ZAMM.COM

Francis Ford Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW almost didn’t star Marlon Brando.

Brando, cast as rogue Green Beret Colonel Kurtz leading hit-and-run missions from Cambodia against Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops, almost dropped out when filming began. He’d been advanced $1M, but threatened to quit and keep the money — to which Coppola replied he’d then go after Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford or Al Pacino. When Brando finally did show up, he’d been drinking and was about 90 pounds overweight. He hadn’t read the screenplay or Joseph Conrad’s novella “Heart of Darkness,” on which the film is based.

After Brando read the script by John Milius, Coppola & Michael Herr, he refused to do the movie. Brando and Coppola argued for days about his  dialogue before Brando finally agreed to work in an ad-lib way and Coppola agreed to film him mostly in shadows.

Coppola was surprised Brando had never read Conrad’s book and spent days on set reading it to him. Conrad’s Kurtz was tall and thin, but Brando was just 5’7″ and obese. Coppola compensated by shooting Brando from angles that didn’t show his stomach.

Originally, George Lucas was going to direct APOCALYPSE, which opened Aug. 15, 1979, from a screenplay by Milius that Lucas had helped develop. Coppola, as executive producer, tried and failed to get it made at Warner Bros. Then Coppola got started directing THE GODFATHER for Paramount.

After Lucas & Coppola became A-List filmmakers and could have gotten APOCALYPSE green lighted, Lucas was busy directing the first STAR WARS. Milius didn’t want to direct APOCALYPSE, so Lucas said Coppola should do it. Milius’s 1969 screenplay was called “The Psychedelic Soldier,” but he changed it to APOCALYPSE NOW after seeing a hippies button proclaiming, “Nirvana Now.”

Coppola also faced challenges casting the role of Captain Willard, whose secret orders are to find and kill Kurtz. Pacino passed because he thought he’d be in the jungle shooting for five months. It wound up taking 16 months! Coppola cast Harvey Keitel as Willard, but after two weeks of shooting replaced him with Martin Sheen, who later suffered a heart attack during filming, which had to be kept very secret to avoid a production shut down by insurers for American Zoetrope and United Artists.

Steve McQueen passed on playing Willard after having said yes when Coppola offered him $3M. Realizing how long he’d be in the Philippine jungles, McQueen asked instead to play Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, with much less location work, but for the same $3M — a deal Coppola refused. The role then went to Robert Duvall, whose performance for 11 minutes of screentime brought him a supporting actor Oscar nomination. As for the now legendary APOCALYPSE, it did $105.2M worldwide on a budget of $31.5M.