The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [75]
Very vaguely, then: A man was going up a river to find a man called Kurtz. There were few specific references beyond that. I decided to take the script much more strongly in the direction of Heart of Darkness—which was, I know, opening a Pandora’s box.
Michael Herr was brought in after the shooting in the Philippines was completed. Did he write all of the narration?
He dominated it; he dominated the tone. The hipster voice Willard is given—that’s Michael.
Was it from ‘Dispatches,’ in which Herr makes such a point of Vietnam as “a rock & roll war,” that the idea came to use the Doors’ “The End”?
No. I knew Jim Morrison, in film school; he came to my house once—this was before he’d had a record out—with some acetates, demos, asking if I could help. I tried; I didn’t get anywhere. But the idea of using the Doors came from “Light My Fire.” That was from Milius: Kurtz’ people would play “Light My Fire” through their loudspeakers, to jazz themselves up. In the end, there’s a battle, and the North Vietnamese regulars come charging in to “Light My Fire.” I went to the Philippines with that ending!
How did the characterization of Kurtz evolve?
Marlon arrived; he was terribly fat. As my wife says in her book, he hadn’t read the copy of Heart of Darkness I’d sent him; I gave him another copy, he read it, and we began to talk. There were a lot of notes that we compiled together. I’d give him some—he’d write a lot himself. I shot Marlon in a couple of weeks and then he left; everything else was shot around that footage, and what we had shot with Marlon wasn’t like a scene. It was hours and hours of him talking.
We had an idea: Kurtz as a Gauguin figure, with mangoes and babies, a guy who’d really gone all the way. It would have been great; Marlon wouldn’t go for it at all.
Marlon’s first idea—which almost made me vomit—was to play Kurtz as a Daniel Berrigan: in black pajamas, in VC clothes. It would be all about the guilt [Kurtz] felt at what we’d done. I said, “Hey, Marlon, I may not know everything about this movie—but one thing I know it’s not about is ‘our guilt’!” Yet Marlon has one of the finest minds around: Thinking is what he does. To sit and talk with him about life and death—he’ll think about that stuff all day long.
Finally, he shaved his head—and that did it. We’d go for it—we’d get there. That terrible face. I think it’s wonderful that in this movie, the most terrifying moment is that image: just his face.
There seems to be no conventional suspense in the movie. Even in the scene where Willard kills Kurtz; that’s an orchestrated scene, full of crosscutting and metaphors, like the killings that end ‘The Godfather.’ Is that the way you wanted to make the movie?
Maybe I’m stupid, but I always wanted the film to be graceful. My very first notion when I began to think of the style of the film—of course, style was going to be the whole movie—I wanted to sweep, not go chaaa! chaaa! I wanted it to have grace. I chose Vittorio Storaro [Bernardo Bertolucci’s cinematographer in The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris and 1900] because I wanted the camera to just float across the boat. That is always shot handheld, because there’s no building dolly tracks in the water. The music would be Tomita-like [a Japanese synthesizer composer] for that reason.
I don’t understand what you mean when you say that style was going to be the whole movie.
When I first thought of doing Apocalypse Now, and I read Milius’ script, I was looking for a clue as to what kind of movie this was going to be. I was very concerned about style, because I knew it wouldn’t be a realistic style—I knew it would have some sort of what I’ll call extension to it, but I didn’t know what. People used to ask me, well, what’s this movie gonna be like? I said, well, it’s gonna be very stylized. And they said, well, like what? Like what director? And I would say, like Ken Russell. I wanted the movie to go as far as it would go. I was prepared to have to make an unusual, surrealist movie, and I even wanted to.