"Apocalypse Now" Revisited

Francis Ford Coppola announced this week that he's planning to rerelease his classic Vietnam War drama, Apocalypse Now, with nearly an hour's worth of never-before-seen footage.

The new director's cut will premiere at this year's Cannes Film Festival in May; meanwhile, Coppola's searching for a U.S. distributor for what he says is the definitive version.

"At the time we were editing Apocalype Now, there was already from the critics...lots of speculation as to the viability of the picture, so we were defensive when we cut it and we wanted to prove the contrary," says Coppola.

"But we did shorten it, and eliminate some of the more bizarre elements in an effort to make the film acceptable to the audience at that time. Now that the film's been around awhile, it's something of a classic, so...we can edit it with more thinking about what the movie is and what the themes are."

Coppola went back to the drawing board and completely re-edited the movie to include 53 minutes worth of new material. The result is a whopping three-hour, 17-minute version that expands on the iconoclastic filmmaker's exploration of the thin line between morality and sanity as filtered through the prism of war.

Says the director, "We re-edited the film from the original unedited raw footage-the dailies. The themes emerge more clearly [and] the film is more bizarre, funnier, sexier, more romantic and with more historical perspective."

Based loosely on Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now stars Martin Sheen as Captain Willard, a secret agent sent into the Cambodian jungle to hunt down and kill Colonel Kurtz, a renegade officer played by Marlon Brando. As Willard travels deep into the jungle, he finds he's slowly becoming more like the man he was sent to kill.

According to producer Kim Aubry, the new version restores a French plantation scene that was cut from the original film. It also includes more footage of the Playboy Playmates scene, a longer introduction of Robert Duvall's Colonel Kilgore, more detail on Sheen's gunboat crew and more moments with bald-headed Brando.

Ironically for a film about a man's descent into insanity, the project nearly drove Coppola crazy. Shot in the Philippines, Apocalypse Now was plagued by everything from bad weather to Sheen's health--the actor suffered a heart attack midway through production.

To make matters worse, the film's original $12 million budget nearly doubled, forcing Coppola to take a mortgage out on his California home just to to complete the movie. (The experience was captured by his wife in the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse.)

After all that, you'd think the director, whose credits include classics like The Godfather trilogy and The Conversation, would give it a rest. Not so.

In fact, he says the second time around proved far less troublesome than the first. In putting together the director's cut, Coppola had the help of the film's original editor, Walter Murch, who won an Oscar for Best Sound for the movie. He also enlisted cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who won an Oscar for his photography, to oversee the dye-transfer reprinting process that vastly improved the color of the film.

In addition, the six-track soundtrack was overhauled and digitally remastered to include the new material.

"Presenting [the film] again on the big screen in the Lumiere Theater, it's as if I was presenting it for the first time," Coppola says of the Cannes premiere.

It will be a sort of homecoming for the Apocalypse Now, which won the coveted Palme d'Or when it debuted at Cannes in 1979.

A screening date has yet to be announced, but this year's Cannes Film Festival runs May 9-20.

Meanwhile, a new DVD and video of the expanded action is in the works, and could be out later this year.