“Apocalypse Now,” Francis Ford Coppola‘s 1979 Vietnam war, has attracted to it maybe the largest corpus of legends and anecdotes of any film ever made. Sort-of an adaptation of Joseph Conrad‘s “Heart of Darkness,” the production became a slog through natural disasters, directorial megalomania, and latter-day Marlon Brando‘s sprawling eccentricity. If you are a film student with an idea for a movie set in a jungle, take a quick look at the legends surrounding “Apocalypse Now,” and similar films like those of Werner Herzog, and write a new script, for God’s sake.
But if you just enjoy stories of hubris and chaos, then by all means dive in. We have here, courtesy of No Film School, a new window on the production, in the fascinating form of the director, Coppola, interviewing the writer, John Milius. Milius is a fascinating figure all to himself, a buddy of Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and the rest of the “brat pack” from way back in the day who also wrote “Dirty Harry,” directed the original “Red Dawn” and created the HBO series “Rome” (check out our list of essential Milius films right here). Here he and Coppola delve back to the days before they shipped out to the jungle, when the only complexity facing them was Milius’ ten-draft, thousand-page monster-script. “What could possibly go wrong?” they must have been asking themselves…