The Insane, Chaotic, Very Nearly Fatal Production of Apocalypse Now
‘We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.’
Francis Ford Coppola
The trouble started before shooting even started in March of 1976, three years ahead of its critically acclaimed premiere at the place its legendary director gave that quote: the Cannes Film Festival. His dark, surrealist masterpiece ultimately took home the event’s top award, the Palme d’Or - along with Volker Schlondorf’s adaptation of The Tin Drum - and would eventually go on to earn eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, though it only converted two of them: Best Cinematography and Best Sound.
It also grossed over $150 million at the global box office, and as gratifying as that must’ve been for Coppola and the star of the movie, Martin Sheen, they both almost ended up among the dozens of corpses a few enterprising members of the design team originally planned to use as set decoration for one of the movie’s closing sequences.
It’s not a direct adaptation, but the story is loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, an 1899 novella about a steamboat captain hired by a trading company to find and retrieve an ivory trader who’d vanished somewhere along the path of the Congo River.
Though he was the first to actually manage it, Coppola wasn’t the first legendary filmmaker to try and adapt Conrad’s book. That distinction rather belongs to a young Orson Welles, who wrote a characteristically long and ambitious screenplay he’d eventually get RKO to bite on in 1939. The project got the green light later that year, but the studio ultimately pulled the plug not long after due to budgetary concerns.
They projected it would cost, when it was all wrapped and done with, around $1 million, and that was, at the time, a small fortune today equal to about $23 million. It just wasn’t worth that to them, especially since its success would be dependent on both the acting and directing skills of its very young, very inexperienced creator. His reputation would get a nice boost a couple years later, after the premiere of his next project, Citizen Kane, but even still, Welles never took another run at a Heart of Darkness adaptation.