Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse Page #5

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and they had a whole bunch of cadre,

and they'd been fighting the Viet Minh

before the Viet Cong,

and they weren't letting go.

Hey, this is

French plantation discussion.

French plantation...

The whole scene is gonna be made

of wisps of fog close to the ground,

and a place that's like a dream.

If you need more fog machines...

Have more than enough machines.

How much do they cost?

- Can I buy the ones I already bought?

- Sure.

Okay, I'll give them to you as a gift

after the show,

but have enough of them.

Now, I want some real machine guns.

Get the PC to go over

and strafe the side of that house

as though Fidel Castro

had his last stand there.

I'd like three or four French people,

and I'll spend money for it.

But I don't want to fly them from France.

If you can't get them from Hong Kong,

Singapore, Japan, Okinawa,

then I will fly them from France.

White wine should be served ice cold.

Red wine should be served

at about 58 degrees.

Should be opened approximately

an hour to an hour-and-a-half

to even two hours before served.

I want a French ceremony

that is right out of a f***ing...

I want the French to say,

"My God, how did they do that?"

Well, my idea was,

as they progressed up the river,

they were, like,

going back more and more in time

in a funny kind of way,

that we were revisiting

the history of Vietnam in reverse.

And the first stop was

in the '50s almost.

We now are with the French.

That was what I was looking for

in the French plantation

that was a kind of ghostly afterview

of something,

almost like they talk about the light

from the stars.

We see it after the star's already dead,

you know, and it was that kind of mood.

It was like having dinner

with a family of ghosts.

There were still a few hundred of them

left on plantations all over Vietnam,

trying to keep themselves convinced

that it was still 1950.

They weren't French anymore,

and they'd never be Vietnamese.

They were floating loose in history,

without a country.

They were hanging on

by their fingernails, but so were we.

We just had more fingernails in it.

How long can you possibly stay here?

- Stay?

- No, no. I mean,

when will you go back home to France?

Back home?

I mean, this is our home, Captain.

- Sooner or later, you're gonna...

- No, Captain!

I mean, you don't know anything

about the French mentality.

It was just the idea

of the French still being there.

There was some speech

that he gives at the end, that he said,

"If they drive us from the house,

we will live in a ditch,

"and if they push us out of the ditch,

we'll live in the jungle.

"All the time we will clean

the blood from our bayonets."

I like that.

So when you ask me

why we want to stay here, Captain,

we want to stay here because it's ours.

It belongs to us.

It keeps our family together.

I mean, we fight for that.

While you Americans,

you are fighting

for the biggest nothing in history.

Our budgets were cut way down

and we didn't get the cast

that we wanted.

But of course, the art department

and the other departments

didn't cut theirs down,

so I was very incensed

that I had this extraordinary set,

that costly set.

Extraordinary decorations and stuff.

I was just angry

at the French sequence.

I cut it out, out of that.

I was very unhappy on every count.

The light, the whole thing.

So everyone forget that we even shot it.

No longer does it exist.

What I'm worried about is that I'm

getting into a self-indulgent pattern.

But don't you, on the one hand,

feel like that's

where your gifts as an artist

are working?

They're on that brink

of not knowing what to do.

What if you just scream out

to the heavens,

"I don't know what the f*** I'm doing!"

I've done that.

That's another form of self-indulgence.

I'm sure I've missed

a whole bunch of opportunities,

and I'm gonna miss others.

But I've caught a lot of them, too.

In the end, it's how many I catch,

not how many I lose.

Francis is in a place within himself,

a place he never intended to reach,

a place of conflict.

And he can't go back down the river

because the journey has changed him.

I was watching

from the point of view of the observer,

not realizing I was on the journey, too.

Now, I can't go back to the way it was.

Neither can Francis.

Neither can Willard.

It was like traveling back to

the earliest beginnings of the world

when vegetation rioted on the Earth

and the big trees were kings.

Trees, millions of trees,

massive, immense, running up high.

And at their foot,

hugging the bank against the stream,

crept the little begrimed steamboat,

like a sluggish beetle

crawling on the floor of a lofty portico.

Where the company men

imagined it crawled to, I don't know.

For me,

it crawled toward Kurtz.

Francis works in a very intuitive way.

So he likes to take advantage of things

as he moves along through a picture.

And Francis just likes it to flow.

And whenever you do that,

you end up with a problem

of having a film

at times that is way too long

and a film that doesn't have

a really strong narrative line in it

that you can keep

the audience hooked in.

And when you get

into this anger, Albert,

don't decide where you're gonna get to.

Wherever you get to,

as long as it's out of you, is okay.

Francis used to write

on these little cards.

I managed to hold on to some of these.

- You want to read one of them?

- Well, let me get the pages right.

And see, we put them

on little cards like this.

Now we have

the main boat approaching.

Now we have the birds.

We don't have the birds great,

but we'll never get it great. The birds...

And then I propose

that we do four close-ups.

Sam, Chief, Martin, everyone,

looking at the birds,

so I can use the sound of the birds

or maybe three birds going through,

and I can create the illusion

of there being birds.

"Birds. Lance.

POVs of blackbirds. Boat."

It was like this. This was his shot list.

Sometimes we'd get pages

that would say...

It'd say "scenes unknown"

on the call sheet.

You just would show up, you know.

They didn't know

what they were going to do.

We didn't just go out there and,

"Oh, what can we do today?"

There was a real plan for each day.

But since Francis is a writer

and was a co-writer of the script,

he could create things at the moment,

and if a new idea came up,

he would sit there up all night

and write it.

Then you're gonna get into this

weird speech of, "Fire, fire.

"You demons. You sons of b*tches.

"Get away from us.

Get away from this boat.

"Back, you walking dead,

you zombies, you sons of b*tches.

"Captain, you made this.

"This is your hell, your nightmare."

I felt that he just thought

a lot of his actors,

we were gems

who were to bring his ideas to life.

And he also took

a lot of our creative input.

Why don't we go,

"You want to kill us all. You're insane.

"You've gone insane.

You're more of a savage.

"You're insane,

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