The Rolling Stone interviews

by edited by Jann S. Wenner

  One night, I went down to the Baked Potato [an L.A. jazz club] to hear the L.A. Express play. I knew Tom Scott, I’d done some work on For the Roses with him. When I heard the band, I was very enthusiastic, and I asked them to play on my next session.

  When they got in the studio, it was the same problem. They didn’t really know how heavy to play, and I was used to being the whole orchestra. Many nights I would be very discouraged. But one night we suddenly overcame the obstacles. The next thing we knew, we were all aware we were making something quite unique.

  Do you think you’ve achieved greatness?

  [Long pause] Greatness is a point of view. There is great rock & roll. But great rock & roll within the context of music, historically, is slight. I think that I am growing as a painter. I’m growing as a musician. I’m growing as a communicator, a poet, all the time. But growth implies that if you look back, there was improvement. I don’t see necessarily that this album is any, to use your word, “greater” than the Blue album. This has a lot more sophistication, but it’s very difficult to define what greatness is. Honesty? Genius? The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either.

  What do you think of the theory that great art comes from hunger and pain? You seem now to be living a very comfortable life.

  Pain has very little to do with environment. You can be sitting at the most beautiful place in the world, which doesn’t necessarily have to be private property, and not be able to see it for pain. So no. Misery knows no rent bracket [laughs]. At this time in my life, I’ve confronted a lot of my devils. A lot of them were pretty silly, but they were incredibly real at the time.

  I don’t feel guilty for my success or my lifestyle. I feel that sometimes having a lot of acquisitions leads to a responsibility that is more time-consuming than the art. That’s probably one of the reasons why people feel the artist should remain in poverty. My most important possession is my pool—it’s one luxury I really don’t question.

  Last question. What would you have listed, as Woody Allen did at the end of ‘Manhattan,’ as your reasons why life is worth living?

  It would be very similar to his. I would name different musicians, but it might finally be a beautiful face that would make me put the microphone down. I would just be thinking fondly of someone who I love, you know. And just dreaming off . . . Basically, if you want to say it in one word? Happiness?

  It’s a funny thing about happiness. You can strive and strive and strive to be happy, but happiness will sneak up on you in the most peculiar ways. I feel happy suddenly, I don’t know why. Some days, the way the light strikes things. Or for some beautifully immature reason like finding myself some toast. Happiness comes to me even on a bad day. In very, very strange ways. I’m very happy in my life right now.

  FRANCIS COPPOLA

  by Greil Marcus

  November 1, 1979

  Would you do it all again? [Referring to ‘Apocalypse Now,’ a complication-plagued project]

  I’m tempted to say no. I really think there’s a limit to what you ought to give a project you’re working on. It’s not worth it, it’s really not worth it. I don’t know that I would be able to avoid doing it again, but I’m forty years old instead of thirty-six. My leg hurts, my back hurts, my front hurts, my head hurts. I’ve got nothing but problems. I mean, I could be the head of KQED [San Francisco’s public television station] and do interesting little experimental things and not be such a wreck.

  There were times when I wished I was working for someone else so I could quit—but I don’t think I ever thought of cutting my losses and coming home. There were a lot of troubles. Marty’s [Martin Sheen] heart attack [which delayed filming even further] . . . severely traumatized my nervous system. We didn’t know if he was going to make it. If he’d gone home to the U.S. for treatment, he might not have come back—his family might not have let him. I was scared shitless. The shooting was three-quarters done; it was all him, what was left.

  Firing my [original] lead actor [Harvey Keitel]—that was bad. It’s a terrible, terrible thing to do: sure, it jeopardizes the production, but it can also ruin an actor’s career, to be fired like that. It was a very, very hard decision. But I just pulled the plunger—I did that a lot on this movie. Still do it. I’ve done it before with people—but that’s another form of saying you’re going to really try to get it right.

  Did making this movie change your idea of what it means to be a filmmaker?

  It changed every idea I have on anything I might not do or be. It enlarged my mind in terms of possibilities. It would be very hard for me to go and direct the new Paddy Chayefsky screenplay now. After Apocalypse Now and the Godfather pictures, especially the two of them together, I began to think in terms of the kind of movie that is impossible: movies that are . . . fourteen hours long, that really cover a piece of material in a way that justifies it, shown in some kind of format that makes sense.

  Ten years ago, John Milius wrote a script: ‘Apocalypse Now.’ You still share script credit with him. How has the movie changed?

  I think the script, as I remember it, took a more comic-strip Vietnam War and moved it through a series of events that were also comic strip: a political comic strip. The events had points to them—I don’t say comic strip to denigrate them. The film continued through comic-strip episode and comic-strip episode until it came to a comic-strip resolution. Attila the Hun [i.e., Kurtz] with two bands of machine-gun bullets around him, taking the hero [Willard] by the hand, saying, “Yes, yes, here! I have the power in my loins!” Willard converts to Kurtz’ side; in the end, he’s firing up at the helicopters that are coming to get him, crying out crazily. A movie comic.

  I’ve read the comic.

  Have you?

  Well, I’ve read comics like that one, sure.

  That was the tone and the resolution. The first thing that happened, after my involvement, was the psychologization of Willard—which I worked on desperately. Willard in the original script was literally zero, nobody. I didn’t have a handle: that’s why I cast him with Steve McQueen at first. I thought, well, God, McQueen will give him a personality. But I began to delve more into Willard. I took Willard through many, many instances in which I tried to position him as a witness going on this trip—and yet give him some sort of personality you could feel comfortable with, and still believe he was there.

  Marty approached an impossible character: he had to be an observer, a watcher. A lot of reading dossiers, a totally introspective character. In no way could he get in the way of the audience’s view of what was happening, of Vietnam. That wasn’t going to work for Keitel. His stock in trade is a series of tics—ways to make people look at him.

  The first scene of the movie—Willard is in his Saigon hotel room, waiting for a mission, drunk, losing control, finally attacking a mirror and cutting his hand open—is described in your wife’s book (‘Notes’) almost as a breakdown on Sheen’s part, certainly not action that was planned.

  Marty’s character is coming across as too bland; I tried to break through it. I always look for other levels, hidden levels, in the actor’s personality and in the personality of the character he plays. I conceived this all-night drunk; we’d see another side of that guy. So Marty got drunk. And I found that sometimes, when he gets drunk, a lot comes out. He began to dance, he took off his clothes—this was ten minutes of the most incredible stuff—and then I asked him to look in the mirror. It was a way of focusing him on himself—to bring out the personality by creating a sense of vanity. And that’s what he punched: his vanity. I didn’t tell him to smash his hand into the mirror.

  Many of the best things in the movie—the helicopter attack, the surfing motifs—are from Milius. Th
e Do Lung Bridge sequence—which came partly from one of Michael Herr’s Esquire articles—was from Milius. Many things were changed. The concept that the guys on the boat would get killed—that was new. From the bridge on, it’s pretty much Heart of Darkness and me.

  Was the film based on ‘Heart of Darkness’ in Milius’ script?

  Very vaguely, then: A man was going up a river to find a man called Kurtz. There were few specific references beyond that. I decided to take the script much more strongly in the direction of Heart of Darkness—which was, I know, opening a Pandora’s box.

  Michael Herr was brought in after the shooting in the Philippines was completed. Did he write all of the narration?

  He dominated it; he dominated the tone. The hipster voice Willard is given—that’s Michael.

  Was it from ‘Dispatches,’ in which Herr makes such a point of Vietnam as “a rock & roll war,” that the idea came to use the Doors’ “The End”?

  No. I knew Jim Morrison, in film school; he came to my house once—this was before he’d had a record out—with some acetates, demos, asking if I could help. I tried; I didn’t get anywhere. But the idea of using the Doors came from “Light My Fire.” That was from Milius: Kurtz’ people would play “Light My Fire” through their loudspeakers, to jazz themselves up. In the end, there’s a battle, and the North Vietnamese regulars come charging in to “Light My Fire.” I went to the Philippines with that ending!

  How did the characterization of Kurtz evolve?

  Marlon arrived; he was terribly fat. As my wife says in her book, he hadn’t read the copy of Heart of Darkness I’d sent him; I gave him another copy, he read it, and we began to talk. There were a lot of notes that we compiled together. I’d give him some—he’d write a lot himself. I shot Marlon in a couple of weeks and then he left; everything else was shot around that footage, and what we had shot with Marlon wasn’t like a scene. It was hours and hours of him talking.

  We had an idea: Kurtz as a Gauguin figure, with mangoes and babies, a guy who’d really gone all the way. It would have been great; Marlon wouldn’t go for it at all.

  Marlon’s first idea—which almost made me vomit—was to play Kurtz as a Daniel Berrigan: in black pajamas, in VC clothes. It would be all about the guilt [Kurtz] felt at what we’d done. I said, “Hey, Marlon, I may not know everything about this movie—but one thing I know it’s not about is ‘our guilt’!” Yet Marlon has one of the finest minds around: Thinking is what he does. To sit and talk with him about life and death—he’ll think about that stuff all day long.

  Finally, he shaved his head—and that did it. We’d go for it—we’d get there. That terrible face. I think it’s wonderful that in this movie, the most terrifying moment is that image: just his face.

  There seems to be no conventional suspense in the movie. Even in the scene where Willard kills Kurtz; that’s an orchestrated scene, full of crosscutting and metaphors, like the killings that end ‘The Godfather.’ Is that the way you wanted to make the movie?

  Maybe I’m stupid, but I always wanted the film to be graceful. My very first notion when I began to think of the style of the film—of course, style was going to be the whole movie—I wanted to sweep, not go chaaa! chaaa! I wanted it to have grace. I chose Vittorio Storaro [Bernardo Bertolucci’s cinematographer in The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris and 1900] because I wanted the camera to just float across the boat. That is always shot handheld, because there’s no building dolly tracks in the water. The music would be Tomita-like [a Japanese synthesizer composer] for that reason.

  I don’t understand what you mean when you say that style was going to be the whole movie.

  When I first thought of doing Apocalypse Now, and I read Milius’ script, I was looking for a clue as to what kind of movie this was going to be. I was very concerned about style, because I knew it wouldn’t be a realistic style—I knew it would have some sort of what I’ll call extension to it, but I didn’t know what. People used to ask me, well, what’s this movie gonna be like? I said, well, it’s gonna be very stylized. And they said, well, like what? Like what director? And I would say, like Ken Russell. I wanted the movie to go as far as it would go. I was prepared to have to make an unusual, surrealist movie, and I even wanted to.

  But you didn’t.

  Well, surrealist. What do you call or what do you not call surrealist?

  Watching the movie, I never had the feeling that I was partner to a dream—and that’s how I would define the experience of surrealism.

  Well, then, what would you call the desire to extend the action so that it had another, different reality—or an extended reality, from just pure reality—that made use of what was going on?

  The emergence of a different reality is raised as something that could happen—that could take over Willard, suck him in. There’s an interesting shot in Kurtz’ temple, a copy of ‘The Golden Bough’—a book about ancient myth and practice of ritual regicide. A man became king; after a year, if anyone could kill him, he became king. After Willard kills Kurtz, he emerges from the temple. Kurtz’ whole community is gathered there, and Willard is carrying two symbols of kingship—this is how I saw it—the book, Kurtz’ memoirs, and the scepter, the weapon he throws down when he refuses the kingship. The community kneels before him, and it’s clear that if Willard wanted to take over, he could have. And then he consciously rejects that choice. If he had not, then he, and maybe we, would have been swallowed by the extended realities you’re talking about. But he rejects that. That seemed very clear. Is that not what you meant?

  No . . . when I finally got there, the best I could come up with was this: I’ve got this guy who’s gone up the river, he’s gonna go kill this other guy who’s been the head of all this. Life and death. Well, I have a friend, Dennis Jakob, we were talking—what to do?—and he said to me, “What about the myth of the Fisher King?” And I said, “What’s that?” He said, “It’s The Golden Bough.” The Fisher King—I went and got the book, and I said, of course, that’s what I meant. That’s what was meant by the animal sacrifices [that occur among Kurtz’ people as Willard murders Kurtz]. I had seen a real animal sacrifice, by the headhunters we had hired. I looked at the blood shoot up in the air, and I’m thinking—this is about something very basic. I’ve gone up this whole river trying to figure out this movie, and I don’t know what’s the matter: What do I have to express, what do I have to show to really show this war? There are millions of things you have to show. But what it really all comes down to is some sort of acceptance of the truth, or the struggle to accept the truth. And the truth has to do with good and evil, and life and death—and don’t forget that we see these things as opposites, or we want to see them as opposites, but they are one. It’s not so easy to define them—as good or evil. You must accept that you have the whole.

  Kurtz is consciously participating in the myth of the Golden Bough; he’s prepared that role for Willard, for him to take his place.

  He wants Willard to kill him. So Willard thinks about this: he says, “Everyone wanted him dead. The army . . . and ultimately even the jungle; that’s where he took his orders from, anyway.” The notion is that Willard is moved to do it, to go once more into that primitive state, to go and kill.

  He goes into the temple, and he goes through a quasi-ritual experience, and he kills the king. The native people there were acting out in dance what was happening. They understood, and they were acting out, with their icons, the ritual of life and death. Willard goes in, and he kills Kurtz, and as he comes out he flirts with the notion of being king, but something . . . does not lure him. He goes, he takes the kid back, and then he goes away and there’s the image of the green stone face again [the face of an ancient Cambodian goddess from Kurtz’ temple complex]. He starts to go away, and then the moment when he flirted with being king is superimposed. And that’s the moment when we use “the horror, the horror.”

  How do you see what Willard is going through at Kurtz’ compound?

  I always tried
to have it be implied in the movie that the notion of Willard going up the river to meet Kurtz was perhaps also a man looking at another aspect or projection of himself. I always had the idea of Willard and Kurtz being the same man—in terms of how I made my decisions as to do whatever we did. And I feel that Willard arriving at the compound to meet Kurtz is like coming to the place that you don’t want to go—because it’s all your ghosts and all your demons.

  Willard’s a murderer, an assassin, and no doubt when he’s alone in the bathroom, he’s had some moral thoughts about whether that’s good: to go kill people you don’t even know. So I’m thinking Willard has been involved—as maybe Kurtz has—on a moral quest, which is to say, “Is what I have done, or what I am doing, moral? Is it okay?” So when Willard gets to Kurtz’ place, it’s his nightmare. It’s his nightmare in that it’s the extreme of the issue that he has to deal with—bodies and heads—and Kurtz is the extreme of him, because Willard’s a killer. Here, now, Kurtz—who has gone mad—has become the horror, the whole thing, which is no more than an extension of the horror that we’re looking at on every level. Willard has to come to terms with this—and what Brando really tells him, the way I see it, is, I finally saw something so horrible . . . and then at the same time realized that the fact that it was so horrible was what made it wonderful . . . and I went to some other place in my mind, in which I became Kurtz, who is nuts.