Week 4 – Apocalypse Now Introduction Bill: Hi again, welcome to week four of the course. Jon and I decided to be outdoorsy for this week’s lesson, and once you see Apocalypse Now, you might understand why. We’re on the Oregon State campus today, and we’re going to be talking about Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film, Apocalypse Now, and we’ll just jump right into the questions we have today. Apocalypse Now and the Auteur Renaissance Bill: So Apocalypse Now is sort of seen as the film that ends the great 70’s auteurist Hollywood experiment in the same way that The Godfather, another Coppola film, is thought to have begun it. Can you speak about why Apocalypse Now is important to the auteur renaissance? Jon: Yeah, we’re getting to the end of the 70’s and the studios are collectively getting impatient about dealing with these directors who have all this power and all this money at their disposal and making movies sort of their own way, and studios resent the fact that they don’t have the kind of control that they’d like to have over the movies. And along comes Coppola, making Apocalypse Now, and he goes off to the Philippines and it seems like he’s spending an outrageous amount of money, things go wrong as you’ll all see when you see Hearts of Darkness, the documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now. But there’s this sort of collective fear in Hollywood that it isn’t that a director is going to make a small personal film that’s going to fail, but they’re going to make a big personal film that’s going to fail, and Apocalypse Now looks like it’s going to be that kind of movie. The irony is that it’s not. The film is a huge, hundred million dollar success, huge box office film. And, in a way, doesn’t cost any more than the James Bond film, Moonraker, released the same year, which is a terrible film. So, I mean, in a way what they were worried about was never really justified. But at the same time, it was sort of symbolic. That Apocalypse Now could have been terrible, so it really is the last time the studios are willing to invest this kind of money in a film, except for one other and that’s Heaven’s Gate, and Heaven’s Gate, which comes out two years later, is a film they invest in on the very day that they decide to pull back on their investment in Apocalypse Now. So they pull back on their investment on Apocalypse Now and let Coppola control the film after that in exchange for a loan that he couldn’t possibly repay. It’s one of the dumbest moments in Hollywood history. And they throw all this money at a western made by the recent academy award winning director Michael Cimino, a western that eventually becomes known as Heaven’s Gate, and that film is a total disaster and is exactly what they were afraid of – a big personal film. In a way, that’s the film that sort of breaks the back of auteurism, but it’s really Apocalypse Now that is the first film that suggests that this could go terribly wrong. Bill: Right, right; there was only production concerns with Apocalypse Now, but there was probably the sense that one wrong move in any direction and the whole thing would have collapsed. Jon: Yeah, you know, you’ve got an actor having a heart attack, which kind of screws things up; you have terrible weather, the monsoons hit way before anyone expected them to, so you have terrible weather; and the terrible weather leads to all these cost-overages; at one point, one of the sets that they had constructed from scratch gets wiped out in a monsoon. So it’s kind of everything that could possibly go wrong, goes wrong. Plus, you’re shooting on water, it’s always very difficult to shoot on water. They’re shooting on a river. You’re dealing with helicopters owned by the government, and the government is busy taking them away to fight rebels. It’s the worst-case scenario, in a way. And when you see this movie, it is so brilliant, and so accomplished, and so visionary. Well, he actually finished something this good, given the situation, actually shows that the auteur theory wasn’t a bad idea. But the studios wanted out because they wanted another formula, they wanted a formula where they didn’t have to trust anyone to make these movies. They wanted a formula where they could go out and throw a bunch of money at special effects, which is what they get in the 80’s, and get the kind of blockbuster they want. Apocalypse Now just never looks like that kind of movie. Heart of Darkness => Apocalypse Now Bill: It’s based off of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Can you talk about the relationship between those two texts? Jon: Yeah, I mean, Heart of Darkness is something a lot of high school seniors read, or used to read. I hope they still read in literature classes. And it’s this sort of classic anti-colonialist story. Marlow travels up river and he sort of narrates the story of going to find Kurtz, who is this trader who has gone native. And what “gone native” means is that he’s no longer “European,” that he’s gone over to the dark side, literally. So they travel up river and they find him, and Marlow finds him, and he’s talking about the “horror” and he’s really gone, well, he’s really gone native. He’s gone spiritual in a way that western culture can’t handle. And in the end, Marlow sees this and then Kurtz dies, speaking of the horror, which you get in Apocalypse Now. And then Marlow goes back to Europe. And it’s interesting, because the novel doesn’t end with this sort of moment with Kurtz, which is how Apocalypse Now ends, and we can talk about that in a little bit because there’s lots of endings to Apocalypse Now, but Marlow goes all the way back to Europe to talk to Kurtz’s wife, and Kurtz’s wife says, “Well, what were his last words?” and Marlow lies and says, “Your name.” You know, “He said your name.” which is kind of fascinating, because the novel ends with a lie, which sort of restores the imagination of Europe, the family values of Europe; whereas that’s absolutely not where Kurtz was at the end of his life. And so, what John Milius, who wrote the original screenplay and then Coppola who adapted it and made the movie – what they saw was that Heart of Darkness was, you know, number one a trip up rivers, so that’s repeated in the film, but it was also a journey into the heart of darkness inside of yourself, and the heart of darkness that’s in your soul. And it was also this anti-colonialist argument that, you know, the problem with colonialism was this assumption that the “primitives” were less spiritual than Christians, and the argument is that our arrogance in Vietnam was that we thought that we were the superior civilization and they could only learn from us, only benefit from our involvement; and certainly the film argues against that. Bill: Right, right. And for a primer on the Vietnam War, kind of history, please do check out the links posted in the weekly assignments to kind of fill in maybe some memory gaps about what that war actually meant. Jon: Yeah, and you can’t understate or underestimate the importance of Vietnam to directors of this generation. You know, they either went to Vietnam, or when we see Oliver Stone, I mean, Stone’s shot a series of films about the Vietnam experience, beginning with JFK, which is a film we’ll see. You know, he actually went to Vietnam. Others did their best to not go to Vietnam. So Vietnam is this sort of central – you know, when I was a freshman in college, it was the last draft year and they did the draft lottery on television. We didn’t have TVs in all our rooms, we didn’t have computers – it was pre-computers- but we did have a kind of central TV room and everyone went to the TV room to see when their draft number came up, and then, you know, your draft number came up and you left the room; and the longer you were in the room, the safer you were, because the less likely you’d be to be drafted. So, you know, Vietnam even in my life, you know, I didn’t get drafted; that was the last draft year and they didn’t end up taking anybody, but, you know, it was certainly part of my life. Apocalypse Now is examining an experience common to young men of that generation. The Fall of Coppola’s Career Bill: A collective consciousness. So, Coppola’s really in many ways the premier director of the 1970’s; he has The Godfather, he has The Godfather part 2, he has The Conversation starring Gene Hackman, and Apocalypse Now in ’79. But then his career kind of falls and stalls a little bit in the 80’s and subsequently. Can you explain why that is? Jon: Yes.