[Audio] Reading Excerpts From Coppola/Brando's Story Conference

These are excerpts from Coppola and Brando's early meeting on Apocalypse Now when Brando decided to take on the role. The excerpts were found by Peter Cowie in the Zoetrope archive and included in his book, The Apocalypse Now Book by Peter Cowie.Excerpts:Brando: I think it’s very important to establish the atmosphere, the contrast between the situation in Vietnam and the gradations on down the line of actions and how those words are finally implemented as to where the bullets go in the side of the face of the kids or what the kids look like.

Coppola: The way that I wanted to rewrite that opening scene, the briefing scene, is that I wanted them to bring him not to some planning room, all militaristic, but maybe the home of the ambassador… I think that they have to be very attractive. We in the audience have to feel instinctively that we agree, whatever these people say, they’re so intelligent, and attractive, and logical, that they’re probably right.” 

Coppola (re the name for Kurtz): How do you like ‘Klein? The reason I say Klein is because the real man in the Belgian Congo who Conrad wrote the story about and named him Kurtz, the real Belgian was a Belgian Jew named Klein.

Brando: He shouldn’t be a Jew because he’s gotta be a red-blooded American… He is a man of extreme abilities, he’s a man of unquestionable devotion and he has carried his devotion to and beyond the line of duty.” 

Coppola:… when you get to [Kurtz], you realize that there is something gentle and soft and touching and human and patriotic. But the man is mad, Marlon, I mean his madness is our madness… in the larger context, the guy is nuts.

Brando: I don’t think that he’s like Patton… I think that the man is … the more you can show him trying to carry out, earnestly trying to carry out the reasonable performance of his duties.” 

Coppola: But that can be done, Marlon. What is the biggest frustration of every top echelon army guy? What is the biggest frustration of [General] Westmoreland?

Brando: They get shot down by authority … You can say that [Kurtz] has been harassed … he’s been recalled on a number of occasions and he’s got logical explanations…

Coppola: Look at the way Patton says, ‘I was convinced that our divisions could have proceeded to Berlin, yet there were considerations at higher levels of which I was unaware.’ There’s always that frustration … Kurtz has essentially disconnected himself from the American army believing that in that way he can serve it better. They always talk about serving… The MacArthur-Truman thing is another example, of feeling like you’re being stabbed in your back.”

Coppola: … He has set himself up as an independent king, in that he is making policy… I wrote the script of Patton, the movie, and he was so incensed that there was criticism and he would rail on and on to his aides, ‘I was reprimanded because I killed the enemy, because I took the territory?’ He was incensed that he was being criticized at home… He was using methods of warfare which from his point of view were effective but by anyone else’s point of view were barbarous, savage…”

Brando: The high command wants him to kill as many people as possible but they don’t want him to broadcast the fact… Instead of fighting it secretly behind closed doors… he feels that it should be known to the world…

Coppola: … he doesn’t lie about it. He doesn’t cover it, he doesn’t call it something else. And that’s why he appears insane…”

Brando: Okay, what about the possibility of his delegating somebody in his command to go back with these reports and present them to NBC or ABC or CBS?

Coppola: … Essentially what has happened, and this is true, this has happened, that they have lost control of Kurtz … It’s like the guy in The Bridge on the River Kwai where he’s building the bridge irrespective of if it’s for the Japanese… and his actions contradict their lies… I think there should be reports that [Kurtz’s] body count is high. He has taken territory, he has reclaimed villages. I think, like Patton, he has one of the best records.” 

Brando: How do you know that he made them look bad?.. It’s believable if you could hang it on the fact that … it was the secret war in Cambodia…

Coppola: What if he’s on the border and he has now started… he has moved…

Brando: He’s crossed the border.

Coppola: It’s like MacArthur…

Brando: They did have a secret war in Laos that they were not supposed to have.” 

Coppola:… Let’s say they are in Cambodia. Where the guy is sent is not Vietnam but he has to go right through the border. That’s why they don’t want to send helicopters. They just send a little boat because that Nung river goes right into Cambodia. It works real good because we built a Cambodian temple.” 

Brando: It has to be clear that the reason that he must be killed is because he is not any more responsive.

Coppola: He has lost control.

Brando: It’s not necessarily that he lost control, it has to be more specific than that… They run a great risk, if he is not controlled, if he is not confined, of having the entire Cambodian campaign exposed to the world…” 

Coppola: It’s like a cancer… Kurtz is not even a man anymore, he’s a trail of rumors… I would like to play with the audience’s imagination, trying to imagine this guy Kurtz, trying to put him together, trying to see what he would be like… The man becomes of certain mythical proportions so that when you finally come face to face with him and he is so different than you expected, he wins you over. You never thought you were going to like him.”.

Brando: I think it helps to talk about it, you know, like Jack and the Beanstalk, about the giant. That he’s so big, that he’s dangerous, that he’s a Medal of Honor… And that he’s a man of infinite cunning and intelligence and he’s a man of experience. ‘If it were not for the fact that he was jeopardizing our position, he would be our best officer.’” 

Coppola: …I want to tell a kind of philosophical thriller without really hammering home the actual political relevance of it to Vietnam. And my fear, on the other hand, is that I want to deal with political relevance in a way that’s evocative of it without hammering it so hard that everyone dismisses it as a political…” 

Coppola: “[Kurtz] is conducting his activities at such an extreme and to the letter of the policy that it’s starting to really get out and it’s starting to give away our presence in Cambodia. It will disclose other covert actions that we have in Laos… But also the army can’t tolerate a man who has gone into the war business for himself…”

Coppola: “The A Teams were like four Green Berets, they were brilliant élite guys… They were encouraged to be savages, encouraged to mutilate, encouraged to rape, encouraged to do atrocities… imagine the ludicrousness of a guy living among these primitive peoples with heads on posts and these contradictions talking in terms of psychology, in terms of ethics, in terms of democracy, when in fact he’s just tortured and they’ve dismembered, and God knows they probably ate the enemy.” 

Coppola: “It was [Robert Towne’s] idea that Willard should have known Kurtz once. That once he was maybe a student in a class he taught or something…

Brando: There would be a lot more advantage if he didn’t know him at all.” 

Coppola: [Kurtz] is like Margaret Mead up there. I mean, he loves the natives… You see Kurtz as a kind of Margaret Mead who hasn’t really gone native but he respects the native customs… You begin to sniff the scent of this Kurtz…” 

Coppola: “There’s a great scene that I want to do… Can you imagine these guys disembarking from this boat… There’s still explosions and sniper fire and you’re running along the beach and they hear, ‘Don’t look in the camera. Just run by’? They stop and there’s NBC… The film then becomes an adventure of incident after incident of this kind of absurdity… So the absurdities get more and more broad.”

Coppola: Willard starts to come apart a little bit and the audience feel that ‘Ah, that Colonel Kurtz is crazy.’ And you begin to get the idea that what makes Kurtz crazy are the same kind of things that begin to have this effect on Willard.” 

Coppola: “There’s one episode after another, each taking you closer to Kurtz… So that by the time the movie is over the audience has been put through an Alice in Wonderland… And our guys, who started out as these wonderful boys, innocent, blonde, beautiful, 19-year olds and stuff, by the end of the movie, just before they get to Kurtz, they’re looking like savages… As they get further away from civilization they get more and more almost into primitive times where at one point in the fog they get shot at with arrows…” 

Coppola:“And not only that, music, Marlon, they fought this war to ‘Light My Fire’. They had loudspeakers, this is true, they had loudspeakers and they would play acid rock and roll during the battles and be stoned on dope when the flares went across the sky… I mean, it was the most absurd war that has ever been fought and I want to get that imagery.”

Brando: And then they would chop their arm off and the parents were made to look at them until they talked …

Coppola: I couldn’t put a scene like that in. I’m the one who couldn’t put the scene in The Godfather where they throw the baby in the furnace…” 

Coppola: … My sense was to try to make the enemy and the presence of the jungle sort of one… Swallowed up by the river, sticking out is the whole tail section of a B-52… It’s like the river is swallowing it up. That says the whole thing, the jungle, natural forces of this Earth will eat anything we have to dish out.”