(crickets chirping)
- [Man] I'm here a week now.
Waiting for a mission, getting softer.
- I think Apocalypse Now is one of
the great, unfinished movies.
And I think part of the
attraction for a lot of people,
is the fact that it presents
a kind of a mystery.
You get very deeply involved in it.
But, I believe that the
filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola,
really never quite
figured out how he wanted
to end his sort of, Vietnam
version of Heart of Darkness.
And at the time it was
released, it was a huge event
because everybody at that point,
had been reading for about three years
about the shooting of
this film in the jungle,
people going crazy.
And in fact, when it
was actually premiered
at the Cannes Film Festival,
it wasn't finished,
it was a work in progress
and it won the Palme d'Or.
But one of the most
interesting things about it was
that on that occasion Francis For Coppola,
when he was at the press conference,
he positioned the film by saying,
that his film was not about
Vietnam, it is Vietnam.
- [Man] At first I thought they
handed me the wrong dossier.
I couldn't believe they
wanted this man dead.
- And in one way it's
kinda one of the most
arrogant things a filmmaker has ever said,
certainly for anybody who was related
to the you know, 60 thousand
Americans who died in Vietnam.
However, in another way what's
very interesting is that,
Vietnam is a war that never seemed to end.
Vietnam is a war that never
seemed to be resolved.
And it's still I think, largely unresolved
in American culture in history.
In that sense, the fact
that Apocalypse Now
is a movie that the director never seems
to have been able to finish,
it's perfectly fitting
because that too was the
experience of Vietnam.
Of all the Vietnam movies made,
the one that actually
shows the most bruises,
is Apocalypse Now.
And I think in that level,
it's really interesting
to kinda see how the movie reflects
that larger American
difficulty and challenge
in finding a way to talk
about this particular war.
- [Man] On the river, I
thought that the minute
I'd looked at him, I'd know what to do.
But it didn't happen.
- Apocalypse Now, with all of
its flaws and inconsistencies
in various version, is a
hypnotic viewing experience.
Part of the appeal for me,
is the fact that the movie
sets off on such a beautiful journey
and then loses its own map.
(soft music)
- The horror.
The horror.
