The film opens with the strange distorted sounds of a helicopter passing as we fade-in
on a tree-line— the entrance to the jungle and the "heart of darkness," so to speak.
The beginnings of a song titled 'The End' by The Doors plays. This iconic opening was
actually something Coppola stumbled upon during the edit (Commentary). Coppola had visited
the editing room on the last day of one of his editors, Barry Malcolm, before he had
to leave for another project (Commentary). Coppola noticed barrels of film that were
the beginnings and ends of footage from the five cameras that photographed the napalm
tree-line explosion from the end of the Flight of the Valkyries battle sequence.
These beginnings of the takes before the explosion happened had been discarded into the barrels
(Commentary). So, what you are looking at is footage meant for the trashcan of the camera
rolling and just waiting for the large explosion to blow up the trees. I've always kind of
imagined that the camera wouldn’t have panned if the shot had been planned from the start
to open the movie.
Coppola thought that the footage looked interesting and unusual and then he went through a bin
of music and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we took a song called ’The End’ and
put it at the beginning of a movie?” (Commentary). Coppola said that, if he hadn’t been there
on that particular Saturday, the movie wouldn’t have begun this way (Commentary).
John Milius’ first draft dated December 5th, 1969, begins with an author’s note
telling a story of newly enlisted soldiers waiting to leave San Francisco for Vietnam.
The line of new paratroopers are approached by a couple of hippies handing out anti-war
pamphlets and one of the soldiers takes off his helmet and bashes one of the hippies.
A sergeant yells, “Which one of you bastards hit this boy?” And the entire company responds
in unison, “I did— sir!” After which, another hippie remarks, “Just think what
they’ll be like when they come back.”
Milius’ screenplay then begins with the narrator reading an Army memorandum and what
follows would have been this familiar image. The description reads:
“It is very early in the dawn - blue light filters through the jungle and across the
foul swamp. A vague mist clings to the trees. The SOUND of crickets and jungle animals is
playing undisturbed. TILT DOWN into tepid water. Suddenly but quietly a helmet emerges
- the water pours off REVEALING a set of beady eyes just above the water. Printed on the
helmet, clearly visible in the dim light, are the words “G*** Killer” written in
a psychedelic hand. The head emerges REVEALING that the tough looking SOLDIER beneath has
exceptionally long hair and beard. He has no shirt on, only bandoliers of ammunition
— his body is painted in an odd camouflage pattern” (Screenplay).
A draft of Milius’ screenplay rewritten by Coppola dated December 3rd, 1975, cuts
the memorandum and has the movie open directly with this iconic shot.
This shot was ultimately reincorporated into the climax of the film. That said, it seems
that shortly before the inspiration to start the film with the napalm explosion, Coppola’s
idea was to open with a black screen and slowly the sounds of the jungle would come out of
the darkness [quote] “before any images are seen on the screen” (Coppola 282).
Imagine an overture of insects.
The idea was to bookend the film with these sounds over black, opening and ending the
film (Coppola 282). In the final film, the Doors' song sort of bookends the movie as
it opens with “The End” and climaxes with “The End.”
Something a little bit more like the opening in the final film appears in a Coppola rewrite
from June 29th, 1976 where he describes the opening as [quote] "A Simple Image of Trees:
coconut trees being VIEWED through the veil of time. Occasionally colored smoke wafts
through the frame. We HEAR music suggestive of 1968, psychedelic . . . Perhaps the
Moody Blues' "Knights in White Satin", or The Doors' "The End".' Willard is seen asleep in Saigon,
after making love to a whore" (Cowie 45).
So it seems like Coppola already had a vague idea of what this would be like when he stumbled
upon the footage in the barrels.
Apocalypse Now has more of a connection to The Doors than just the song— Doors frontman,
Jim Morrison and keyboardist Ray Manzarek met at UCLA film school while Coppola was
attending (Travers 4). Morrison said, “The good thing about film is that there aren’t
any experts… There’s no authority on film. Any one person can assimilate and contain
the whole history of film in himself, which you can’t do in other arts. There are no
experts, so theoretically, any student knows almost as much as any professor” (Travers 42).
By the way, some of their teachers during this time included “Stanley Kramer, Jean
Renoir, and Josef von Sternberg” (Travers 42). Morrison was particularly influenced
by Josef von Sternberg and German Expressionism and this influence
would carry over to The Doors (Travers 42).
Morrison made a very avant-garde student film with tons of bizarre imagery including Morrison
smoking a joint and winking at the camera while an atomic bomb explodes (Travers 45).
“Have you ever seen God? Mandela. Symmetrical angel.”
“It’s bombastic.”
Apparently it was enough for some of the faculty members to “[call] it the worst student
film ever,” which, if you’ve seen many student films, is kind of impressive (Travers 45).
“Hey, Morrison. F*** them, man. It’s great. It’s non-linear. It’s poetry. It’s everything
good art stands for.”
After the negative feedback, Morrison and Manzarek and another friend named John Densmore
decided to drop out of their universities and start The Doors (Travers 4).
“I quit.”
And the connection doesn’t end with UCLA— Jim Morrison’s father, George Stephen Morrison,
a former World War II fighter pilot, served as an Admiral [quote] “in command of the
carrier division during its pivotal role in the Gulf of Tonkin incident” (Travers 41).
Wikipedia describes the Gulf of Tonkin incident as [quote] “an international confrontation
that led to the United States engaging more directly in the Vietnam War” (Wiki). Admiral
Morrison would go on to be “in charge of all U.S. Operations in Vietnam” after following
“President Lyndon Johnson’s orders to ‘give me my damn war’" (Travers 1).
Originally, the entire soundtrack was going to be songs by The Doors (Cowie 101). Editor
Walter Murch said, "We tried many, many songs, but anything we put on the film seemed to
be so apt that it was wrong, it hit the nail so firmly on the head that it seemed sophomoric.
There was no connection other than a very deep bond between the psyche of Jim Morrison
and the psyche of this film” (Cowie 101). Murch also saw the opening image of the exploding tree-line
as [quote] “emblematic of the whole Vietnamese experience” (Cowie 101). If I had to guess
what he means means by this, I would probably say that it’s something similar to these
images in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.
The North Vietnamese making small bold strikes
and the US unloading massive amounts of expensive
bombs and ammunition and not necessarily hit anything.
“You know, one time we had a hill bomb for twelve hours and when it was all over, I walked up.
We didn’t find one of them. Not one stinking Dink body.”
Once the decision was made to use the Doors’ song in the beginning, editor Walter Murch
created an avant-garde sequence of our protagonist, Willard, thinking about the jungle (Commentary).
Coppola wanted to show what was inside Willard before the story begins and, here, we see
what is inside his mind, soon we’ll get a glimpse into his soul (Commentary).
Like the opening shot, the beautiful connection of the helicopter to the ceiling fan was also
not planned. Coppola had gotten a shot of Willard on his back, so naturally he got a
shot of what Willard would be looking at— the ceiling fan, but Murch’s idea to combine
it with the sounds of the helicopter blades really shows us how much the jungle is a part
of Willard and it’s done in a purely cinematic way (Commentary).
Murch said, "I remember vividly the moment when I made the connection between the sound
of the helicopter rotors and visual of the fan. Willard was filmed upside down like that
originally. The shot of the Buddha at the right of frame was part of the idea of forecasting
the end at the beginning” (Cowie 100).
Here, we actually see part of the end of the film with Willard about to kill Colonel Kurtz,
but we don’t know it. It just appears as a surreal look into Willard’s primal psyche.
Sound Re-Recording Mixer Richard Beggs put the track of the Doors’ song over the opening,
but when Murch requested the track from the record label, they accidentally sent the master tracks,
so the mix in the movie sounds different than the mix on the album (Wiki). One thing
that was changed was part of Morrison’s vocals repeating ‘f***’ over and over
as part of a reference to the story of Oedipus where he… you know, accidentally kills his
father and marries his mother…
He seemed pretty upset about it. I mean, he gouged his own eyes out…
“Hey, Josephus!”
“Hey, Motherf***er.”
Anyway, Morrison’s vocals in that part were essentially buried on the track. Beggs said,
"They sent me the four-track… a direct copy of the original master they had made
for the song, and in that version Morrison kept saying “F*** yeah! F***! F***! Yeah!”
but it was never in the album, so I incorporated it into the picture. It was like finding some
buried treasure!’ (Cowie 100).
That said, screenwriter John Milius had always wanted the movie to open with the Doors’
Light My Fire, which he considered to be better than The End (Cowie 100).
In this episode’s Companion PDF, I go into more detail about Jim Morrison and The Doors’
connection to Apocalypse Now. You can get it for just $1
and it really helps the channel out.
“The man’s enlarged my mind.”
There were actually several very different openings that had been written into the various
script rewrites. The first opening that was written depicts a Montagnard attack on the
Vietcong followed by the introduction of Willard on “luxury cabin cruiser"
in Marina del Ray (Cowie 44, Screenplay). Here, Willard is a bodyguard for “the head of a large
American Corporation” (Screenplay). He thinks about Vietnam and tells a woman that “Los
Angeles… was once one of the dark places of the earth” and this opens up a dialogue
between the two where the woman says, “You’re going to tell me about the horrors of war”
and Willard replies, “The horror? Would you really listen if I told you? I mean, about
the real horror?” (Cowie 44).
Willard telling his story would be a framing device similar to the one in Heart of Darkness.
The novella has its protagonist telling his story to fellow sailors aboard an ivory trading
company’s steamboat (Wiki). Another draft of the Apocalypse Now script, from January
1976, opens with the military finding Willard sharing war stories at a bar in Danang (Cowie 44).
“Go f*** yourself.”
Millius’ versions of the screenplay always seemed to put Kurtz at the beginning of the
film and it is here where we can really see Milius’ idea of what Kurtz and his army
are like. First, an ambush of Vietcong soldiers by Kurtz’ army shows Americans who have
embraced the jungle and have become part of it.
Milius’ screenplay reads: “Our VIEW TURNS as the men around us are
thrown and torn, screaming and scattering into the jungle. More AMERICANS appear, unexplainably,
out of the growth. It is now that we fully SEE the bizarre manner in which they are dressed.
Some wear helmets, others wear strange hats made from feathers and parts of animals. Some
of them have long savage-looking hair; other crew-cut or completely shaved; they wear bandoliers,
flack jackets, shorts and little else. They wear Montagnard sandals or no shoes at all,
and their bodies and faces are painted in bizarre camouflage patterns. They appear one
with the jungle and mist, FIRING INTO US as they move” (Screenplay).
Shortly after this, the soldier whose head had slowly peeked out from the water now emerges,
dripping with mud, and firing a machine gun (Screenplay).
Kurtz is soon shown as a John Wayne-type with a description reading “He wears a green
beret and he has close-cropped hair and a tough jutting jaw (Cowie 38).
It is easy to see the connection to John Wayne when you look at Wayne's 1968 anti-communist
Vietnam War movie, The Green Berets. Wayne is depicted as the ultimate American,
stomping out Communism.
In the margins of Milius’ draft, Coppola writes, “What am I saying about him?” (Cowie 38).
Milius’ scene continues: “The massive stone gate—the patrol passes
under it in triumph — men displaying scalps hanging from their M16’s — they hold up
captured AK 47’s — dope — rice and other booty. Wild-looking Montagnards CHEER and
cackle with delight. The Colonel turns and crosses his arms, standing majestically” (Cowie 38).
Coppola writes, “Again, this must not appear funny. But it’s as though
we have come upon a view of something unlike [anything] we have seen before” (Cowie 38).
Eventually these openings were scrapped in favor of something simpler. Coppola said, "Marty's
character was coming across as too bland… I tried to break through it. I always look for
other levels, hidden levels in the actor's personality and in the personality of the
character he plays. I conceived this all-night drunk; see another side of the guy” (Travers 117).
The narration, which we’ll talk about more in another video, orients us. He has divorced
his wife, he can’t stop thinking about getting back to the jungle— he’s only been back
in the civilized world for a week. It’s obvious that he has some kind of PTSD (or
post-traumatic-stress-disorder), which had a devastating effect on many veterans of war.
I think, perhaps, the most striking bit is when he says:
“Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker. And every minute Charlie squats in
the bush… he gets stronger.”
“Charlie” is referring to Victor Charlie — part of the NATO phonetic alphabet—
Victor for “V” and Charlie for “C” — “VC”, which stands for Viet Cong (Wiki).
What Willard says here is sort of similar to that motivational saying that the people
you are competing against— in business, in art, in a trade, or whatever— they are
hustling harder than you and they aren’t taking breaks. But in this case, the subtext
is a little stronger in that the Viet Cong have more at stake and the jungle is their home.
Willard has to keep his edge, not just to fight the Viet Cong, but to fight his own demons.
What’s interesting, is that they would provoke a drunk Martin Sheen on his
36th birthday to wrestle with his own demons… on camera. This would result in an injury
to Sheen’s hand as well as a scene that blurs fiction and reality where a character
and an actor bares their soul for the audience at the same time.
This episode’s companion PDF features some more detailed information on Jim Morrison
at UCLA, some interesting quotes by Walter Murch and Coppola on the use of The Doors’
music in the film, as well as a playlist of music that Coppola noted or wrote into the
script, but didn’t end up using. Download it now for just one dollar.
And if you support me on Patreon at the $5 level, you’ll get access to all the companion
PDFs I make for this series.
Thanks for watching!