“I don’t know what that meant”: The classic movie James Caan called “cerebral horsecrap”
Although he was a known quantity and a hugely in-demand talent throughout his career, James Caan could have seized megastardom by the horns had he not developed a habit for repeatedly turning down some of the most iconic roles in cinema.
That’s not to say he was a jobbing actor struggling to get by when his career featured plenty of success, but his trajectory could have turned out completely differently had he ended up taking on just one of the many parts he was considered for but ultimately rejected.
There’s no harm or shame in being a distinguished character actor who gets to work with some of the best filmmakers in the business, but Caan could have comfortably found himself attending the Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson, and Dustin Hoffman school of leading men had things turned out just ever so slightly differently.
Ironically, at one stage or another, he was being eyed for parts that ended up being played by almost all of those aforementioned stars, several of which ended up as Oscar-winning performances. Hackman won ‘Best Actor’ for The French Connection, Nicholson did the exact same with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Hoffman took home the trophy for Kramer vs. Kramer, all of which could have been Caan in another timeline.
That’s without even mentioning the role of Roy Neary that went to Richard Dreyfuss in Steven Spielberg’s classic sci-fi Close Encounters of the Third Kind, his disinterest in being Han Solo in George Lucas’ Star Wars, or his failure to understand Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal war story Apocalypse Now.
The Godfather director was hoping to reunite with his bullet-riddled Sonny Corleone on the project, and approached him to gauge his interest on playing Willard. However, as Caan informed Variety, there were a combination of factors that ruled him out of the running.
“Francis called me and said he wanted my to play Willard. He said he’d get me a house in Manila with a maid and fly me to location in the jungle every day on a helicopter,” he explained. “I said, ‘Francis, there’s two things I hate; heights and tsetse flies, so let’s not do this’. I couldn’t be away six months while my wife was pregnant.”
That’s a far cry from his initial assessment, though, with Caan admitting previously that even though Apocalypse Now was “a wonderful picture,” he couldn’t wrap his head around the ending. “That last 15 minutes was cerebral horsecrap,” he offered in a bespoke appraisal of the final moments of one of cinema’s greatest-ever achievements. “I don’t know what that meant.”
It might be a stretch to suggest Caan’s loss was Martin Sheen’s gain when the latter almost died during production, but had he been able to comprehend what Coppola was trying to say in the final scene and his personal life been more settled, then Apocalypse Now would have had him as its lead.
