I’ve been watching various YT clips about the casting of the role and the firing of Keitel.
What a weird role in that several of the actors named would have worked, but Coppola is right, Keitel doesn’t work.
Steve McQueen was cast first, and if you could wrangle him, it would have been the greatest thing McQueen had ever done. But apparently McQueen wanted to play it as a typical ‘cool guy’ role for him. Can you imagine a focused Steve McQueen doing scenes with Brando??
Pacino was asked and he would have been great. I don’t think James Caan works very well. Others considered : Nicholson (works) Redford (nahhh) Eastwood (nahh) Tommy Lee Jones, Keith Carradine and Nick Nolte (all IMHO too inexperienced AT THE TIME for that role)
In the end I think Martin Sheen does a great job BUT…he’s supposed to be an assassin who has been in Vietnam for a while, so when he’s being wide-eyed and incredulous at the chaos around him (acting as a stand-in for the audience) it doesn’t really make sense.
But i dont know quite how to square that circle without him just being stony-faced for three hours.
On a different note…are there any other films considered to be classics that don’t have a definitive version? I mean none of the various cuts seem to be superior over the other One might have a great scene that should have been in the original cut but is too long…etc…
Almost every movie considered a classic has only one version. (there’s no “director’s cut” for GWTW, Casablanca,2001 etc) Unless I’m missing your point?
Depending on how you define ‘classics’, one could argue the original Star Wars trilogy meets this criteria. Sure, there was the ‘official’ version released in the theaters in 1977, 1980 and 1983, but good luck finding those original cuts on any official release from the past 25+ years, and Lucas has rereleased those films countless times with new graphics and CGI, replacing ghost Anakin in Return of the Jedi, etc.
However, I agree with you re:lack of a definitive version of AO. I didn’t see it all the way through until maybe about 15 years ago, by which time there were multiple cuts available and it’s like which one do I watch?
Blade Runner: European and American versions, Directors Cut and Final Cut. None of them are ‘definitive’, because the fact is that many people prefer the version that was targeted at them. (And actually there were more versions, but they weren’t preserved and documented).
I’ve seen the film a dozen times and that incongruity slipped right by me every time. I hope you haven’t ruined my favorite film for me. Seriously, I think it just helps depicts how absurdly unpredictable being “in the shit” is for even someone who has been in it for a long time. It’s hard for me to imagine anybody else but Sheen in the role. I can’t say the same for Kurtz.
For me, the original release of Apocalypse Now is the definitive version. The Redux version includes a lot of what Coppola wisely left in the cutting room. Kilgore on the bullhorn trying to get his skateboard back, the French compound scene, and for goodness sake the sex with bunnies scene.
I disagree, it really does make sense. You can hear it in the voice overs - Willard knows that the war is fucked up but as he reads the dossier on Kurtz, he realized that Kurtz was even more fucked up.
How many people had I already killed? There was those six that I know about for sure. Close enough to blow their last breath in my face. But this time it was an American and an officer. That wasn’t supposed to make any difference to me, but it did. Sh*t… charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500. I took the mission. What the hell else was I gonna do?
And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.
Redux is great as supplementary material. When you are familiar with the plot, the various side scenes offer some nice fleshing out of the setting. But they would have been distracting and kind of pointless in the original release since they didn’t advance the main plot. They were right to be cut from the theatrical release even if they were great scenes.
Adding to this, Williard very nearly goes crazy and seems to be aware of it, which makes his task even more daunting. In essence, the whole film is about being transfixed by horror: too awful to contemplate, but you can’t stop watching.
About Sheen/Williard, I think it would have been an extremely demanding role for any actor. I don’t really know anything about it, but I think many of the techniques that are often used by actors (deliberate efforts to convey this or that) would not have come off convincingly (contrived, corny, etc.) “Stony-faced” is one way to describe Sheen’s performance, although it should be considered that his character’s military training had probably given him the discipline to conceal his growing uncertainty.
I agree. In relation to what I wrote above about Williard nearly going crazy, Aurore Clément’s character has an extraordinary line in the French plantation sequence. If I remember correctly, it’s something like, “There are two of you: one who loves and one who kills.”
I feel the same way about Blade Runner. The director’s cut is a better Work of Art. But if I hadn’t seen the original, with the much despised voice-over narration, I don’t think I would have understood what the heck was going on.
When I saw the thread title, I thought it was going to be some bizarre linking of Apocalypse Now and the cult classic Willard. I have to admit I feel a little let down.
Martin Sheen was the last of the James Dean wannabees, and his style fit the bill: rebel with a cause (Uncle Sam’s). Bo Hopkins as the shady Bureau of Narcotics agent in Midnight Express is another example. I knew guys like that as a teen in the 70’s: holdover 1950’s juvenile delinquents who hated the peace and love bullshit.
Over in the UK, their spy movies had a strong Mod aesthetic. But realistically, they’d be smarter to recruit Rockers for the dirty work.
I refused to upgrade from VHS to DVD for just that reason until I found a 3-disk set with double sided DVDs, original on one side and ‘enhanced’ on the other. The enhanced side was the only one with a commentary track but who cares about that?
I always thought Willard was the only one who realized the insanity of what was going on. Everyone else accepted it. And Sheen captured that.
It would be a very different movie if any of those actors portrayed Willard. It would just be a tough guy going up river to kill the bad man. Apocalypse Now is not a Tom Clancy novel.
Sheen’s Willard however captures the absurdity of not only the plot of the movie, but the war in Vietnam itself, which I think Coppola was going for.