Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Dennis Hopper in a very nice picture.  I've not mentioned him at all.

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Written by Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius, Michael Herr, Joseph Conrad (novel)

Starring Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall

I’m not going to bother writing much about Apocalypse Now. For the most part, this is because I assume – and I think it’s fair to assume – that nearly everyone who’s likely to see it has done so, has formed clear opinions about it, has read or heard or talked about it. Like Citizen Kane, or Star Wars, or Casablanca, it’s one of those films that’s gained such prominence over the years that there’s really nothing left to say. 

 

But there’s another reason for not really writing about Apocalypse Now. It’s because I’ve not really seen it for a few years. Not how it ought to be seen. What I have watched rather more recently is Apocalypse Now Redux – yes, that’s Redux, not Director’s Cut. The difference is apparently important. According to Wikipedia,  

Redux is usually considered by fans and critics, as well as director Francis Ford Coppola, a completely new movie altogether.

Now, when I got to see a completely new movie, I’d normally hope that it wouldn’t contain two-and-a-half hours of an existing movie, and a classic at that, but let’s not split hairs. Coppola wants us to know that this isn’t a director’s cut, but rather the cut that he, the director, would like the world to see. As I said, it’s an important difference. Apparently. And I certainly wouldn’t suggest for one moment that Coppola wants to be seen as doing something more artistically and cinematically significant than other directors. Not that kind of guy at all. Not the kind of director who would see himself as a step above everyone else, the kind of director who wouldn’t allow anyone to see Abel Gance’s Napoleon unless they watch his own edit with his father’s score, rather than the way Gance wanted it to be seen. What? Oh, right. 
 

Anyway, I digress.

Twenty-odd years before the Redux, Coppola and editor Walter Murch felt able to discard the material that surfaced in the Completely New Movie version.  As is normally the case with director’s cuts – not that this is a director’s cut, of course – there are a few scenes that are a little more bloated than they originally were, a minute here, thirty seconds there, short clips of footage trimmed for good reason and now restored because the director likes them. But it’s the two long scenes that have been added that really mark the difference between the Redux and the original cut, and which account for most of the extra fifty minutes that the new version runs for; the first of these is an odd detour into farcical sex-comedy, as the men pay for shambling, hurried sex with the Playboy bunnies they’d met earlier; the second has the boat stop off at French plantation, bury Clean, and have a chinwag over dinner.    

Two long scenes that Coppola and Murch once felt able to discard. What changed? What is it about a clumsy scene of small-scale prostitution or a dull diversion with a few Frenchmen that had no place in a superb movie of 1979 but are now deemed absolutely necessary in the twenty-first century? Well, the former is inescapably 70s, seemingly escaped from a sexploitation flick, so quite how that contributes to making a Completely New Movie for today, I’m not certain. And the latter, although it briefly threatens relevance with the opportunity to pay respect to the death of such a young man, is mostly concerned with eating up time whilst achieving nothing in particular – the kind of dull, misguided scene that ends up on the cutting room floor when an awful lot of films come to be edited.

 

And that, really, is my point. I know it’s taken an awfully long time to get here – I need to be edited a bit more – but there it is, the point of all this rambling. Those two scenes weren’t cut at random, they were cut for a bloody good reason: that their absence makes for a better film. And that’s true of a good ninety per cent of all new cuts, be they director’s cuts or whatever; once in a while, a film (such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil) will be torn apart in editing, with much of what’s good about the picture taken away – but only very rarely. Mistakes happen in all walks of life, bad decisions are made, and it should never be assumed that the director knows best how the finished movie should appear. He usually doesn’t. That’s why editors exist. That’s why a good editor can make so much difference to a film.

Steven Spielberg, when editing Jaws with Verna Fields, didn’t want to lose a second of shark footage, largely because he’d spent months trying to get that damn rubber fish to work and hoped to make the most of it. Fields, thankfully, put her foot down, and the director recognises today that Jaws became the film it was largely because there’s so little of the shark and so much of the men. 
 

On the other hand, Richard Kelly clearly didn’t recognise the work put in by editors Sam Bauer and Eric Strand when it came to Donnie Darko. The m0vie that made it to the cinemas was ingenious, enigmatic, energetic, thought-provoking and thoroughly good fun – an outstanding 80s teen movie with a just-confusing-enough sci-fi story stirred in, and one of the most striking and acclaimed films of the decade. However, the release of the director’s cut showed us that Kelly was after something entirely different, a long, daft story in which every fantasy detail was explained in the clearest and least interesting terms possible. That godawful mess was Kelly’s baby, and he must have been horrified to see the editors cut it into something brisk, entertaining and, well, good.  

Given how much he put into it – financially, physically, emotionally – it’s easy to see how every second of footage recorded for Apocalypse Now would be Coppola’s baby. And easy to see how much of an itch it must have been for him, knowing for two decades that two substantial scenes of his work, his creation, remain abandoned and unseen. I hope he’s happier now that fifty minutes is out there for the public to see – but that’s no reason for the rest of us to be interested. The 1979 original was wonderfully edited, and a magnificent piece of cinema. Watch that. Don’t indulge Coppola. He’s had more than enough indulgence as it is.