The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [77]
Willard’s a murderer, an assassin, and no doubt when he’s alone in the bathroom, he’s had some moral thoughts about whether that’s good: to go kill people you don’t even know. So I’m thinking Willard has been involved—as maybe Kurtz has—on a moral quest, which is to say, “Is what I have done, or what I am doing, moral? Is it okay?” So when Willard gets to Kurtz’ place, it’s his nightmare. It’s his nightmare in that it’s the extreme of the issue that he has to deal with—bodies and heads—and Kurtz is the extreme of him, because Willard’s a killer. Here, now, Kurtz—who has gone mad—has become the horror, the whole thing, which is no more than an extension of the horror that we’re looking at on every level. Willard has to come to terms with this—and what Brando really tells him, the way I see it, is, I finally saw something so horrible . . . and then at the same time realized that the fact that it was so horrible was what made it wonderful . . . and I went to some other place in my mind, in which I became Kurtz, who is nuts.
And pathetic. One of the most beautiful lines in Michael Herr’s narration is when he says, “Kurtz had driven himself so far away from his people at home”—the idea that you could go so far that you couldn’t get back, even if you wanted to get back.
That’s what I was trying to do with Willard in that last section. I always had this image, over and over again, of being able to stare at the something that was the truth and say, “Yes, that is the truth.” Somehow a face was always important to me, and that’s why I liked just looking at Brando’s face for ten minutes or whatever. Remember Portrait of Dorian Gray? I mean, it was like ripping back the curtain—ahhhhh! There it is. And that’s the way I felt about Vietnam. You just look at it, you open your eyes and you look at it, and you accept it if it’s the truth. And then you get past it.
One line that seems to be coming out, following the L.A. screening in May and the Cannes screenings—and I’m speaking of the American press, since that’s all I’ve seen—is “The movie is terrific for the first hour or so: it’s so exciting, it’s well done, spectacular, it looks as if it were worth the money that was spent, you can see the money on the screen.” And then, “When the picture get to Kurtz, it becomes muddled and philosophical and pretentious—it falls apart.” That line is remarkably consistent. (And has remained so in most of the reviews that have appeared since the film was officially released.)
Audiences, and therefore certain writers, really know the rules of the different kinds of movies—and whether they want to admit it, in the first hour and a half of this movie, they’re locked into a formula. It’s a formula movie; you just get locked into the slot and it’ll take you up the river. And then, at a certain point, it doesn’t develop into the action adventure that it had set you up for. In my mind, the movie had made a turn I wouldn’t alter—it curved up the river. I chose to go with a stylized treatment, up the river into primitive times—and I eliminated everything in the script that didn’t take you there. It now takes you into various difficult areas, which you have to engage with a little. They’re riding down a big sled on a very formula movie, and they want it to resolve, and kick ’em off, just like movies are supposed to do, and it doesn’t do it. It’s like someone takes them off the slide and says, okay, now walk up the steps, and they don’t want to do it.
I’m not saying they are wrong in feeling that. I think some do and some don’t. But they would have preferred that it just went easy, without any difficulties—let the movie do it all. And I couldn’t do it in the end.
Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?
I couldn’t, I don’t think—I tried. I mean, I couldn’t give