George Lucas’ wild original vision for ‘Apocalypse Now’
One of the greatest war films in cinematic history is undoubtedly Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 classic adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. The project famously starred Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando in two of their finest performances, but interestingly, Coppola wasn’t always going to be the one sitting in the director’s chair.
In fact, George Lucas had been working on an earlier version of bringing Conrad’s story to life set in the hot and humid jungles of Vietnam. Coppola had been pencilled in as producer and only took the directorial reigns when Lucas became unavailable because of Star Wars.
Lucas had worked for several years developing the film with writer John Milius while still working on his own screenplays. Lucas sent his producer friend Gary Kurtz out to the Philippines to scout out suitable filming locations.
In an interview with IGN, Kurtz said, “I spent about six months scouting for locations and doing a lot of legwork and research on jungles and helicopters for Apocalypse. The reason that Apocalypse is shot in the Philippines is because that’s the only place that had helicopters and jungle to match.”
The Apocalypse Now with Lucas at the helm would have looked very different to the final film that Coppola made. “The approach that we had to making Apocalypse was to do it all in 16mm, all handheld, all quasi-documentary style, and actually hire a couple of Japanese crews to go into Vietnam and shoot stock footage in the real country,” Kurtz added.
Another change that arrived with Coppola taking the lead was that there was not as much humour in the film as there had once been. “The original script for Apocalypse was much closer to M.A.S.H. than it was to Heart of Darkness,” Kurtz said. “It had quite a bit of black humour, and it isn’t the film that Francis made – he rewrote the script considerably and changed a lot of the things.”
But as mentioned above, Lucas had been working on some other projects at the same time as Apocalypse Now, and it was the fact that they were greenlit that meant that Coppola ended up taking on the war film. Instead, Lucas focused on his coming-of-age drama American Graffiti, released in 1973.
American Graffiti was a success, which led to more interest in Lucas’ space-faring epic Star Wars. After that was given the go-ahead, Lucas did not have the time to take on Apocalypse Now, which would go on to be considered one of the greatest war films of all time. But how different it might have looked…
