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"FacebookPinterest\n\n There have been plenty of great films made about the Vietnam War\u2014The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Born of the Fourth of July\u2014but from the day it came out, Francis Ford Coppola's take on the war, Apocalypse Now, has always been one of a kind. Unlike the other classics of the Vietnam subgenre, Apocalypse Now has had a wild, near-mythic afterlife. Created in chaos, initially rejected by critics, the movie was swiftly embraced by transfid moviegoers, becoming an unlikely hit and an Academy Award nominee for Best Picture. But that was just the beginning of its legend. In 1991 came Heart of Darkness, an award-winning documentary about the often-disastrous making of the film, which was cobbled from footage shot on the set by Coppola's wife Eleanor. Then in 2001, Coppola delivered an extended cut of the film, Apocalypse Now Redux, featuring an additional 49 minutes of restored footage and finally presenting the film in the form he had originally intended. Today, both versions of the film\u2014the 1979 theatrical version and the Redux re-cut\u2014arrive on the Blu-ray format in a single two-disc set, giving GQ the perfect excuse to ring up Coppola, now 71, and spend a few minutes talking about life in the movies.\n\n Why do you think \"Apocalypse Now\" continues to have such a hold on film buffs? \n\n It goes to this element of risk. When movies are made, especially today, they eliminate the risk factors to such a great extent by predigesting the movie and applying what they think are rules learned from successful films. The investor dominates the process. And so the films don't have complexity and depth. Clearly [Apocalypse Now] went off on its own to explore the themes of what was a very unusual, maybe unprecedented, war on many levels. So when the film came out, it shocked people at first and almost defied them, because it was so different than what had been considered a war film. When that happens\u2014when risk is taken and the filmmakers dive into the subject matter without a parachute\u2014very often what you get it something with those qualities that make it age well with the public. Risk is a factor in making art, making films. But because films are, of course, an industry, and so many people are making a living from it, they have really learned over the last twenty years to make risk-free projects. Although I don't know that they've succeeded. Films still lose a lot of money.\n\n In some ways, it's as if people are infatuated with the legend of the film\u2014the making of it, the risk involved\u2014as with the film itself.\n\n I went there with the intention of making a war film that could make a lot of money so that we could use the money to make little art films. And, of course, the subject matter seduced me and as I started making the film, I realized it was becoming more and more surreal as I heard the stories from the veterans. It was, among other things, a California war. Usually war films in the past were all these characters from the East. And there was always a guy from Brooklyn. But Apocalypse Now was a California war. They were surfers and they were listening to the Doors. That was very different. As I followed what seemed to be the trail, I began to make the film in more of a surreal, drug-induced sensibility\u2014not that we were on drugs, but that was the sensibility. All the pink and green smoke, the strange helicopters. And I realized, by the time I got through three-quarters of it, that I didn't have an ending. Because the ending we had was a very conventional.\n\n Of course I was under great strain, partly because we didn't have an ending and because it was my own money. But it produced a very oddly appropriate film for that subject matter. And when the film first came out, well, let's face it, that year Kramer vs. Kramer won all the Oscars. We were nominated in the end, but at first the film was condemned and proclaimed to be disaster. And yet people couldn't stop coming. We found that the screenings at the Dome Theater in LA and the Ziegfeld Theater in New York were always full of people. The film just literally waited out that first response. More and more there was something to the film that fascinated people.\n\n Then fifteen years or so later, I saw the version we had released on a little television in England, and I thought, \"Well, this movie isn't as far-out and crazy as we thought.\" Because we were very concerned that we were going to lose the whole shebang. So I pulled out 20 or 30 minutes and tried to make the film look as much like a conventional war film as I could. And that's what we put out.\n\n There really aren't that many versions. There was the original cut, which we shortened in an attempt to try to avoid a loss. And then years later I decided the film had not only been accepted by the audience but had also somehow changed the audience's tolerance for a more unusual film. So we just put the footage back. So the two versions are really both the original version. Except that when the film first came out we had greatly sanitized it and shortened it.\n\n One great example of the movie's continued hold on the culture is Tropic Thunder. Here's a movie that came out in 2008, and it's essentially a spoof and a tribute to a film\u2014your film\u2014that came out 30 years earlier, before much of its audience was even alive. Did you ever see Tropic Thunder?\n\n Yeah, and that movie was all of those things\u2014a spoof and a tribute. It did seem as though it was pretty much derived from our experience and our film. It was funny. We enjoyed it. And it made us realize how our film had seeped into the culture and affected a lot of people. I had met Ben Stiller when he was just a kid, when he was starting out. He was a very enthusiastic young kid, and he was very aware of my various adventures. So it did make sense. Oh, yeah. Parts of it were just amazing\u2014Robert Downey, Jr.'s transformation. The whole thing was funny.\n\n Earlier on, you mentioned having to scramble for a new ending to this unexpectedly unconventional film, which made me think of Dennis Hopper, who died earlier this year. Were you in contact with him toward the end of his life? And did you think at all about your experiences with him on this film when you heard the news of his passing?\n\n I'm happy that I got to talk to him every weekend for maybe the last four or five weeks of his life. He would always say he was getting better, and I'd say, 'Let's go make a movie!'\n\n What did you talk about when you called?\n\n Oh, you know, \"How are you feeling? How's it going?\" \"Oh, I'm fine, it's looking up.\" Those kinds of conversations. Full of hope. I've been through this before with other friends who were sick, where we all live in different parts of the world, so it's the telephone gives us the chance to be together, and it's not a lot different than holding someone's hand who's growing weaker. But I so enjoyed knowing Dennis. He lived full tilt. He was a very multi-leveled person; he was himself a filmmaker and a wonderful photographer; he was a very early participant in the art scene, knew a lot about it.\n\n The part that Dennis played wasn't even in the script. Originally he was hired to play the part that Scott Glenn played, the soldier, the Green Beret who was sent up the river to do the job and who became a convert. But when Dennis showed up, he was so funny and these lines of dialogue that were coming out of him\u2026 I knew there was a part in Heart of Darkness, referred to as The Russian, who was that sort of person at the Kurtz encampment. And I also knew about some journalists and some photographers who famously disappeared, like Errol Flynn's son Sean. So I just put clothes on Dennis and hung a bunch of cameras around him and figured it out right there on that first day, and suddenly his character was born. And then I gave Scott Glenn the part that Dennis was meant to play.\n\n Sometimes his behavior was out of control. But he did a remarkable about-face\u2014and it's a testament to his intelligence\u2014where he stopped drinking and he stopped doing drugs and he got another 20 years out of his life. And so I got a chance to work with him on a few other projects. When someone has that kind of intelligence, it justifies a lot of bad behavior\u2014well, I don't know if it justifies it, but it makes the person all the more valuable to know and keep as a friend because you know you're dealing with someone of real quality.\n\n Let's talk about your more recent film work. Some directors peak very early, like Orson Welles, and never regain their early form. And there's Clint Eastwood, whose filmmaking career didn't really hit its stride until he was the same age you are now. He has spent his 70's, the last ten years, at this remarkable pace, making at least one movie a year. When you watch his output, do you admire it? Or does the mere thought of it exhaust you?\n\n Oh, not at all. I think he's a wonderfully intelligent and competent director. But he doesn't make personal films. Various people write the scripts, and he's got it down how to lead a group and make the film. So it's possible for him to make one film after another. But I don't think of his films as more than very high quality Hollywood studio filmmaking. There's a bit more eccentricity to [his films] because he's so respected by the financier, so he can go his own way. But it's a far cry from a kind of personal cinema, where the person is really creating the movie out of his own imagination. We have older filmmakers who manage to come up with an original script every year, like Woody Allen. And you could say, \"Well, he does make a new film every year, but they're very similar from one to the next.\" That may be, but there's always some wonderful idea in it.\n\n Both of those men are wonderful American filmmakers. But my goal was always to make a more personal film, where each time it's a different exploration. I'm more personally impressed with directors like the Coen Brothers, where every time I see one of their films, I've never seen anything like it before.\n\n They also keep up a fairly remarkable pace, considering how they work.\n\n Well, they're younger. But I love that they just do what they do. My big goal in life was always to figure out how I can make a lot of money so I can go off and make films irrespective of the opinion of the three or four critics who seem to rule the roost. Because that doesn't matter. I've seen in my career, the films that I am celebrated for today weren't such big successes in their time. Apocalypse Now was a pretty unusual, amazing film to come out. I had to deal with the opinion makers who said this or that about, and ultimately they were wrong. The ultimate test of a film is if people will look at it forty years later. Unfortunately, the films I'm making now, which are personal and are very different one from the other, I won't be around to get the real verdict on. With a lot of my recent films, people didn't even really know that they had come out.\n\n How do you feel about that? Do you care?\n\n No. It's been no different than it ever was. I had one huge success when I was young, which was The Godfather, and absolutely every film after that was considered a failure of some kind or another\u2014but then, years later, people decided that many of those films were interesting. So I know the ones I'm doing now, I'm not going to live long enough to get what the real reaction is. Anyone who's made film and knows about the cinema has a lifelong love affair with the experience. You never stop learning about film. I plan to just keep doing my own little films. If I have to finance them, that's fine. I was trained by Roger Corman so I know how to make a low-budget film if I have to. It's more important for me to make the films that only I can make, which is that of my own feelings or what I think is the meaning of life or chip away at it rather than to go get a job and have a bunch of thirty-two-year-old ecutives give me their theory of what they think the box office requires.\n\n Your daughter has a new film coming out later this year. Do you get nervous for her and for the reaction to her films? \n\n Sure. You always worry more about your reaction to your children than you do to yourself, because that's just the way it is to be a parent. Every time someone says something bad it hurts your feelings. But in the case of my daughter, she's a young woman. She already has such a personal style that you don't even need to see the credits and you know she made it. In our family, that's the highest thing you can aspire to. The goal is to make films that only you can make.\n\n Which was greater: your happiness over the positive reception that she got for Lost in Translation or your hurt over the way Marie Antoinette was not as well-received?\n\n Marie Antoinette was the most interesting case of misreporting of the facts. I was there. When it was shown at the Venice Film Festival, it got a standing ovation, even from the press. Three or four British people booed it. And when we went to the press conference, the very first question was, \"Sofia, how do you feel that your film was booed?\" And that was asked by the very journalist who booed it. But that's what happens. And now when they talk about Marie Antoinette they say, \"Oh, it was booed.\" It wasn't booed!\n\n Martin Scorsese, one of your great contemporaries, just directed the pilot of Boardwalk Empire, a gangster story set during the Prohibition. It's subject matter that he keeps returning to again and again. Whereas you never did, after your success with The Godfather. Why do you think the two of you have gone in such separate directions after your early successes?\n\n Well, Martin is an enormously talented filmmaker. And like all of us, as we get older, you begin to wonder how you're going to sustain your life and especially in a diminishing movie industry that is so, as I said, predigested. So you do what you can. Martin is fascinated by those stories and those characters. I'm absolutely disinterested. I was at the time I made The Godfather. I never wanted to make a second Godfather. In fact I had suggested Martin, who was then a younger filmmaker, to direct the second Godfather. I was absolutely not interested. The Godfather was a drama. It was not appropriate to make a series of movies. I never wanted to make even a second one, much less a third or a fourth. So why does it happen? Of course we know why. Because to make a film is a risk. And they want to have a risk that's already cushioned by the fact that's is a sequel. I'm the one who started giving numbers to movies with Godfather I and Godfather II. Hollywood ran with that and now it's only a sequel film business. I have no respect for what they've done to the film business. But all of us, all of my colleagues, the people of my age group, have to face the realities of the film business. And not all of them have a wine empire or a resort empire to pay the bills.\n\n So in other words we have you to blame for Transformers 3?\n\n You do. And I am ashamed of it."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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