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By Root 533 0

I said, “but you have to hint at it, make him such a mysterious person that the audience will wonder more and more about him until the end.” When Willard, the army officer played by Martin Sheen, and the character based on Conrad’s Marlow, heads up the river and people shoot at him, I said that neither he nor the audience will know whether Kurtz is going to appear, and as Willard keeps getting closer and closer, he becomes more frightened by the mystery of what may be ahead of him, and the audience will share these feelings. Willard doesn’t know if he will survive the journey up the river, and as it continues he gradually loses confidence until he finally finds Kurtz, who then can represent the quintessence of evil.

A break in shooting Apocalypse Now. (Stephanie Kong/SYGMA)

If we locked ourselves into the portrayal of Kurtz in the original script, I said, it would be impossible to focus on the man’s mystery, that which is truly ominous, because what is truly ominous must be unseen. I offered to rewrite the script based on the original structure of the book, and Francis agreed. I spent about ten days on a houseboat completely rewriting the movie and thinking about how my character should look. Conrad described Kurtz as “impressively bald. The wilderness had patted him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball—an ivory ball.…” Without informing Francis, I shaved my head, found some black clothing and asked the cameraman and lighting crew to photograph me under eccentric lighting while I spoke half in darkness with a disembodied voice. After I showed him these tests, I told Francis I thought that the first time the audience hears Kurtz, his voice should come out of the darkness. After several long moments, he should make an entrance in which only his bald head is visible; then a small part of his face is lit before he returns to the shadows. In a sense the same process is going on in Kurtz’s mind: he is in darkness and shadows, drifting back and forth in the netherworld he has created for himself in the jungle; he no longer has any moral frame of reference in this surreal world, which is a perfect parable of the insane Vietnam War.

I was good at bullshitting Francis and persuading him to think my way, and he bought it, but what I’d really wanted from the beginning was to find a way to make my part smaller so that I wouldn’t have to work as hard.

I loved shaving my head. I’d never done it before, and putting witch hazel on my head and sticking it out the car window while we were driving to another location during those hot days in the Philippines was heaven.

Besides restructuring the plot, I wrote Kurtz’s speeches, including a monologue at his death that must have been forty-five minutes long. It was probably the closest I’ve ever come to getting lost in a part, and one of the best scenes I’ve ever played because I really had to hold myself under control. I made it up extemporaneously, bringing up images like a snail crawling along the edge of a razor. I was hysterical; I cried and laughed, and it was a wonderful scene. Francis shot it twice—two 45-minute improvisations—but used hardly any of the footage in the picture. I thought it was effective, though it might have been out of place. I never saw the footage of the entire speech, so I wouldn’t know.

57

IN THE MOVIE BUSINESS there is a crude but amusing saying: “The way to say ‘fuck you’ in Hollywood is ‘trust me.’ ” It’s not always true. I’ve known wonderful, honest people there, but I’ve also run into a sizable number of whores, cheats and thieves. When this happens, you have to take charge of the situation; if you don’t, they’ll devour you. When I made The Men, I was one of the first movie actors to negotiate a one-picture deal instead of a long-term studio contract. Later, when the studio system, whose seven-year contracts had made indentured servants out of actors, collapsed, other actors began making similar deals. Like everything else, the price producers paid us was determined by the law of supply and demand and, like any other workers, our objective