‘Apocalypse Now’ Director Francis Ford Coppola On Marlon Brando, ‘Damn Yankees’ And Managing Chaos – Tribeca
By Dade Hayes
In a conversation at the Tribeca Film Festival with Steven Soderbergh, who said he saw Apocalypse Now 17 times as a teenager in Baton Rouge, LA, Francis Ford Coppola reminisced about working with Marlon Brando and managing though chaos.
“The fuse had been blown on the circuit,” Coppola said of the 1979 film, whose 40th anniversary “Final Cut” is being celebrated at Tribeca. (A theatrical, on-demand and Blu-ray release is set for August, with newly enhanced sound and 20 minutes shaved from the “Redux” edition of several years ago.)
“In filmmaking as in life, bad things are going to happen,” Coppola told Soderbergh during the conversation at the Beacon Theatre, alluding to the biblical series of events that hit the production, including a typhoon and Martin Sheen’s heart attack. “The good news is that there is no hell. But the quasi-good news is, this is heaven.”