fulfilling the potential they had originally seen in the film’s epic story. Several saw it at the official screening in Cannes, where the audience gave the film an extended standing ovation. Notes Sam Bottoms: "I was dazzled by the new version because I felt that Francis made a brilliant piece of filmmaking even better. It seems to have ripened with time. America might not have been ready for ‘Apocalypse Now’ in

1979. But it’s still about things in our society and our hearts that we have to recognize and deal with."

Aurore Clement, who appears in the newly added French plantation sequence, says that seeing the new version of the film was "like a dream." She continues: "It was very emotional, especially when at the end of the screening, the lights came on and many in the audience were crying. You could just feel people reacting to the power of this story." For Clement, the emotion was heightened by the fact that her scenes had been cut out of the film 22 years ago, yet were now a pivotal part of the film. "I had never even seen these scenes, not even when I did the looping for this version," she says. "This was my very first time seeing what I had done so long ago and it was an extraordinary feeling."

Production designer Dean Tavoularis was also surprised by the audience’s tears. "You don’t think of this type of film as being a tear-jerker, but I realized what moved people so deeply is that this new version gives a deeper sense of lost opportunity, of a paradise that has been destroyed by dark human impulses. It’s quite moving."

Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro noted that not only has the film changed, but so have film audiences who will either see it again or for the very first time. "After 22 years, audiences have matured," he says. "I think we are ready to go back to the boat, as Francis was finally ready, and we are ready to complete the experience of ‘Apocalypse Now’ in a different way."

One of the most striking impressions for a contemporary audience is the absence of special effects shots. "There is a realism to this movie that can’t be duplicated with digital effects and computers," notes Dean Tavoularis. "There’s a texture you get when everything is for real. All those helicopters were not composed or composited. They were all there, criss-crossing, and there’s a real power that comes from that scale."

Never get out of the boat. Absolutely God damn right.
Unless you were going all the way.

There are two new musical themes on the film’s soundtrack—both covering scenes in the French plantation sequence: one is over the funeral of Clean; the other is the love theme over the seduction sequence between Willard and Roxanne.

Coppola recalls: "The story of the love theme is actually quite wonderful. When we realized we had this considerable new footage, we figured we could figure out a way with the old music to get through it. But there was this love scene that needed a whole new motif and treatment. Originally, I had worked on it with my dad, but he’s gone now. So I thought maybe I could go through the music, find some other piece of classical music that he wrote, and take that motif--and then we could finagle it. As we went through it, I came across a scrap of music, partly torn, with the note ‘Love Theme.’ So we thought maybe he already wrote it even though we didn’t realize it. Indeed he had written it, and when we played it and put it in the picture, it was in fact that, a beautiful new love theme that fit perfectly, which was kind of Debussy in the tone. It was sort of like working with him from across the beyond."

Coppola also recalls his original conception for the film’s compellingly dissonant score: "My idea, somewhat inspired by the Japanese synthesizer composer Tomita, was that we would orchestrate the music with the real sounds of the war and environment. The bass line would be the helicopters, and the strings would be wind and screaming jets, and the whole thing would have a foundation as though played by Jimi Hendrix. Mickey Hart, the percussionist for The Grateful Dead, did the rhythm track, with a huge room full of every percussion instrument known to man."

Hey man, you don’t talk to the Colonel, you listen to him.

Murch is famous and much lauded for his mastery of sound effects and mixing. This is due in part to the groundbreaking efforts he and his team made in creating the Dolby 5.1 sound format for "Apocalypse Now"—a format that has become the industry standard 20 years later and won Murch an Academy Award. The film continues to be praised for its highly textured weave of the sounds of modern warfare. "We remastered onto the SRD format, and it was wonderful poetry to return to the 5.1 digital sound with the movie that started it all," Murch says.

"It was a defining sound film, and thankfully the original sound elements were all available and in good shape," says "Redux" producer Kim Aubry. "We called in a half-dozen actors to loop lines for the new scenes that had never been prepared as if they were going to be the finished film. Among them were Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Sam Bottoms, Albert Hall and Frederic Forrest. But the most stunning event was watching Aurore Clement come in to loop a film that she was entirely cut out of 22 years before." (Clement plays Roxanne, a young widow, in the French plantation sequence.)

He was one of those guys who had that weird light around him. You just knew he wasn’t so much as going to get a scratch here.

In at least the top 20 U.S. cities, "Apocalypse Now Redux" will be presented with dye transfer prints by Technicolor (once known as the Technicolor three-strip process). Says cinematographer Vittorio Storaro: "We chose dye transfer prints because we wanted to provide a viewing experience that is equal or better to the 70 millimeter prints from the 1979 release."

Adds Aubry: "In so doing, we became a part of reviving a process that Technicolor offered from 1939 into the early 1970s—essentially from ‘Snow White’ to ‘Godfather 2’—and brought back in R&D mode just a handful of years ago."

The process is more like magazine printing or lithography in that it involves color separation: the primary colors—yellow, cyan and magenta—are on separate pieces of film. Each of these masters (or matrices) is then rubbed up against the film—creating a dye transfer. Aubry notes: "By comparison to the color positive print stock that is the norm today, dye transfer lends richer, more saturated colors, gives us more control over color in the printing stage, and makes for more-stable, longer-lasting prints."

Says Storaro: "We put a tremendous amount of work into shooting this film, so it was a joy to hear that so many scenes would be returning to the picture. When I went to oversee the color timing on the new version, I almost cried it was so beautiful. The dye transfer process allowed us to recoup so much more color as well as light and darkness from the original negative than any other process."

He continues: "The experience of restoring this film was one of the greatest visual experiences of my life. The colors are so vital to the meaning of this film, because it is about the dark side of humanity, and this blackness has to be represented in the visualization of the picture. With the Technicolor dye transfer, I was able to really bring the emotion of the color back to the film. Ultimately, I think the look of ‘Apocalypse Now Redux’ will show the younger film generation just how beautiful a film should look."

Everyone gets everything they want. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one.

Francis Ford Coppola first heard about the idea that would become the script for "Apocalypse Now" from John Milius and George Lucas in the late 1960s, when Coppola was working at Warner Bros. as a screenwriter. "John was telling unbelievable stories about many of his surfer friends who returned from Vietnam, and the action there," recalls Coppola. "He wanted to write a screenplay about it and alternately called it ‘The Psychedelic Soldier’ and ‘Apocalypse Now.’ Meanwhile Carroll Ballard was planning to put ‘Heart of Darkness’ into production and I was writing ‘The Conversation.’ There was a lot of cross-fertilization going on, to say the least."

Later, when Coppola set up his new production company, American Zoetrope, in San Francisco, he gave John Milius funds to write "Apocalypse Now," a script Zoetrope wound up owning. "I called George Lucas and let him know that I now owned the script and did he want to direct it. George said was about to undertake a new science fiction project and wouldn't be able to get to it for well over a year. Subsequently, I called John Milius and asked if he wanted to direct it, and John was also disposed on another project," says Coppola. "Then I thought maybe if I directed it myself as a big action war film, American Zoetrope could make a lot of money which we could use to make our small personal films."

As Coppola made the film, he found himself increasingly referring back to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. "Instead of carrying the script, I had a little green paperback in my pocket, filled with notes and markings. I just naturally started referring to it more than the script, and step by step, the film became more surreal and reminiscent of the Conrad novella," he says.

Coppola adds: "Many of the most memorable scenes come verbatim from John Milius' original script: the setup of the boat and those characters; the extraordinary helicopter assault playing Wagner through the loudspeakers, the tiger, the Playboy bunnies and the weird Do Lung Bridge. My own work on the screenplay enhanced the Conrad parallel and augmented many of the scenes, including the French Plantation and most of the last act of the film. Dennis Hopper was originally hired to play Colby, the officer sent to assassinate Kurtz, only to become one of his subjects. But when I saw Dennis the first day, I dressed him up in a Montagnard shirt, put a bunch of cameras around his neck, and the crazed photojournalist somewhat based on rumors of Sean Flynn was born, and I lifted out of the pages of Conrad the character of the Russian who was there with Kurtz."

In the end, many people contributed to the final screenplay, with Coppola giving greatest credit to "John Milius, who is the original author, Michael Herr, who wrote the narration, and all of the actors, who in their improvisational work provided the basis of many of the scenes I would write out late at night."

The horror, the horror.

If "Apocalypse Now" is a turbulent, hallucinogenic, horrifying and operatic epic, so too was the making of the movie in 1979. Coppola began the film as an Oscar-winning director ("The Godfather") at the height of his powers. Before he was finished, he would refer to the project as "The Idiodyssey." He recalls: "Like Captain Willard, I was moving up a river in a faraway jungle, looking for answers and hoping for some kind of catharsis.

We made ‘Apocalypse’ the way Americans made war in Vietnam: There were too many of us, too much money and equipment—and little by little, we went insane."

*Filming (on location in the Philippines) was scheduled to last 4 months, but continued for 15. In total, Coppola shot 2 million feet (or 370 hours) of film over a 238-day shoot. By comparison, a typical film-shooting schedule runs roughly 55 days. He often rewrote scenes for the next day late into the night on 3 x 5 cards. Actors would get call sheets for the next day’s work that read "scenes unknown."

*Coppola had to replace one of his lead actors (Harvey Keitel) three weeks into production.

*Keitel’s replacement (Martin Sheen) later suffered a heart attack that proved nearly fatal (a priest went so far as to read Sheen his "last rites"). In order to keep shooting, Coppola brought Sheen’s brother to the Philippines and shot him as his double while Sheen recuperated.

*Marlon Brando arrived a much larger physical presence than anyone expected, and threatened repeatedly to quit. None of the Green Beret colonel uniforms that had been prepared for him even remotely fit. "That’s when I decided to photograph him from the chest up, which made him look like a giant, a kind of Paul Bunyon character," Coppola says.

*The worst hurricane in 40 years struck the Philippines three months into the shoot, while the Medevac scene was being shot, shutting down the production for six weeks with what co-producer Gray Frederickson recalled was, "rain so intense you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face." Nearly all of Dean Tavoularis’s painstaking sets were destroyed and had to be rebuilt.

*The budget ballooned from $16 million to more than $32 million (Coppola mortgaged everything he owned to personally cover the $16 million overage).

*A crew member published a magazine during production called "Rumor Control."

*Post-production, which on most films lasts 6 months at most, went on for over two years.

*Journalists routinely published items on the movie inquiring "Apocalypse When?"

And yet what emerged at the end is a film that endures in modern memory as a classic unlike any other. The film was recently voted one of the top 100 films in American history by a blue ribbon panel of the American Film Institute.

"One of the things I’m certain about," Martin Sheen said in 1979, "is that this is going to be one of the most talked-about films in motion picture history. " With "Apocalypse Now Redux" the conversation about the film gets a new centerpiece.

Running time: 3 hours, 16 minutes.

Special thanks to Peter Cowie, whose definitive "The Apocalypse Now Book" provided significant background information for these notes.