Eleanor Coppola

I had seen with my wife when I was – I had been there a year and a half or something.

I saw – What's it called? It was the documentary that Eleanor Coppola made about Francis Coppola making Apocalypse Now.

Yeah.

And it was this sort of like documentary from her point of view of how he lost his mind making it.

You can find it.

and what's striking when you watch it isn't that it's different from what's in the film it's that it's more honest what they released ends on willard's boat moving into darkness the radio call unanswered or at least unresolved kurtz's voice still on the soundtrack the moral question hanging which is also a legitimate ending which also works but the explicit destruction of the compound the clear indication that willard is participating in exactly what he was sent to stop that's not ambiguity that's a statement the reason it got pulled is actually somewhat documented in hearts of darkness the documentary that eleanor coppola made about the production and in subsequent interviews by the time they got to post-production the film had already become a legend for its catastrophic on-set disasters the typhoon marlon brando arriving vastly overweight having read nothing martin sheen's heart attack and cupola was in a fragile state united artists wanted something that could win cannes which it eventually did and there was a sense that the more devastating explicit ending was two on the nose two on the nose that phrase has killed more great cinema than any budget crisis the thing is sometimes art should be on the nose sometimes the nose is exactly where you should be the argument that explicitness is somehow less sophisticated than ambiguity is a bias that critics have not necessarily one that serves every film equally apocalypse now is a film about the explicit horror of american foreign policy dressed up as individual moral collapse making the ending more comfortable and ambiguous is a choice that reflects the same cultural embarrassment the film is supposedly critiquing walter murch who cut the film has spoken about this in interviews with the diplomat's precision he clearly has complex feelings about those choices he won the academy award for his work on it and also released an extended cut decades later that restored material and reframed some sequences but the compound destruction never made it back in sometimes it's not a whole sequence sometimes it's a single scene three minutes maybe four and the absence of those three minutes turns what should have been a tragedy into something that reads as a thriller scene nineteen ninety five david fincher there is a scene that was written and in some versions of the production history partially shot in which john doe kevin spacey's character visits a library early in the film the scene establishes quietly and without exposition that doe has been planning these murders for years not months years there are books he's annotated going back nearly a decade handwriting changes he was different once and became this what the finished film gives you instead is a villain who appears to have arrived fully formed the kind of evil that has no origin no evolution just pure theological malevolence which is effective brad pitt's reaction to that head in the box at the end is one of the great performances of shock and grief in ninety cinema but here's the argument for the library scene if doe has been doing this for years quietly invisibly then the horror isn't just what he did the horror is the city the horror is that a man catalogued these murders and nobody noticed not because he was particularly brilliant but because modern urban life is so atomized that extreme deliberate evil can grow in plain sight that changes what the film is about without the library scene science is a procedural about catching a monster with it it becomes something closer to what finch's later work zodiac especially would make explicit a film about the failure of institutions to see what's right in front of them about how systems that should detect and prevent violence instead create the conditions for it fincher has talked in various commentaries about restraint in that film about how much he deliberately withheld and some of that restraint is clearly intentional and correct but the library scene sits in a different category it's not withholding for mystery It's withholding background that would have elevated a very good genre film into something genuinely disturbing in a systemic way.

I want to spend some real time on Brazil.

Terry Gilliam, 1985.