Like Fine Wine

In a Hawaiian shirt, sitting in a quiet corner of the Carlton Hotel, looking somehow like a cuddly version of Marlon Brando’s imposing Col. Kurtz, Francis Ford Coppola agrees that he’s calmer than the last time he brought “Apocalypse Now” to the Riviera. The reason is simple: “I don’t have my life at stake.”

That last time was 22 years ago, when Coppola decided to enter his Vietnam War epic in the Cannes competition out of desperation as much as anything else. “I was so scared,” he remembers. “There were big newspaper and magazine articles saying ‘Apocalypse’ was a mess. I thought showing it might stop the speculation that it was a disaster.”

Coppola was anxiety-ridden because of what he had to lose. “The film was made under very strange circumstances. I had put up my Napa Valley house and estate to guarantee the loans to finance the film,” he says. “People ask me if it isn’t harder these days to make unusual movies--well, it was impossible then.”

It’s one of the ironies of a film that has had endless reversals of fortune (“Apocalypse Now” ended up winning the Palme d’Or and getting nominated for eight Oscars) that the source of so much anguish then is the cause of renewed success now. Because Coppola guaranteed the loans, he owns the film outright. With that proprietorship goes the rare ability to revisit the material and put together a version closer to his original ideas, and that is what he has done.

What’s being called “Apocalypse Now Redux” by Miramax (which will release it Aug. 15, the anniversary of the original) premieres here today, and no one, no matter what they thought about the 1979 version, can fail to be impressed by the beauty, power and ambition of what’s on the screen now.

A bravura piece of filmmaking, the new “Apocalypse Now” has a dynamic new six-channel soundtrack created by the wizardly Walter Murch (who won an Oscar for editing the first version) and a new Technicolor dye transfer print that is so spectacular that cinematographer and fellow Oscar winner Vittorio Storaro says, “I almost cried, it was so beautiful.”

Even more unusual, “Apocalypse Now Redux” adds an unheard-of 53 minutes to the original’s running time. But, paradoxically, the picture seems to play not only better but faster at its new 3-hour-and-17-minute length. The director agrees.

“In a funny way the movie is more clear at this length, it’s fuller and better developed about its theme of the kinds of hypocrisy involved in warfare,” Coppola says. “Deep down people like longer films; when they say they don’t, they mean, ‘I’m not engaged.’ Filmmakers are often quick to cut a film down as a first solution, but often it isn’t the best one. I always try to be cooperative, so I cut ‘Cotton Club’ by 45 minutes and then I regretted it for years.”

Despite his pleasure at the way “Apocalypse Now Redux” turned out, Coppola was not necessarily eager to take it on. “I don’t dwell so much on the old movies; I’m a person who puts them away, I have to be prodded to go back and look at them,” he says. “Once it’s over, it’s kind of over for me.”

But six years ago, Coppola was staying at a London hotel when “Apocalypse Now” came on the TV. “Whenever it starts, I always watch the beginning, which I like a lot,” he says. But this time the director felt compelled to see it all the way through. “It was considered too long and too strange when it came out, but in contemporary terms it didn’t seem that far out. I thought maybe times had changed.”

Coppola then contacted Murch with the idea of doing a reedit, and what took up some of those years was clearing both men’s schedules. It was Murch, described by the director “as logical and analytical as I am not,” who had the key idea of not simply replacing already-edited sections that had been removed but going back to the original, unedited dailies and cutting the sequences anew so as not to prejudge the material.

Because post-production on the original had been so rushed and chaotic, four editors had worked on it under what Coppola calls “precarious circumstances. I had painted myself into a corner during shooting by sort of changing the kind of movie it was as I was going along, making it more like Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ than the action-adventure film it was sold as. I couldn’t avoid my instincts, but at the same time I worried about it having dire financial consequences.

A Journey Back in Time

“It was a long movie, it was bizarre and demanding for audience taste, and there was no assurance it would make its money back. There was also the question of whether it was a real war movie, did the philosophical elements get in the way.” Hence all the cuts.

The footage added to “Apocalypse Now” falls into four main areas. The biggest chunk is what’s known as the French plantation sequence, where Martin Sheen’s Capt. Willard and his boat mates interact with an extended family of French planters who are heavily armed and tenaciously holding onto their land. This includes a romantic interlude between the captain and a French widow played by Aurore Clement. “The journey up river became a kind of journey back in time,” Coppola says, “and these people were sort of like ghosts who appeared floating out of the fog.”

Another new sequence that features women is an extended encounter with the Playboy entertainers (played by Colleen Camp and Cynthia Wood) in which Willard trades fuel in return for his men having time with the playmates. This was a tricky (and very rainy) sequence to get in, because it was begun but never finished during a typhoon, the worst in the Philippines in 40 years, that shut down the production for months.

“The women talk about being uncomfortable in these poses, and I always loved the parallel, that we’re not only sending young boys in but that our culture exploits youth in every gender, that kids are sacrificed for our double standard in morality,” the director says.

The other two key additions involve more footage for two of the film’s stars, Robert Duvall and Marlon Brando. Coppola was hesitant to add anything for Brando, considering his Col. Kurtz to be “a character who should be dished out in thin razor slices. Like Harry Lime in ‘The Third Man,’ you can’t be seeing too much of him.” But he couldn’t resist a sequence of Kurtz reading to Willard from actual Time magazine articles about how well the war was going. “Time putting out this line always galled me and Marlon, who took special delight in reading that.”

Backdrop for Closing Credits

As for Duvall, out and out mesmerizing as Lt. Col. Kilgore, determined to make Vietnam safe for surfing, there is simply more of one of the actor’s most memorable characterizations. “We were scratching our heads about how to get some lifts and we cut some of his performance, though now it seems stupid that we ever did that.”

One thing that won’t go back in “Apocalypse Now” are shots of Kurtz’s compound being blown up. “We shot it because we had to destroy it, so I said, ‘Let’s blow it up and take shots of it,’ ” Coppola says. But although the footage wound up being used as merely decorative backdrop to the closing credits, the director eventually pulled the footage when he realized that people were reacting to it as if it were an alternate ending.

“I didn’t want to send the message that the film ends in destruction and death,” Coppola explains. “When Willard becomes the new Kurtz, he throws his weapon down, and the tribesmen do the same. I was trying to say that maybe our destiny isn’t always to be killing each other for all eternity.”

One of the pleasures Coppola felt in dealing the French plantation sequence is that it contains cameos by his two sons--the late Giancarlo, and Roman, who has his own debut film, “CQ,” showing here out of competition.

“We always took our kids everywhere we went, and we were always putting them in our movies out of practicality,” he explains. “Where the hell else are you going to get some kids ready on demand? That’s how Sofia, who had just been born, ended up being baptized as Michael’s son in ‘The Godfather.’ ”

With both Roman and Sofia now directors, the 62-year-old filmmaker finds himself more interested in the fluctuations of their careers than those of his own. “I go through it again with them,” he says. “And I know how hard it’s going to be.”

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Times photographer Robert Gauthier is in the thick of it at Cannes. View the daily photo galleries online at https://www.calendarlive.com/cannes

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CANNES OPENER: “Moulin Rouge” has glittery premiere and divided reception. F17