Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse Page #4
- R
- Year:
- 1991
- 96 min
- 828 Views
do the ending.
the best film that way.
It seems like such a,
kind of, bright thing to do.
And I feel that the people back there
feel that postponement is like,
"The picture's in trouble or something. "
It's just that very intelligent,
major studios
used to do things like this all the time.
No, I know that.
And that's what sort of bugs me
is the ludicrousness of thinking
that I'm gonna go through
all that I'm doing,
after all I've been through in the past,
after all the pictures I've made
and after shooting 16 weeks,
that I'm not gonna finish a movie
in which I've invested
three years of my life just because...
I mean, it's stupid, man.
Yeah, but even if Brando drops dead,
I can still finish the movie.
I'll just get another actor.
If I can't get Redford,
I'll go back to Nicholson.
If I can't get Nicholson,
I'll go back to Pacino.
If I can't go to Pacino,
I'll go back to someone else.
I mean, sooner or later,
I can get someone for three weeks.
I mean, it's not in the cards
that we're not going to finish the movie.
This is the first day of heavy rain.
A typhoon is off the coast.
I've never seen it rain so hard.
Water has started coming
in the rooms downstairs,
and Sofia is splashing around in it.
Francis has decided to make pasta,
and he's turned on
La Boheme full volume.
I knew that if weather came,
that I was gonna try to incorporate it.
I didn't realize that
it was on such a big scale.
So I was only thinking
that I got to shoot tomorrow.
he began to film.
He said, "This has happened,
and monsoons hit Vietnam.
"There's a lot of mud,
a lot of rain around. Let's film."
We went to lba
to shoot the scene that got cut.
The set was, like, 80% demolished.
It was, like, mud up to the knees.
It was like pissing, man.
I mean, it was hitting you so hard,
it hurt.
It started out just as raining a lot,
and after a while, we realized
it was knocking out
centers of civilizations,
and rivers were overrunning,
and people couldn't get to the places...
They were all on the roofs
of hotels and stuff.
We had to stop for a while.
And I realized that certain sets
had been destroyed.
Francis has closed down
the production for two months.
The cast and crew
have been sent home.
It was an opportunity
for everyone, really,
to have a little relief from the situation,
because it became apparent
that it was gonna go on longer
than we realized in the beginning.
Last night, we slept outside on the lawn.
It was beautiful, so clear, with stars.
Francis tossed and turned,
having nightmares.
This morning he said he'd had a dream
about how to finish the script.
But now that he was awake,
it wasn't any good.
He said he couldn't go on
making the John Milius script
because it didn't really express
his ideas,
and he still doesn't know how to make
the film into his personal vision.
He's been struggling with this
for so long.
He knows the material
backwards and forwards.
He is practically chasing his tail.
First of all, I call this whole movie
the Idiodyssey.
- The Idiodyssey?
- This is the Idiodyssey.
None of my tools, none of my tricks,
none of my ways of doing things
works for this ending.
I have tried so many times
that I know I can't do it.
It might be a big victory
to know that I can't do it.
I can't write the ending to this movie.
I was on the spot.
I had gotten myself into something big.
Some people had come through,
a lot of people hadn't.
And it was my job
and also my financial burden
to pick up the pieces
and finish the movie.
I didn't quite understand
all the ramifications of the financing.
I felt that he'd do whatever he had to,
we'd borrow the money.
But I really support him as an artist,
and I feel like whatever
in order to get his artwork is okay.
And I always felt confident.
So what's the worst that can happen?
They take away your big house,
they take away your car, so what?
He was a very creative person
and earn his living and provide for us.
So I really wasn't frightened by it.
In fact, at that point in time,
we had escalated our lifestyle.
We had this big
22-room Victorian house,
you know, a staff and a screening room.
Life was kind of complicated for me.
And entertaining...
And I would have loved
to have had my lifestyle
reduced to some smaller scale.
So that part of me
was just fearless in that regard.
It really didn't matter if it all went
down the tubes in financing this project.
It was really okay.
A melodrama is currently
playing itself out in Hollywood
that for sheer emotionalism
rivals anything put on film.
The embattled figure in this drama
is director Francis Coppola,
who once again finds himself
waging a war
to keep his dream financially afloat.
Now, if you read newspapers at all
or listen to the radio, you know
that Mr. Coppola has been involved
in the production of this motion picture
for more years than
even he would care to count.
The press painted a portrait of me
as sort of a crazy person
and financially irresponsible,
which I don't particularly think
is really true.
No doubt that it was my money.
But the difference was that
Apocalypse Now was about Vietnam.
That was what made it sound
like such a crazy financial bet.
Did you ever consider quitting?
How am I going to quit from myself?
Am I going to say, "Francis, I quit"?
You know, I was financing the movie.
How could I quit?
July 25th, 1976.
We've returned to the Philippines
to resume production.
Francis hopes to finish shooting
in the early fall.
There is a kind of powerful exhilaration
in the face of losing everything,
like the excitement of war
when one kills
or takes the chance of being killed.
Francis has taken
the biggest risk of his life
in the way he's making this film.
This film is now $3 million over budget,
which the distributor, United Artists,
has agreed to put up.
But Francis has to pay it back if the film
doesn't make $40 million or more.
That just gets me all the more focused
on the present moment
about the "what-ifs" of the future.
I know that every building that's built
runs into big production overages,
every bridge that's built.
Every NASA project,
any large project that involves
lots of people, conditions, weather,
of a construction nature,
goes over all the time.
And a movie is no exception.
It's true that
since it was my own money,
and once I felt that
I was going in a direction,
I wanted to continue
going in that direction.
Since it was my money,
I just did it, really.
There was a sequence in the film,
so-called the French plantation
sequence,
and it involved
to this rubber plantation still run
by these French-speaking people,
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"Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 22 Dec. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/hearts_of_darkness:_a_filmmaker's_apocalypse_9761>.
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