Apocalypse Now lai gây sóng gió ? Cannes

Apocalypse Now lai gây sóng gió ? Cannes

'Apocalypse Now' Takes Cannes by Storm ... Again


By Lee Yanowitch

CANNES, France (Reuters) - Francis Ford Coppola's new, longer cut of his classic Vietnam War epic ``Apocalypse Now'' is the toast of the Cannes film festival, 22 years after the original version's triumphant premiere at the Riviera resort.

``Apocalypse Now Redux'' adds 53 minutes of action originally left on the cutting-room floor and was screened out of competition Friday to huge applause.

Coppola said being back at the festival, where he won the coveted Golden Palm award for ``Apocalypse Now'' in 1979 and ``The Conversation'' in 1974, was like coming home.

``I came to Cannes with my first film and I was probably 26 years old and of course to me it was the most glamorous, enchanting place,'' the corpulent director told a news conference.

``So there is something of a homecoming to Cannes, the kind of place ... you associate with fun and good news and the people you've come to know over the years,'' he said.

One of America's most erratic and energetic filmmakers, Coppola brought the original ``Apocalypse Now'' to Cannes as a work-in-progress to kill off rumors that the movie was unreleasable despite its long five-year production schedule.

PSYCHADAELIC DELIRIUM

Loosely based on Joseph Conrad's novella ``Heart of Darkness,'' the film tells the nightmarish tale of U.S. army captain Ben Willard, dispatched deep into the jungle to kill rogue Green Beret Colonel Walter Kurtz.

Starring Marlon Brando as the despotic Kurtz and Martin Sheen as the loner Willard, the original film blew audiences away with its psychedelic delirium.

However, Coppola always thought that he had jeopardized his artistic integrity to make the story accessible to as large a public as possible and believes that the new version, which runs at 3 hours 17 minutes, is truer to his vision.

``When we shot the movie and put it together we had a 4-1/2 hour movie and in those days it really wasn't viable to consider making it much more than 2 hours,'' he said.

Among the sequences recovered for ``Redux'' are the French plantation scene -- one of the most talked-about 'lost scenes' in Hollywood folklore -- which sees Willard and his men bumping into a group of French colonialists who are trying *****rvive the war.

Perhaps the more compelling inserts are less famous -- such as a scene when the men come across a group of stranded Playboy bunnies and trade them some of their fuel for ***.

But Brando fans will be disappointed that little more of their hero makes it to the screens.

``Apocalypse'' was filmed in the Philippines and the shoot has entered the annals of Hollywood history.

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Typhoons washed away whole sets, Sheen suffered a heart attack midway through and Brando showed up late and totally unprepared for his role.

``In the original script Brando was meant to be a special services colonel and he had promised me he would arrive sort of trim but he arrived very, very overweight and I didn't know what to do,'' Coppola recounted Friday.

``I suggested that we show that in the jungle he had gone to seed and was there with a mango in one hand and a girl in the other. But he was very shy about that, he didn't want to be portrayed as being heavy,'' he said.

To get around the problem, Coppola always filmed Brando from the chest up so he could make him look big rather than fat.