The above picture is one of Martin Sheen along with several Ifugao who were brought on the set of Apocalypse Now to play the role of Vietnamese montagnard tribes men and women.  The Ifugao purportedly practiced both headhunting into the twentieth century.

Ifugao headhunter

headhunting include mortification of the rival, ritual violence, cosmological balance, the display of manhood, cannibalism, prestige, and as a means of securing the services of the victim as a slave in the afterlife.

 

Marlon Brando took a liking to the poem, and purportedly received inspiration for the role of Colonel Kurtz from reading it.

First stanza:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

Included in Colonel Kurtz's jungle 'library' was James Frazier's, "Golden Bough".  In it, Frazier made the claim that all pre-Christian religions were fertility cults that revolved around the worship and periodic sacrifice of a sacred king, who was also the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, who died at the harvest and was reincarnated in the spring.  Francis Ford Coppola would use Frazier's theory of the king's sacrificial death when formulating the ending of "Apocalypse Now", which was initially inspired by the Ifugao animal sacrifice.  He decided that Kurtz would be killed.  But not by way of an airstrike, which was considered to the point that such a scene was actually made.  No.  Kurtz would be sacrificed, just like some kind of sacred king.

Francis Coppola struggled in regard to how to end Apocalypse Now.  Earlier in the movie's production, Coppola had some of the local Ifugao people brought onto the movie set to play the role of Vietnamese and Cambodian montagnard tribesmen.  It was Coppola's wife who, upon witnessing the sacrificial slaughter of a Carabao (water buffalo) by the Ifugao, finally found a resolution to her husband's dilemma.  Purportedly not initially interested, Francis Coppola, at the behest of his wife, went to witness one of the sacrificial rituals performed by the Ifugao, and finally found a way to end his movie.

It is when Captain Willard is in Nha Trang, being briefed on his impending mission, that he gets his first glimpse into the mindset of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz.  General Corman and Colonel Lucas are outlining the nature of Captain Willard's mission, along with a third man, a civilian, perhaps a CIA agent, known only as "Jerry", when the general requests that an audio tape be played for the captain, identifying it as an intercepted radio message out of Cambodia, confirmed to be the voice of Colonel Kurtz.

" I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and surviving."

Colonel Kurtz is making an abstract reference to the toughness and resilience of the North Vietnamese Communists.  He is alluding to the notion that the Vietcong are both willing and able to endure any amount of pain, suffering and torment in order to defeat the American forces in Vietnam.  They will never give up no matter how much napalm is dropped on them, no matter if their towns and villages are destroyed, no matter how much death is inflicted upon them.  It is this kind of toughness and resilience that is in effect Kurtz's dream in that he is trying to duplicate it among his montagnard soldiers out in his Cambodian outpost.  But on the other hand, it is his nightmare in that these are already the traits of his enemy, an enemy that he knows is highly skilled and motivated, an enemy that is willing to fight to the last man, woman, and child.



 

Early in the movie, Captain Willard peers through the blinds of his Saigon hotel room, and says: "Saigon...shit!  I'm still only in Saigon!"  Captain Willard "wanted a mission."  And "for my [his] sins they gave me [him] one.  And when it was over, I'd [he'd] never want another."  

There could not have been a better song choice for the intro portion of Apocalypse Now than The End by The Doors.  First of all, The Doors epitomized the madness, the cultural and generational tension, of 1960s America.  Not the Beatles.  Not the Rolling Stones.  Not Jimi Hendrix.  No, it was the sound of The Doors and the voice of Jim Morrison that in effect became the American soundtrack of this tumultuous time, one forged by America's conflict in Vietnam. 

The intro portion of Apocalypse Now, the dreamlike sequence of Captain Willard in a Saigon hotel room, complete with flame, napalm, alcohol consumption, cigarettes, guns, divorce letters from home, blood, broken mirrors, and untold torment and pain, ends with Captain Willard staring at a rotating ceiling fan while Jim Morrison overlays the already bizarre and maddened mood by stating"Lost in a Roman...wilderness of pain, and all the children are insane...waiting for the summer rain, yeah."
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Apocalypse Now begins with a an almost still-shot of the jungle.  Upon closer view it can be gleaned that the palm trees are blowing or rustling ever-so-gently.  One can hear the slightly distorted sounds of helicopter blades chopping their way through the air.  Soon they become visible, almost floating across the screen in dream-like fashion to the slowly emerging sounds of the Doors, The End.  Suddenly, without warning, the landscape is illuminated with the orange blaze of napalm exploding onto the jungle, devouring the green foliage almost on contact.  The viewer then sees the upside down image of Captain Willard, which begins moving in a clockwise motion until upright.  Are these the images that haunted the mind of Captain Willard when he went home after his first tour in Vietnam?  He later states that when he was in the jungle he couldn't wait to go home, and after he went home he couldn't wait to get back in the jungle.