When Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando almost came to blows
There’s no hiding from the fact that Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now, starring Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Dennis Hopper and Laurence Fishburne, was something of an absolute production disaster, even if the final movie is an undoubted masterpiece. Filming was littered with issues, including catastrophic weather and a number of cast and crew members existing on the verge of mental breakdown.
But of all the mishaps and torturous stories surrounding the Vietnam classic, one of the most interesting comes in the form of a feud that erupted between Marlon Brando and Dennis Hopper. It was a rift that grew so intense it actually nearly came to physical blows, such was the voracity of the two actors.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Hopper opened up on how the feud arose. “We had a lot of problems together,” he said. “He refused to be on the set at the same time I was. I like to think he was doing me a favour, honestly.” Brando, who’d been known to turn up late for production, did so again for Apocalypse Now.
The result was that the cast and crew had to wait around on set for several weeks, or as Hopper explained, “When Brando finally arrives, I had been down there a month and a half. And I have this crack unit; we’re doing drills, we’re doing karate, we’re doing Jiu-Jitsu, we’re climbing trees, we’re scouting… we’re a crack unit.”
With Brando finally on set and production moving ahead, Coppola took the entire cast out for dinner, but this led to the moment Brando and Hopper would very nearly clock one another. It all came down to Brando not having read the book the film was meant to be based on, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which Coppola had been “on him” for having not bothered.
Hopper, having been given a “little red book” by the Green Berets, intended to ask Brando about the book, but some wires got seriously crossed. “I say to Brando, ‘I bet you haven’t read the book’. And he thinks I am talking about Heart of Darkness, but I don’t know this at the time. He gets up and says, ‘I don’t have to listen to this! I don’t have to take this!’ And he is screaming and yelling, ‘Why do I have to hear it from him? I have to hear it from this punk!’ And he storms out of the house.”
Brando’s comments were then not well-received by Hopper, who jumped out of his seat and proceeded to try and upset his co-star for the rest of the night. When the cast headed to a local cinema to watch Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Hopper had had enough of the ongoing feud and claimed aloud that he’d like to fight Brando.
Thankfully, the fight never actually took place, and Coppola took Brando on a “two-week river excursion and came back with a script.” The relationship between the two actors was never healed, and according to Hopper, “Brando said, ‘I’ll work with him, but you come in and do your scenes first and then I’ll come in and listen to you, but we’ll never be on the set together.'”
