Willard and Chef step off the boat and walk into the jungle… the heart of darkness…
in a scene that would not only symbolize the journey into one’s unconscious and the fear
of the unknown but also Francis Ford Coppola’s journey into his unknown and right now, the
unknown is how this story will end.
In this video, I’ll take you through the tiger sequence, how it was shot, the inspirations
for its style, and why it is important to this story.
And stay tuned to the end of the video, because we’re going to talk about Coppola’s writing
process and why he has begun filming the movie with no end in sight.
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After the Valkyries sequence ends, Willard and the River Patrol Boat crew finally begin
making their way up the Nung River to Kurtz.
We start this new section of the movie with Chef, Clean, and Lance sharing a joint–one
of the reasons Coppola was refused any support by the US Military on the production.
They offer some to Willard who refuses–instead, filling his canteen with liquor.
This could certainly be read as Coppola implying a strange double standard in the stigma over
smoking marijuana versus drinking booze.
I’m not here.
I’m walking through the jungle gathering mangos.
I meet Raquel Welch.
Coppola had been telling Freddy Forrest, to help him find the character of Chef, [quote]
“whenever you don’t know who you are, just say, ‘man, I’m not getting off the
boat.
I’m not here, I’m not really here” (Commentary).
And this was something Forrest would say throughout the production, things like, “I’m not
really here.
I’m in Montana with Jack Nicholson” (Hearts of Darkness).
Keep the reference to Raquel Welch in mind, too.
We’ll talk about this in the next episode.
In a part that was cut for the theatrical version but later put back in for the Redux
version, a helicopter flies overhead playing a pre-recorded message from Kilgore asking
for the safe return of his surfboard, which was stolen by Willard.
I will not hurt or harm you.
Just give me back the board, Lance.
It was a good board and I like it.
You know how hard it is to find a board you like.
One thing that’s really pronounced here is a white bandaid under Willard’s left
eye.
You can see in these shots, Willard doesn’t have it yet, but you can barely make out a
small cut on his cheek.
This is a real cut.
According to Coppola, during one of the takes, Martin Sheen fell on his rifle and cut himself.
Coppola just went with it and added the bandaid because that’s what they would have done
in the situation anyway (Commentary).
After the patrol boat is dropped in the water, the bandaid is on his face.
Willard and Chef leave the boat to search for mangos in the jungle.
Willard asks why they call him Chef.
I’m a real chef.
I’m a saucier.
Coppola writes in the margins of the script: “[Is Willard] starting to feel the need
to know his men personally?
Maybe he knows that they will die on this mission” (Cowie 41).
This idea is more developed in the Redux version.
Just before this, in an exchange that was cut from the theatrical version, the crew
asks Willard how dangerous their journey is going to be.
Is it gonna be hairy?
I don’t know kid.
Yeah, probably.
The crew isn’t like Willard.
They all have lives they want to get back to.
You don’t get a chance to know who the fuck you are in some factory in Ohio.
It seems Willard sort of sympathizes with the crew after this and goes mango hunting
with Chef to get to know him better.
I was supposed to go to Paris to study at the Escoffier School, then I got orders for
this.
This sequence was filmed pretty early in the production.
It was just after shooting the Valkyries Sequence–mid-May of 1976.
Coppola wanted to get into the jungle early to let the actors get a feel for the Vietnam
War and the Heart of Darkness.
Coppola said, "The real phenomenon on being in that situation, of being in the middle
of that jungle, dealing with all the unfriendly elements, was part of what Vietnam was about,...
That was the first directorial decision, to put us all in a circumstance that reflected,
you know, what the movie was all about” (Travers 109).
When they went out to shoot this sequence, they came across this amazing tree, and Coppola
was blown away by its size and look (Commentary).
Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, putting his philosophy of color into practice, decided
this should be a ‘blue sequence’ enhanced by the blue bucket (Commentary).
This color philosophy meshed well with Coppola’s desire to add more surrealism to the movie.
Coppola [quote] “wanted Kurtz and Willard to be separated by a thin line” (Travers
135).
Milius’ script had Kurtz’ army having mastered the jungle and becoming transformed
into [quote] ‘killing machines’ by it,
but Coppola wanted the jungle to be an evil monster–killing or driving insane those
who enter it (Travers 135).
We see this concept for the first time in this scene–Chef and Willard have unknowingly
ventured into the heart of darkness for something as simple and innocent as mangos.
Coppola and Storaro wanted the jungle to have a surreal look to it as well.
Storaro was inspired by the Tarzan comic books of the late 1930s illustrated by the incredible
Burne Hogarth (American Cinematographer 95).
Storaro said, “In 1972, just before we began working on Apocalypse, Hogarth had published
two new books of his Tarzan art [Tarzan of the Apes and Jungle Tales of Tarzan], and
they really focused on the principles of movement…I showed them to Francis during our early meetings.
I told him that I wanted to portray the jungle in a similar way, with very aggressive colors…
I didn't want the color of the jungle to be a naturalistic color” (American Cinematographer
100).
Just look at how different the colors look from how they shot it.
Storaro: “I was asking to myself how I can represent this journey into our unconscious,
so I thought that maybe the only way is to represent the same structure of our own life
with the structure of the light itself.
So the journey into ourself that Willard is doing is the journey we could do within the
color spectrum.
Starting from beginning to end into light that represents life” (Writing with Light).
An example would be that black represents the unconscious, and through it, the heart
of darkness.
Green is the process of knowing and Blue is our intelligence as humans (Writing with Light).
Part of the effect came from Storaro using filters to get the bright green leaves against
the dark blue trees (Cowie 61).
Coppola: “Here I saw a film in which the cinematography really joined forces with the
director’s work to do something that in many cases was extremely illogical where the
camera participated in the action almost as a character would and it worked very beautifully”
(Writing with Light).
Throughout most of the movie, Willard is a passive character–always looking.
And we are watching, like Willard.
Often the camera IS Willard.
Storaro said, “The silhouettes were also inspired by the French native painter Henri
Rousseau.
He did some paintings set in the jungle that had very aggressive colors, and in one that
I remember there was a man in silhouette with a woman and a tiger behind him” (American
Cinematographer 100).
Willard hears something and they stop to investigate.
We hear the faint booms and thuds of explosions going off in the distance.
Editor Walter Murch heard from soldiers that they could always hear low artillery in the
distance while in Vietnam, so they decided to put the sound off in the distance to mimic
the sound of a heartbeat as the suspense builds (Salon).
Murch said, “What's interesting when you're working with image and sound is to stretch
the content of what you're looking at to the breaking point.
In the case of the tiger scene, we stretched it to the point where nothing that you're
looking at has anything to do with what you are hearing.
Under these circumstances, people tend not to hear sound consciously.
But they process it nevertheless, and it has the effect of a heartbeat.
If you stopped the film and asked, ‘What's that sound?’
– people would come to a certain level of consciousness, and say, ‘Oh, it must be
distant artillery.’
But they don't: The sound operates at this subconscious level” (Salon).
In Milius’ 1969 draft of the script, he writes, “a few yards from them they HEAR
something move - it is obviously no small jungle creature” (Milius Screenplay).
In the margins, Coppola writes, “let the audience feel sure it is a Vietcong'.
Then, as the tiger springs from its hiding-place, 'Give it the old [Roger] Corman shock — ferocious
face of a tiger!'”
(Cowie 41).
Coppola continues, “The men's shooting should be 'wild — uncontrolled —they don't hit
anything’” (Cowie 41).
Storraro said, “The tiger is the symbol of nature, an unconscious fear.
You do not recognize the face of your enemy, because the real enemy is yourself — the
darkness within you.
When Freddie Forrest runs away from the tiger, he emits the unconscious fear of the unknown”
(Cowie 61).
On May 10th, 1976, Eleanor Coppola wrote in her diary, “Mona [an associate producer]
told me that yesterday the tiger that will be used in a scene arrived from L.A. It had
been in a crate for thirty hours and the handlers were very concerned about it.
They took it to the studio and let it out in the wardrobe room.
It was lying down suffering from jet lag.
It perked up at lunch-time and ate four chickens and a ten-pound roast.
In the afternoon they took it out to the airport to put it on the DC-3 to go to Baler.
The crate wouldn’t fit through the door of the plane, so they walked the tiger on
like a passenger.(Coppola 59).
Coppola: “And on the occasion when many of the italian crew had invited their wives
to come from Rome, these Italian ladies all in their lovely dresses to visit their husbands.
When they got on the plane to take them to our location, a man, a trainer came onto the
plane with a tiger on a leash and, of course, these ladies were hysterical.
The pilots were absolutely refusing to fly the plane with the tiger in it.
In fact, they had locked the door and they had a step ladder so they would climb into
the cockpit from the side window because they didn’t want to be anywhere near where this
tiger was.
(Commentary)
Once the pilot got on the plane, he freaked out and climbed out onto the wing, “refusing
to take off” (Cowie 58).
The passengers rode in the “front compartment” of the plane and the pilot finally got back
on once the tiger was docile (Cowie 58).
Fred Forrest: “We had this guy there with the tiger–a couple, the trainers.
He had like a speech impediment from scar tissue all over his face where he had some
bouts with the tiger, Gambi” (Hearts of Darkness)
Stunt coordinator Terry Leonard baited Gambi the tiger into the shot by holding a squeeling
pig attatched to a rope and then when Gambi lunged for the pig, he would throw the pig
in a box, so Gambi couldn’t eat it (Commentary).
The trainer had said that they hadn’t fed Gambi for a week (Hearts of Darkness).
Coppola kept telling Freddy Forrest to get closer and he would respond, “You get closer,
Francis.
You get closer” (Hearts of Darkness).
When the tiger lunged, everybody freaked out.
Emilio, the focus-puller, actually climbed up a tree (Cowie 61).
According to Coppola, in one of the takes, Gambi managed to get the pig and drag it into
the jungle and it took them hours to find them (Commentary).
Forrest said, “To me that was the essence of the whole film in Vietnam–that look in
the tiger’s eyes, the madness; it didn’t matter what you wanted, there was no reality
anymore–if that tiger wanted you, you were his” (Hearts of Darkness).
A fucking tiger!
Coppola was told that, sometime later, Gambi did end up killing someone and was euthanized
(Commentary).
I’m done with the whole god damned fucking shit, man!
You can kiss my ass in the county square because I’m fucking bugging out!
This part back on the boat was filmed almost a year later (Commentary).
One of the lines that always had a strong effect on me is when Chef says,
All I want to do is fuckin’ cook!
I just want to learn to fucking cook, man!
These men’s lives were disrupted and even ended, for what?
They aren’t like Willard or Kilgore or Kurtz.
Their hearts are not in this.
And this is followed by one of the most essential lines in the movie.
Never get out of the boat.
Absolutely goddamned right.
Unless you are going all the way.
Do not enter the heart of darkness unless you are willing to completely give yourself
over to it.
Kurtz got off the boat.
He split from the whole fucking program.
Willard dives back in to the Kurtz dossier.
We talked about the creation of the dossier near the end of episode 8, but I want to encourage
you to check out Adam Savage’s video on his incredible reproduction of the Kurtz dossier
on the Tested YouTube channel.
You can find a link in the description.
It’s interesting to realize that the tiger sequence could also be seen as a metaphor
for this stage of the production.
This scene, filmed near the beginning of the production, represents the beginning of both
Willard and Coppola’s journey into the unknown–their own heart of darkness.
Despite wanting to scrap screenwriter John Milius’ original victorious ending, depicting
Willard and Kurtz teaming up to fight a US helicopter attack, Francis Ford Coppola didn’t
have a different ending in mind, but he figured he could write a new ending while they were
already filming the movie (Travers 97).
Fred Roos: “And he was a co-writer of the script.
He could create things at the moment and if a new idea came up, he would stay up all night
and write it.”
(Hearts of Darkness)
Coppola, being a masterful screenwriter himself, could rewrite scenes on the fly during production,
but Coppola had always planned on this—expecting to incorporate things that happened during
the shoot into the final film (Hearts of Darkness).
This wouldn’t just be rewriting a scene because of unexpected weather, either.
He wanted the movie to reflect his experience making it.
Coppola: “ And your own experience during the making of it was also a very strong element
and that, somehow the director works with more than just having the script and having
the team of people and actors.
That also the conditions and the mood of the company and each individual and what, personally,
people are going through is also one of the primary elements of the film.”
(Hearts of Darkness)
In an interview from much later by Nowness, Coppola described his writing process, saying
that in all the aspects of filmmaking, he is least confident in his ability to write
(Nowness).
And this is coming from a guy who won an Academy Award for screenwriting with one of his earliest
scripts.
He described his writing as like having a big ball of dough that is his life experiences,
ideas, interests, dreams, and observations, and he will take some of it and make something
out of it and take some more and make something else (Nowness).
He says that an idea doesn’t have to be developed–it can just be a seed (Nowness).
When he’s ready, he’ll work on it every day, usually in the morning and when he has
about sixty to seventy pages, he’ll read it and rewrite it as a short story (Nowness).
This way he can put more aspects into it that you can’t do in a screenplay that better
helps him understand what he wants to communicate in the movie (Nowness).
He’ll show it to his colleagues as a short story and then they talk about actors and
go look at locations and write down ideas, then he can finally write the screenplay using
the details of the short story, and incorporate what is unique about the actors and locations
(Nowness).
One thing he finds that helps is to just write the ending so that he knows where he is going
(Nowness).
But in the case of Apocalypse Now, they were already deep into production without an ending.
Imagine the guts or lunacy you would have to have to put all of your money into a story
that doesn’t yet have an ending.
And yet, he was in the production with no end in sight— and finding the right ending
would require Coppola to take his own journey into the Heart of Darkness…
On the next episode of Making Apocalypse Now, the patrol boat comes across a strange Playboy
stage show shining like a beacon in the middle of the dark jungle in another surreal sequence
inspired by Homer’s The Odyssey.
Check out this episode’s $1 Companion PDF where we dive deeper into Vittorio Storaro’s
color theory and a selection of interesting comments from the previous episode.
It’s just a dollar or you can get access to all of the Companion PDFs I’ve made for
this series by joining my five-dollar tier on Patreon.
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