Critics of "Apocalypse" have said that Coppola was foolish to translate Heart of Darkness, that Conrad's vision had nothing to do with Vietnam, and that Coppola was simply borrowing Conrad's cultural respectability to give a gloss to his own disorganized ideas. I should at this moment make a confession: I am not particularly interested in the "ideas" in Coppola's film.
Years and years from now, when Coppola's budget and his problems have long been forgotten, "Apocalypse" will still stand, I think, as a grand and grave and insanely inspired gesture of filmmaking - of moments that are operatic in their style and scope, and of other moments so silent we can almost hear the director thinking to himself. We've heard that Marlon Brando was paid $1 million for his closing scenes, and that Coppola gambled his personal fortune to finish the film, and, heaven help us, we've even read a journal by the director's wife in which she discloses her husband's ravings and infidelities.īut all such considerations are far from the reasons why "Apocalypse Now" is a good and important film - a masterpiece, I believe. We've all read Coppola's grandiose statements (the most memorable: "This isn't a film about Vietnam. That "other" film on the screen - the one we debate because of its ideas, not its images - is the one that has caused so much controversy about "Apocalypse Now." We have all read that Coppola took as his inspiration the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness, and that he turned Conrad's journey up the Congo into a metaphor for another journey up a jungle river, into the heart of the Vietnam War.
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