The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [74]
Did making this movie change your idea of what it means to be a filmmaker?
It changed every idea I have on anything I might not do or be. It enlarged my mind in terms of possibilities. It would be very hard for me to go and direct the new Paddy Chayefsky screenplay now. After Apocalypse Now and the Godfather pictures, especially the two of them together, I began to think in terms of the kind of movie that is impossible: movies that are . . . fourteen hours long, that really cover a piece of material in a way that justifies it, shown in some kind of format that makes sense.
Ten years ago, John Milius wrote a script: ‘Apocalypse Now.’ You still share script credit with him. How has the movie changed?
I think the script, as I remember it, took a more comic-strip Vietnam War and moved it through a series of events that were also comic strip: a political comic strip. The events had points to them—I don’t say comic strip to denigrate them. The film continued through comic-strip episode and comic-strip episode until it came to a comic-strip resolution. Attila the Hun [i.e., Kurtz] with two bands of machine-gun bullets around him, taking the hero [Willard] by the hand, saying, “Yes, yes, here! I have the power in my loins!” Willard converts to Kurtz’ side; in the end, he’s firing up at the helicopters that are coming to get him, crying out crazily. A movie comic.
I’ve read the comic.
Have you?
Well, I’ve read comics like that one, sure.
That was the tone and the resolution. The first thing that happened, after my involvement, was the psychologization of Willard—which I worked on desperately. Willard in the original script was literally zero, nobody. I didn’t have a handle: that’s why I cast him with Steve McQueen at first. I thought, well, God, McQueen will give him a personality. But I began to delve more into Willard. I took Willard through many, many instances in which I tried to position him as a witness going on this trip—and yet give him some sort of personality you could feel comfortable with, and still believe he was there.
Marty approached an impossible character: he had to be an observer, a watcher. A lot of reading dossiers, a totally introspective character. In no way could he get in the way of the audience’s view of what was happening, of Vietnam. That wasn’t going to work for Keitel. His stock in trade is a series of tics—ways to make people look at him.
The first scene of the movie—Willard is in his Saigon hotel room, waiting for a mission, drunk, losing control, finally attacking a mirror and cutting his hand open—is described in your wife’s book (‘Notes’) almost as a breakdown on Sheen’s part, certainly not action that was planned.
Marty’s character is coming across as too bland; I tried to break through it. I always look for other levels, hidden levels, in the actor’s personality and in the personality of the character he plays. I conceived this all-night drunk; we’d see another side of that guy. So Marty got drunk. And I found that sometimes, when he gets drunk, a lot comes out. He began to dance, he took off his clothes—this was ten minutes of the most incredible stuff—and then I asked him to look in the mirror. It was a way of focusing him on himself—to bring out the personality by creating a sense of vanity. And that’s what he punched: his vanity. I didn’t tell him to smash his hand into the mirror.
Many of the best things in the movie—the helicopter attack, the surfing motifs—are from Milius. The Do Lung Bridge sequence—which came partly from one of Michael Herr’s Esquire articles—was from Milius. Many things were changed. The concept that the guys on the boat would get killed—that was new. From the bridge on, it’s pretty much Heart of Darkness and me.
Was the film based on ‘Heart of Darkness