Hollywood Hellraisers (30 page)

After a month regrouping at his base in San Francisco to rethink his battle plan, Coppola returned to the jungle. Some of the crew mutinied and didn’t go with him. Sheen went somewhat reluctantly. ‘I don’t know if I’m going to live through this,’ he told friends. ‘Those fuckers are crazy.’

Work now began on the sequences set around Colonel Kurtz’s compound, where a shocking discovery was made. One morning, Sheen’s wife woke up co-producer Gray Frederickson. ‘You’ve got to come with me.’ She took him down to the temple set, which was strewn with rubbish and smelled terrible. ‘You’ve got to clean this up,’ she said. ‘It’s a health risk, I won’t allow Marty to work here.’ So Frederickson went to the production designer Dean Tavoularis. ‘They’re complaining about you; there are dead rats in there.’ Looking not bothered, Tavoularis said, ‘That’s intentional, it gives it real atmosphere.’ ‘Well you’re gonna lose the actors,’ said Frederickson. ‘They’re not happy working in those conditions. ’ There was a prop guy standing close by who muttered, ‘Wait till he hears about the dead bodies.’ Frederickson cried, ‘What!’

He’d heard the rumours about dead bodies being on the set but discounted them as plain ludicrous. ‘And they took me there,’ Frederickson recalls. ‘There was a marquee where we all ate dinner and then behind it was a tent where they stored props and we went in there and I saw this row of cadavers all laid out, all grey-looking. I said, “You guys are nuts. Where did these come from? We’ve got to get rid of this immediately.” They said, “No, no, they’ll be very authentic, we’ll have them upside down in the trees.” I said, “You can’t do that.” It turned out they’d got them from a guy who supposedly supplied bodies to medical schools for autopsies, but the police showed up on our set and said that this guy was robbing graves. Then the police said to us, “How do we know you guys haven’t had these people killed because they’re unidentified?” And they took all of our passports; I was worried for a few days. But they got to the truth of it all and put the guy in jail. And they showed up with a big truck and these soldiers were loading the bodies inside and they came over to me and said, “Where do we take these.” I said, “I don’t know, the cemetery.” Turned out they couldn’t take them to the cemetery because it costs money to bury them. “Oh, don’t worry,” they said, “we’ll dump them somewhere,” and they drove away. I don’t know what they did with them. So for the scenes in the movie we had extras hanging from the trees, not dead bodies.’

When Marlon arrived he shocked everybody — he was like a blimp, maybe three hundred pounds; that’s an awful lot of peanut butter. ‘He was huge,’ says Frederickson. ‘You couldn’t see around him.’ This gave Coppola palpitations, for he’d envisioned Kurtz as a lean and hungry warrior. Also, what the hell was he going to wear? There was no Green Beret uniform on earth big enough!

Worse, Brando had neither read Conrad’s book, learned his lines nor done any preparation whatsoever for the role. ‘Francis had to literally start from scratch with him,’ says Doug Claybourne. ‘He had to bring him up to speed on what the thing was about and who the character was.’ According to Dennis Hopper the whole production was shut down for a week while Coppola read Brando the novel out loud. ‘Nine hundred people, the cast and crew, just sat and waited!’ he said. ‘We called it “the million dollar week”, because Marlon was getting paid a million dollars a week.’

When Marlon finally got round to reading the script he didn’t like it at all, and refused to play the role as written. Each morning Coppola would trudge over to Brando’s dwelling and for hours they’d debate and pore over the dialogue. Coppola sensed Marlon was stalling because he’d yet to get a handle on how to play Kurtz. The director was also getting nervous. ‘I only had him for fifteen days and I used up five of them just listening to him talk about termites.’

Finally, on the fifth day, Marlon shaved off all his hair and arrived at the idea of improvising his scenes and letting Coppola’s camera capture whatever came out of his mouth. Self-conscious of his killer-whale appearance, Marlon also stipulated that he dress in black and for the most part be filmed in shadow. Coppola agreed to steer his camera away from his enormous belly.

Marlon also wanted nothing to do with Dennis Hopper. Coppola had cast Dennis as a character who doesn’t appear in the book, a photojournalist who’s part of Kurtz’s inner entourage. Dennis agreed to play the role on the understanding that he would be given at least one line of dialogue with Brando. ‘That was my contract.’ Dennis had idolised Brando since his teenage years. Early screen acting gods had been the likes of Orson Welles and John Barrymore, but they soon became old hat when the thirteen-year-old Dennis saw films starring Brando and Montgomery Clift in the same week. ‘It changed my life.’

Marlon simply refused to work with Dennis, or even appear on the set at the same time. Instead he’d shoot one night, Dennis the next; that’s how they worked to get their scene done. Dennis came in once and Coppola said, ‘Last night Marlon called you a snivelling dog and threw bananas at you.’ So the actor had to endure this prop man throwing fruit at him all night long. Crushed that his hero wanted nothing to do with him, Dennis wondered if he was ‘giving off something that freaks him out’. Or maybe because of Marlon’s experience of alcoholic parents he had a major problem with Dennis’s drink-and-drugs lifestyle.

Dennis was certainly in a bad way on the film according to George Hickenlooper, who directed the seminal documentary
Hearts of Darkness
about the making of
Apocalypse Now
. ‘Dennis recounted the story to me that he was asked, “What can we do to help you play this role?” And Dennis said, “About an ounce of cocaine.” So he was being supplied by the film production drugs that he could use while he was shooting.’

Hopper’s performance as the crazed photojournalist is, well, crazed. ‘That’s the way he was, on and off camera,’ says Frederickson. ‘He was pretty crazy on that film, but he was fun and everybody loved him, a great guy. There wasn’t an edge to his craziness at all. Actually he’s a lot more serious and less friendly now that he’s not so crazy.’ For some of the crew he was also taking his method acting a little bit too far. ‘Dennis was notorious on set for never taking a shower,’ says Doug Claybourne. ‘You didn’t want to stand too close to him.’

Dennis even managed to set his hotel room on fire, according to Frederickson. ‘He had his girlfriend there and they were having a romantic night and he had all these candles and put them too close to the curtains and it caught on fire.’ Claybourne also recalls the incident. ‘Suddenly this flaming mattress came hurtling out of Dennis’s hotel room window and landed in the river outside.’

Like Marlon, Dennis improvised many of his scenes. Hours and hours of footage was shot, but Coppola chose to use only a few choice moments. His death scene was also removed. When Dennis takes a photograph of Kurtz he more or less signs his own death warrant and is hoisted up on a rope and shot to ribbons. A life-size dummy of Dennis was constructed and filled with ninety-eight squibs. ‘Now that dummy cost more than I got paid for the entire fucking movie,’ argued Dennis. ‘So, y’know, who’s the biggest dummy?’

Catastrophes continued to plague the production. Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack and Coppola, convinced he was to blame, one evening had an epileptic seizure, banged his head against the wall, rolled round on the floor and foamed at the mouth like a rabid dog. These were Coppola’s darkest hours from a stressful shoot that would have felled most other directors. ‘We had access to too much money,’ he later confessed, ‘too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.’ Dennis said, ‘Ask anybody who was out there. We all felt like we fought the war.’

Coppola, though, had more to lose than most. Some of the money being squandered was his own, several millions, in fact, and the director faced financial ruin if the film couldn’t be completed. No surprise that Coppola’s marriage almost collapsed as the pressure increased and the director suffered a nervous breakdown, declaring on three separate occasions during filming that he intended to commit suicide. He was ready to die out in the Philippines, do whatever it took to finish the film. Dennis could relate to that.

Sheen eventually recovered and work began again. When Marlon finished and it was time for him to leave, Coppola needed a big favour from his star. He approached Frederickson, ‘because he knew I got along with Marlon. Francis didn’t get along with him that well.’ Coppola needed Marlon to come out just for a quick close-up of his lips saying, ‘The horror, the horror.’ Frederickson went to Marlon’s hotel; he was getting ready to catch his flight to Hong Kong. ‘My contract’s up; I finished yesterday,’ said Marlon. ‘It’s just a little favour,’ Frederickson replied. ‘We’ll fly you out there, shoot it in an hour and then you can be on your way.’ Marlon smiled, ‘It’s never an hour, you know that.’ He then calculated how much he’d been paid for his stint on the picture. ‘It comes to about $75,000 a day,’ he said. ‘I’m in the Marlon Brando business, I don’t do anything else. I’m not in real estate or oil, I sell Marlon Brando. So you’re asking me to do a $75,000 favour. Would you ask that of the president of General Motors?’ Frederickson went back to Coppola. ‘When I told him he was furious and raved, ‘OK, tell Brando I’ll pay him the $75,000, but I’m gonna keep him here all day long.’

After 238 days Coppola finally wrapped. The budget had ballooned from $13m to nearer $30m. United Artists wanted
Apocalypse Now
to be their big Christmas 1977 release, but the opening was pushed back and pushed back as Coppola worked frenziedly in his editing suite for months on end arranging some 200 hours of footage. Critics started referring to the film as ‘Apocalypse When?’

Doug Claybourne stayed with the picture when it moved into post-production, working with the actors as they dubbed their lines, many of which were inaudible owing to background noise on location. Marlon came in for two weeks. ‘I remember one time Francis came in late to the studio and Marlon said to me, “You’ve got to get me a water gun, Doug.” So I ran out and bought a dollar water gun and gave it to Marlon. He filled it up and put it in his pocket and when Francis came into the recording suite he let him have it, wet him down good, saying, “You can’t be late, Francis, you’ve got to be here on time.” He loved to pull that kind of stuff. He was a real jokester, and a gentle guy and very sweet. Just a gentleman.’ Martin Sheen also found Marlon extremely friendly. ‘He went to great lengths to crack a good joke. The only thing he would not talk about was himself, or movies, or acting.’

Apocalypse Now
finally opened in 1979 and is today rightly regarded as a masterpiece and a life-changing experience for most of the people who worked on it. Doug Claybourne recalls helping to organise the press screenings in New York. ‘I had all the actors together at the theatre but I couldn’t find Dennis. I had to go back to the hotel and I found him in his room, stark naked with his cowboy hat and his cowboy boots on.’

Years later, when George Hickenlooper made his documentary, most of the stars and crew were happy to talk about the movie. Except Marlon. Hickenlooper tracked him down to the set of a movie. As he walked to his trailer Hickenlooper made his move. ‘Mr Brando, we’re making a documentary on
Apocalypse Now
. Would you be prepared to do an oncamera interview?’ Marlon turned round and stared like death into Hickenlooper’s face, his eyes boring into his psyche. ‘Why are you making a film about that fat fuck? He owes me two million dollars.’ Obviously Marlon was having issues with his royalty payments from Francis. ‘You tell that fat fuck,’ Marlon continued, ‘that if he pays me the two million, you can film me taking a shit.’ With that the trailer door slammed shut. Hickenlooper never got his interview.

Look at this fucking shit we’re in, man. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. And with a whimper, I’m fucking splitting, Jack.

Dennis Hopper had been in the Philippines shooting
Apocalypse Now
for just over a month. On his last night he and Coppola got roaring drunk together. An assistant was looking on nervously; his task was to get Dennis to Manila to catch a flight to Germany, where he was due to start filming the Wim Wenders thriller
The American Friend
(1977). Dennis refused to leave until there was no more beer left in the house.

At Hamburg airport Dennis was dazed and confused, knowing neither where he was nor why he was there. Still wearing his character’s costume from
Apocalypse Now
, at first sight Dennis gave Wim Wenders the impression that ‘he was drugged out of his mind’. Maybe the Coppola shoot had taken more out of Dennis than he realised because the actor was ‘totally impossible to work with for the first couple of weeks’, according to Wenders. ‘I told him that either we’d get someone else or he’d have to prove to me that he was the great actor that I knew he was. He was totally suicidal. He took every drug in the book.’ In the end Wenders confronted Dennis, telling him straight, ‘Are you gonna die tomorrow or are you gonna become an actor?’

Relations between Dennis and his co-star Bruno Ganz were even worse. The two of them had diametrically opposed approaches to acting. Dennis arrived on set entirely unprepared, not even knowing his dialogue, but once the camera turned he attacked the material with enthusiasm. ‘He had an incredible presence,’ said Wenders. Ganz, who came from a theatrical background, had been fretting for days about the scene, going over every gesture, every word, and so was completely thrown and disturbed by Dennis, who basically didn’t give a toss. ‘They actually had a fist fight in the middle of one scene because they hated each other so much,’ says Wenders. ‘There was no way I was going to work with these two maniacs.’