Cannes has always been a haven for auteurism, the school of criticism that prizes a director’s personal vision and ongoing thematic concerns. Throughout the ’70s, Francis Ford Coppola was an auteurist darling, awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes for his chamber drama The Conversation. But even for the director whose Godfather saga echoed his family’s own immigrant history, it’s hard to imagine a more personal film than Apocalypse Now.
Sure, it started out as a Vietnam War drama inspired by Joseph Conrad’s colonial nightmare Heart of Darkness. But as Coppola’s wife, Eleanor, would detail in Hearts of Darkness, her own making-of documentary about her husband’s movie, the Apocalypse production quickly sprawled out of control, to the point where the movie became less about Capt. Willard’s (Martin Sheen) quest to hunt down the monomaniacal Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) and more about Coppola’s own monomaniacal struggle to finish the movie.
The shoot lasted 15 months, followed by two years of post-production. Apocalypse still wasn’t finished when Coppola screened it at Cannes as a work-in-progress. “We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane,” Coppola said at Cannes, adding, “My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam.”
The incomplete movie’s Palme d’Or victory still marks the last great high watermark of his career. It also marks the end of the 1970s auteurist wave of American cinema; despite its box office success and critical acclaim, the movie’s $32 million cost (astronomical in 1979) and disastrous production history ensured that Hollywood executives would allow decades to pass before they ever gave a director carte blanche like that again.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jts9suWIDlU]