Lucas arranged for scouting trips to the Philippines as he juggled the idea of an absurdist take on the material. That incarnation of Apocalypse Now remained a possibility for four years. His first feature had, after all, been the austere science fiction film THX 1138. This now sounds like an absurd suggestion, but, a that point, Lucas was known as the most experimental of a crew that took in Millius, Coppola and Steven Spielberg among other founders of post-classical Hollywood. ![]() He ended up with a colossal draft that he felt would suit the still-obscure George Lucas. Coppola, for whom he was working at the time, encouraged his friend to fling all his mad energy into it (not advice Millius would need to hear twice). In 1969, John Millius, the famously robust director and screenwriter, began contemplating a version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam. There is something of Kafka’s The Trial about it: an unfinished novel whose chapters have no definitive order. For 50 years, alternative ideas of what it could be have been floating about the Cinemasphere. But it remains hard to accept that this is the final version we will ever see. Now 80, Coppola is unlikely to take another crack at Apocalypse Now. Robert Duvall (centre) in Apocalypse Now (1979) ![]() It was a good decision to leave that out of the first commercial cut. The French Plantation sequence, in which Captain Willard and his crew meet survivors from an earlier colonisation, restored for Redux, is still there in something like its entirety.īut its looks as if the hugely misguided scene - unacceptable in 2001, more unacceptable now - in which the team trade fuel for sex with the Playboy Bunnies has been cut. The “new” cut comes in at a tolerable 183 minutes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |