The following video is a brief snippet from an unknown documentary or story talking about the making of Apocalypse Now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWIjnJbd-10

                            Coming soon!!  

"THE APOCALYPSE OF MARLON BRANDO" 

A book chronicling the on-set conversations between Marlon Brando and Francis Ford Coppola during the filming of Apocalypse Now.

The following article is from "The Hollywood Reporter" 8/30/14:



Since Brando — like co-star Dennis Hopper, who shunned showers and reeked from cocaine abuse — couldn't memorize a single line (yet gave an immortal performance), Coppola recorded Brando improvising for five days, typed up Brando's insightful ramblings along with snatches of Heart of Darkness, put the lines on tape and gave the 300-pound actor an earphone, so he could press a button and recite what he heard. "He didn't have a good memory, that's why he'd say, 'Uh... uh...' and push the button," said Coppola.

About twenty or so Stieng soldiers appeared from out of the jungle like ghosts while everyone
watched in curious amazement. They looked different than the Jarai. They were much darker and their hair was long and frizzy.  Native to the swampy lowlands of Cambodia, the Stieng are well known throughout Cambodia and Vietnam for their prowess as hunters of man and animal. They are feared and reviled by the Vietnamese because of their brutal and bizarre tactics.

"Some of the montagnards had killed a couple of wild boar and were roasting them over an open flame. They were now out of their tiger-striped jungle gear issued by the U.S. Army, and were wearing their more traditional Jarai attire complete with loincloths and large amounts of bodily adornment consisting of brass earrings, necklaces, and bracelets. They began chanting and banging on tin gongs in an attempt to summon certain animistic gods and the spirits of their ancestors, but not before they dulled their bodies and heightened their senses by smoking mild hallucinogenic herbs and drinking an alcohol made from rice. Soon the Jarai were chanting very loud and boisterously, as well as dancing to the beat of the drums with the hopes of eliciting otherworldly assistance in their time of war."

Apocalypse Now is not necessarily an anti-war film, but rather one that transcends the ambiguities of war to tell us something about the human spirit and psyche. For example, Colonel Kurtz is a man who becomes (devolves or evolves, depending on your perspective) something primal yet progressive. 

As Captain Willard says, "Kurtz split from the whole fucking program".  What's he talking about?  Well, again, this is open to interpretation, but the most common explanation of Willard's observation is that he no longer bought into, much less adhered to, all the lies and moral rationalizations regarding the American involvement in Vietnam. Rather than resisting the so-called 'call of the jungle', Kurtz gives in.  He accepts the emergence (or reemergence) of his primordial instincts.  

 Marlon Brando did an amazing job capturing the essence of a man slipping the bonds of Western Rationalism with his dialogue and physical acting.  But perhaps even greater were the efforts of Vitorio Storaro, the cinematographer of Apocalyspe Now, who manged to capture the madness permeating the mind of Colonel Kurtz through some of the most fantastically beautiful images captured by a camera.

Here's a painting of Kurtz and Willard by the artist John Froehlich.

The making of Aguirre: The Wrath of God became as legendary to film buffs as the film itself, as right from the beginning of the production Herzog would purposely try infuriating Kinski to get the most frightening performance he desired out of him. Kinski's angry outbursts would result in not only a gunshot blowing off the top joint of a extras finger but Herzog threatening to shoot first Kinski and then himself, at a time when Kinski threatened to walk off set. Over the years this story has been given rise to the legend that Herzog made Kinski act for him at gunpoint. However Herzog debunked that rumor in the DVD commentary track by stating, "I was unarmed but somehow in order to look better Kinski reported as if I had drawn a gun at him...it's not like that. But I would have shot him, there was no doubt and the bastard understood it was not a joke. I just out-gutted him and was more determined than he was. After that he behaved for like ten days."

 

If you've seen the 1962 movie, "Mutiny on the Bounty", also starring Marlon Brando, you may have noticed certain similarities. For example, in "Mutiny", when the Bounty made its way to shore in Tahiti, the scene looks very reminiscent of when Captain Willard's boat, PBR Street Gang, enters Colonel Kurtz's Cambodian camp. In each instance both ship and boat are slowly and quietly surrounded by the native inhabitants in their own canoe-like boats. In both scenes there is an eerie calm, a kind of clash of cultures, if you will, fraught with both fear and a fascination of the "other".

Walter would spend the lion’s share of his summer vacations waiting on nature’s cycles of life, death, and rebirth to unfold around him, with his father’s assurance that in the end, everything would work out as accorded by Divine Providence.  Put into these terms, Walter believed his was a world where goodness would always prevail, that all things were, “Providentially ordained”, as his father would say.  And it was the riverbank that encapsulated this for him, coming to symbolize much of what he loved and held dear.  It was also a place where he felt close to his long-deceased grandfather, spending many hours there pondering the man he heard so much about, but never met.

River of Dreams
Benjamin Mercer on Apocalypse Now


 The famed first sequence of Apocalypse Now not only lays the hallucinatory groundwork for the rest of the film, but it also foregrounds the very scale of the destruction wrought during the Vietnam war: To the frayed preliminary strains of the Doors’ “The End,” helicopters swarm in slow motion over an anonymous patch of jungle, a bright-yellow plume of smoke dancing eerily in the chopper blades’ current; suddenly, an inferno, unleashed from above, engulfs the landscape, and the camera—which has heretofore been completely fixed—begins tracking to the right, effectively measuring the detonation’s impact as it moves along. A series of dissolves then positions this less as an actual event than one officer’s fevered encapsulation of the conflict he can’t seem to tear himself away from: A man appears, his face upside down, superimposed over the blaze, as he takes a slow drag on a cigarette, evidently hypnotized by the helicopter whirr of the ceiling fan above. Later in the same Saigon-hotel-room sequence, that man, special-operations officer Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen), shatters a full-length mirror with his fist, suggesting the impossibility of assimilating the war’s grand-scale horrors has led directly to this downward spiral of self-destruction.

Rightfully regarded as one of the finest films on the subject of war ever made, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now nonetheless also happens to be one of the most perennially elusive and disconcerting consensus classics of the American cinema. Discussion of the movie’s actual action has long seemed almost beside the point. There is the enduring Hollywood legend of the hellish production in the Philippines, the movie’s status as one of the money-hemorrhaging swan songs of a marvelously unruly era of domestic feature filmmaking, and the long list of homages and parodies it has inspired. Perhaps this is in part because the film itself is so difficult to pin down. It has a clear, linear narrative direction (Coppola and screenwriter John Milius, loosely adapting Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, use a simple journey’s-progress template), but an altogether more unsettled relationship to its sometimes top-heavy themes (the rottenness of the Vietnam war, the rottenness of war in general, the fragility of the human psyche, the meaning of civilization, etc.). Grasping the film as a whole is even more difficult in its 2001 (Coppola-preferred) Redux cut, a more languidly fluid affair. For one thing, women feature much more prominently: In this 50-minute-longer version, members of Willard’s crew canoodle with a pair of Playboy bunnies after their USO show, and Willard goes to bed with a French woman at the ghostly rubber plantation where she’s holding out.

A strong common thread may be found, though, throughout many of the film’s most arresting scenes, including that iconic bad-trip opener: the nauseatingly theatrical dimension of war—a key reason why this movie in particular, shot by the great Vittorio Storaro, stands to gain from an expansive theatrical presentation. Vietnam appears here as a crucible of chaos, a place occupied by a corps of distorted personalities, where only the most flamboyantly brutal gestures seem to register through the candy-colored napalm haze. Once Willard receives his orders to go upriver to kill Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando)—a decorated American officer who has gone rogue in a highly extravagant and “irregular” manner, amassing an army of followers deep in the jungle, over the Cambodian border—the nightmare commences in earnest. A patrol boat—whose motley crew also includes fired-up Clean (Laurence Fishburne), spaced-out pro surfer Lance (Sam Bottoms), tightly wound Chef (Frederic Forrest), and the older Chief (Albert Hall), stoically manning the helm—provides the means of transport.

Each scene unfolds as though it were a stop-off at some dystopic movie already in progress, but one in which real human atrocity can periodically pierce the rest of the charade. Perhaps most notable is the early rendezvous with Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall), a barrel-chested cock-of-the-walk commander who seems to relish the chaos around him, and who leads the formation of helicopters during the spectacular “Flight of the Valkyries” air strike, a barrage that’s presented, sickeningly, like a commemorative fireworks display. In voiceover (journalist Michael Herr penned the narration), Willard observes that Kilgore will always emerge from battle unscathed: “He was just one of those guys with that weird light around him. He just knew he wasn’t going to get so much as a scratch here.” From one stage to another: Soon after the Kilgore episode, Willard and his men pull over for fuel and find themselves taking in a USO show featuring a trio of Playboy bunnies (one of the women is dressed as a cowboy, another as an Indian), though the extended tease ends abruptly when a riot breaks out at the waterfront amphitheater. In Coppola’s film, there comes to seem something uniquely American about this kind of garish display.

A gradual redirecting of the thematic spotlight occurs not long after the USO scene. Much of Apocalypse Now’s haunting overall effect stems from the fact that, as the journey upriver progresses, the film’s focus seems to dilate, rather than constrict, moving further away from a Vietnam-specific commentary to a more dispersed meditation on the since-time-immemorial impulses at the dark heart of mankind. This diffusion of themes occurs organically, so that the acid take on America’s aimless conduct in Vietnam doesn’t feel abandoned so much as transmuted. But after the sampan massacre—the film’s closest-range atrocity, during which the skittish Clean opens fire on a vaguely suspect family of Vietnamese farmers—the theater of violence continues on a stage whose dimensions are more difficult to make out than the contours of the battlefield.

A kind of slow-stroboscope psychedelia takes over at the Do Lung Bridge, where faces fall in and out of the darkness as fizzling flares and seemingly undirected bursts of mortar fire sporadically illuminate the night sky—a surreal light show that serves as a prelude to Willard and Co.’s arrival at Kurtz’s compound. When Willard’s journey does finally reach its terminus, the impression of an acrid performance remains in the atmosphere. Kurtz himself turns out to be a consummate showman in his own respect, reading aloud prophetically from Eliot and brooding in the shadows, his every movement suggesting that he’s fully, if somewhat wearily, aware of each shaft of light as a potential dramatic device. (This sense is probably at least partially due to a storied on-set workaround, since the actor showed up to the set unprepared and overweight.) Referring to the severed heads littering the encampment, “poet-warrior” Kurtz’s most forthcoming disciple, an American photojournalist manically played by Dennis Hopper, admits that his idol can be a little over-the-top: “Sometimes he goes too far, you know, and he’s the first one to admit it.”

As the film drifts onward, it feels less and less likely that Kurtz has been imagined by Coppola and Milius as the embodiment of a single coherent ideological position. The tweaked-out ravings of the photographer, for one, seem to destabilize what the colonel stands for, as does one Kurtz rant about morality and judgment. The colonel is gradually boiled down to his charismatic essence—a regime of seductive phrases and loaded little gestures, all of them aimed at rejecting any authority but his own. From here, Apocalypse Now moves inexorably toward a climactic showdown, but the film’s conclusion, rather chillingly, lacks a sense of resolution. If we could follow Willard beyond that final dissolve, we would no doubt find him haunted by even more imponderably strange and horrific images of combat than at the film’s outset—and unsettled even more deeply by the specters of the larger-than-life men who were able to harness the appalling spectacle.

Captain Richard M. Colby was the man previously assigned Willard's mission of killing Colonel Kurtz, but who defected to Kurtz's private army and sent a message to his wife telling her to sell everything they owned, as well as cynically telling her to "sell the children".

Not really.  However, the filming of Apocalypse Now was so stressful that Mr. Coppola, albeit jokingly, threatened to blow his brains out on many occasions.

                                T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men", performed by Colonel Kurtz.
 
  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPeHO1r8paU

Apocalypse Now movie poster

Have you ever wanted to hear the indigenous Ifugao people of the Philippines sing The Doors song, "Light my Fire"?  Well, here's your chance.  But beware...if you watch the video through to the end you will be made aware "That's coming from where we're going."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnoK1FGYjXk

    After Captain Willard kills Colonel Kurtz, the montagnards bow down before Willard.  He has   
    killed the old god, replacing him in the hearts and minds of his once loyal followers. 

Walter E. Kurtz served two tours of duty in Vietnam before he established his Cambodian outpost and became a pariah to the U.S. military establishment.


During those two tours of duty, Walter E. Kurtz was a part of the Gamma Program, the recruitment of montagnard tribesmen from the highlands of Vietnam and Cambodia to conduct a war of attrition against the North Vietnamese.

"I'm an American! Yeah, American civilian. Hi yanks... American, American civilian. It's all right. And you got the cigarettes, that's what I've been dreaming of."

Walter was intrigued by Wilke and spent a lot of time studying him as they both tried to pass the initial long, hot, seemingly endless moments of inactivity, and was fascinated by Wilke’s animal-like mannerisms and instincts.  He walked in and out of the jungle as quiet as a ghost and seemed to have eyes in the back of his head, catching Walter staring at him from behind on several occasions.  Sudden sounds emanating from the jungle could not catch Wilke unprepared for fight-or-flight no matter how quickly they erupted.  Years of constantly living only seconds away from death by way of man, nature, and beast, has sharpened his senses like that of fine cutlery, putting him in perfect harmony with the jungle.