the edge
Sun 8.23.20
Eleanor Coppola made a documentary about husband Francis’ making of the film, Apocalypse Now and she named it, Apocalypse Now: A Film Maker’s Apocalypse. It’s in the vein of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo in which the making of the film seems like a journey through hell. Francis, with the help of another writer, bonded Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the ongoing Vietnam War. It was filmed in the Philippines jungle with an extraordinary cast. Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is travelling the river by boat from South Vietnam to Cambodia on a secret mission to kill Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) who has gone native.
Francis is intent on capturing the essence of what is happening in the Vietnam War, which was surely America’s most ruinous war. The army was drafted, they did not volunteer; there was no clear purpose for being in Vietnam, you had young unhappy boys in unbearable steamy jungle fighting a war that had no meaning for them and no purpose to accomplish, which they were losing to the purposeful Viet Cong. Soldiers were heavily into drugs, going crazy committing atrocities, and every day on American TV’s was a listing on the number of soldiers having died on the previous day.
How does a cast of actors replicate that? The script was free floating. Francis would give general outlines to individuals on what their characters’ intents were in a coming scene and they were free to improvise. The acting is impressive. But truly it was grueling to portray the absolute hopelessness and misery of the real soldiers. A lot of the actors were doing drugs, to reach that Level of intensity, speed, psychedelics, marijuana. There is so much to the logistics of making such a film, and all the difficulties encountered, from a monsoon to the host country fighting its own civil war in the midst of it, to Marlon, who gets paid a million a day for thirteen days’ work being unreasonably demanding. It has completely swallowed Francis. I will never finish this film; I don’t have an ending; it’s going to be awful. He wakes up at 3 in the morning to write scenes; he is a man possessed, focused.
The film Apocalypse Now is today considered one of the greatest films ever made and has won numerous awards. Francis Ford Coppola is a great man because he lives beyond the created societal world. He could have lost everything he had in this film because he put up his own money. He lives on the edge committed to his truth, his reality. His wife Eleanor is no slouch either. We should all have such a wife, who is incredibly supportive of his artistic vision, seeing becoming poor as something she could live with if needed.
Everything else in life is bullshit; the money, the awards, the perks are meaningless. What motivates you is the desire to create what you know to be the truth as only you see it. Karl Wallenda, the patriarch of the Flying Wallendas said it best, “Walking the tightwire is living; everything else is waiting.”
