Francis Coppola said of his film Apocalypse Now, “My film is not about Vietnam. My film is Vietnam…. little by little, we went insane.”
The movie has a 8.4 rating on IMDB. The making of documentary is 8.1 and Roger Ebert gave it nearly 3.5 stars. Some of the chaos includes:
- Typhoon Olga destroying the Kurtz compound and shutting down production for months while it was rebuilt.
- Martin Sheen having a heart attack (he was 36 years old) and then crawling a quarter mile to get help.
- Marlon Brando refusing to read the source material; Coppola spent the first week reading it to him.
- Brando refusing to be filmed in direct light because of his weight.
- Both Brando and Dennis Hopper refusing to be on set together.
- The Philippine military taking promised helicopters away from set to fight communist insurgents. .
- Sets sinking into the mud.
The film’s roughly $13 million budget ballooned to over $30 million, and 4 months shooting into 16.