The maddest movie ever: Why Apocalypse Now is the finest film of modern times

Standing in a steamy, rainswept jungle in the Philippines, the film director Francis Ford Coppola, a man known for a volatility that sometimes verged on madness, was screaming in incandescent rage at one of his stars, the wild and wacky Dennis Hopper.

Hopper, the quintessential droopy-moustached Seventies hippie, was stoned on marijuana, cocaine, speed or any of the other drugs that were routinely smoked and swallowed by the hundreds of actors, production staff and extras on the set of the classic Vietnam War film, Apocalypse Now.

Coppola was furious that the star was so spaced-out he couldn't remember his lines.



Mayhem: Apocalypse Now was as chaotic behind the camera as it was on screen

But Hopper had the perfect riposte. He didn't have any lines to remember, he reminded the director, because he hadn't been given any.

The script had been torn up a long while ago. By and large, the dialogue and the very scenes themselves were being made up as they went along.



This small on-set confrontation summed up the making of Apocalypse Now.



The inspired improvisation of a genius was how some admirers saw Coppola's performance as a director.



'Chaos' was the word used by co-star Martin Sheen when he arrived on the nightmare set of a movie already millions of dollars over budget though filming had barely begun.

Yet out of this mayhem emerged a masterpiece of cinema, which this week was hailed by experts in the field as the best film of the past 30 years.

Its dark-hearted tale is unsurpassed as over three epic and often gruelling hours it follows an undercover U.S. Army officer (Martin Sheen) sent from Saigon to assassinate a power-crazed Special Forces colonel (Marlon Brando) who has flipped and set himself up in his own native kingdom deep in the Cambodian rain-forest.



When the Circle of London Film Critics began making annual awards back in 1980, they voted it their top film of that year.



Three decades later - as part of a celebration to mark the anniversary of the awards - the 130-plus critics have decided that it has not been bettered since.

'Its monumental performances and dazzling film-making technique have stood the test of time,' says the circle's chairman, Jason Solomons.



With America this week committing 30,000 more troops to the Afghan war in what some fear could be a reprise of Vietnam, its themes are more relevant than ever.

What is remarkable is that this undisputed greatness was hewn out of a production that was constantly teetering on the edge of self-destruction.

Francis Ford Coppola put millions of his own money into Apocalypse Now

The typhoon that ripped though the Philippines and flattened the newly-built first set, delaying filming for nearly two months, was a breeze compared with the antics of the stars.



The blaze that incinerated the sheds where essential props were stored was a candle-flame against the monstrous bonfire of vanities of cast, crew and director alike.

The very idea of the film had begun in a fit of pique. In 1975, Coppola, director of the blockbusting Godfather series, was infuriated by taunts from the arty elite in Hollywood that he wasn't capable of making a film with a truly serious theme.

He seized on the Vietnam War, from which the United States had ignominiously just exited after more than a decade of brutal fighting in which nearly 60,000 Americans were killed and 300,000 wounded. It was a defeat that had scarred the national psyche.

There could be no more serious issue and Coppola was overwhelmed with the mighty vision of what he wanted to achieve. He soon found himself in a quagmire of mud and mayhem.

From the start, he had trouble casting the key part of Captain Willard, the officer who goes in search of mad Colonel Kurtz and around whom the action revolves. Hollywood's finest said no.



Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson and Steve McQueen all turned him down - possibly because of the unappealing prospect of four months on location in a remote jungle.

When Al Pacino, who owed his stardom to the chance Coppola gave him in The Godfather, followed suit, the furious director hurled his five Oscars out of the window of his San Francisco home in frustration. (He managed to rescue just one of them.)

He then alighted on Harvey Keitel, a well-known, albeit second-tier, star, and filming began in the Philippines. But a glance at the early rushes showed that Keitel was not the man for the job. He simply didn't have the gravitas to carry the role.

He was fired, and the little-known Sheen was brought in, flying in on a private plane to a jungle location that was raindrenched and waterlogged because Coppola had decided to ignore the weatherman's warnings that the annual monsoon was on its way.

They filmed in the rain some days and in the dry on others and prayed that the different conditions could be smoothed out in the editing.

If this wasn't chaotic enough, Sheen then added his own dose of mayhem, a result of the severe alcoholic phase he was going through.

In the opening scenes, Willard has a violent mental breakdown brought on by heavy drinking. Sheen played it with all the stunning realism of a man who was himself out of his head on booze after a 24-hour birthday bender.

He could hardly stand up and when, for the film, he smashed a mirror with his fist, he was so drunk he didn't realise his hand was badly cut and streaming blood. Those on the set with him were on tenterhooks, scared that he was going to take a swing at the director and the camera crew.

Shortly afterwards, Sheen collapsed with a heart attack, though he was just 36 years old, and was found crawling along a road looking for help. The jungle heat may have had something to do with his condition, but his drinking and the fact that he was woefully out of shape for such a demanding role can't have helped.

When Coppola heard the news, he had an epileptic fit of his own. He blamed himself and ordered a news black-out on Sheen's illness.



'Even if he dies, he's not dead until I say so,' he told startled studio bosses back in Hollywood.



Sheen was off work for six weeks and was uneasy about returning. 'I don't know if I'm going to live through this,' he was heard to say.

His absence caused more delays in the filming schedule, which was now stretching out indefinitely. Cynics renamed the film 'Apocalypse When?' Studio bosses despaired and called it 'Apocalypse Never'.

Coppola was in bits. He'd had to put millions of his own dollars into the project in order to get the studios to back it while still allowing him creative control over the final product - a vanity he had insisted on.



He faced personal bankruptcy. But what worried him more was what he increasingly saw as the artistic bankruptcy of the whole project.

Apocalypse Now star Martin Sheen collapsed with a heart attack during filming

He went round the set moaning that the film was rubbish - an Fgrade work from someone who had always seen himself as a straight-A director. 'We are all lost!' he yelled at his wife, Eleanor. 'I have no idea where to go with this.' He was thinking of shooting himself.

Many of the cast and crew shared his misgivings. It was common currency that he had run out of ideas, had no set plan and was not only improvising as he went along but relying on his actors to do the same.



Often they were handed schedules of the day's shooting that simply said 'Scenes unknown'. One on-set observer concluded that Coppola's mind had turned to 'jelly'.

The problems piled up, of which the rogue tiger that came out of the jungle and stalked the set was just a minor inconvenience. A bigger obstacle was when a real war intervened.

One of the film's emblematic scenes has American helicopter gunships flying into battle with Wagner's apocalyptic Ride Of The Valkyries blaring from loudspeakers in the cabins and down to the villagers below.

But after the first take, the choppers were suddenly called away. President Marcos of the Philippines - from whose army they had been hired - needed their firepower to take out some real rebels on another island. Fiction and fact were becoming disturbingly intertwined.

The dead bodies littering the set were another indication of the blurring edges between art and reality. Kurtz's jungle stronghold is a hell-hole of medieval barbarity, strewn with the skulls and remains of the enemies he has slaughtered in his private war against the Vietcong.

But an over- enthusiastic props manager decided that dummies were no good for this purpose. He wanted actual corpses to lie on the ground and hang in the trees 'to give real atmosphere'.

A man who supplied cadavers to medical schools was hired to supply dead bodies - until horrified senior production staff realised what was happening. The sinister supplier, it turned out, had been creeping out at night and robbing graves.

The local police showed up on set to investigate. The passports of the production team were temporarily confiscated and an army truck arrived to cart the bodies away. After that, authenticity had to rely on the evil- smelling garbage that was strewn everywhere and the very real rats.

All the while, the cast and crew partied whenever they could. At their hotel, hundreds of beer bottles were lined up around the swimming pool so no one had to waste time getting out of the water to go to the bar. 'People were diving in off the roofs,' one production assistant recalled. 'It was crazy.'

Money was squandered. The Italian film cameramen insisted on pasta being flown in from Italy, on which the Philippines customs authorities levied a tax running into thousands of dollars.



The management paid up, scarcely bothering to glance at the preposterous bill. What had started out as a $12million film was heading towards three or four times that figure.

A London Film Critics' Circle Awards poll dubbed Apocalypse Now the best film of the past 30 years

As everything spiralled out of control, Coppola's wife warned him that 'he was setting up his own Vietnam with supply lines of wine and steaks and air conditioners.



He was creating the very situation he was trying to expose. With hundreds of staff carrying out his every request, he was turning into Kurtz - going too far.'

And then there was Brando, a walking (or, rather, waddling) legend, enigmatic and eccentric to the point of being barking mad.



In that sense, the role of Kurtz fitted him like a glove, unlike the Special Forces uniform he was expected to squeeze his ballooning 20- stone body into.

Both his fee and his waistline were so huge that the playwright Tennessee Williams joked that Brando was clearly being paid by the pound.

Not that he had initially wanted the part. To begin with, he wouldn't even take Coppola's phone calls.

When he finally relented, it was for an astronomical fee of $3.5 million for four weeks' location work. (Later he gave some of the money back in return for a substantial share of the profits.)

The conditions were that he was to lose weight for the part and also read Joseph Conrad's Africa-based novel, Heart Of Darkness, on which Apocalypse Now was loosely based for its themes and for the character of Kurtz.

The great man had managed neither in the months since signing the contract. When he turned up on the set, he lied about having read the book but could not disguise his elephantine size. 'You couldn't see around him,' said a shocked producer.

Since his character was supposed to be a lean and hardened fighting man, slimming would have to be achieved by clever filming.

As a result, one of the outstanding features of Apocalypse Now became the physical aura of mystery surrounding the iconic Kurtz. He is dressed in black and his face is always in shadow. Smoke swirls around him, giving him the demonic air of a tribal god. The effect is spot-on.

But in reality, it was done that way less for artistic reasons and more to camouflage Brando's belly and bloated cheeks. In scenes where the whole of his body had to be seen, a double was used.

Sitting in the houseboat that was also used as his location dressing room, Brando finally got round to reading Heart Of Darkness and from that moment on, he became a complete pain. True to his roots as a 'Method' actor who needed to get totally inside the characters he played, he now wanted to explore every nuance of motivation.

The 900-man cast and crew stood idle for weeks on end while Brando and Coppola struggled with the proper interpretation of his role. They pored over Conrad, books about mythology and T. S. Eliot's poem of destruction and rebirth, The Waste Land.

All the while, the meter was ticking, the costs escalating.

There was still no proper script, and so, for the crucial scenes where Willard confronts and kills Kurtz, Brando invented his own lines and mumbled and slurred them in that incoherent but unmistakable Brando way.

Eventually, having put his heart and soul into the interpretation, Brando dried. 'Francis, I've gone as far as I can go,' he told the director. 'If you need more, get another actor.'

It wasn't necessary. Brilliant editing did the job as 18 minutes of rambling were cut to two. The result was electrifying.

'The horror, the horror,' were Kurtz/Brando's apt final words (and also those of Conrad's Kurtz). They encapsulated both the film's mighty themes about the Vietnam War but also the nightmare of the way it had been made.

Coppola himself later admitted this parallel.