The five-and-a-half hour Apocalypse Now Workprint has been compared to the Apocalypse Now Redux (2001) primarily because both contain many scenes deleted from the original 1979 version of the film, but the difference between the redux and the workprint is significant. Whereas the redux is a tightly-edited tightly-structured film, the workprint is a rambling loosly-edited half-formed affair that is capable of revealing Francis Ford Coppola’s vision in the very process of taking shape. It’s rare to be able to view such a workprint, and even rarer to be able to view one from a filmmaker as influential as Coppola and for a film as significant as Apocalypse Now -- a film which could justifiably be called one of the most important American movies of the past 30 years. This double rarity alone should make the Apocalypse Now Workprint an engrossing viewing experience for critics, theorists and buffs alike. On the simplest level, the workprint exudes the allure of still unseen footage, but in addition to this allure, it offers the opportunity of gaining an insight into the strangely heterogeneous mix of forces, themes, ideas and talents that were eventually distilled, and only ever partially harmonized in the ’79 and ’01 versions.

The workprint shows Coppola’s vision for Apocalypse Now unfolding in two quite distinct, not always compatible, ways. The simple narrative movement which forces Willard upstream to find and kill Kurtz establishes the film’s psychological interest through the suggestion that Willard’s external journey runs parallel to and mirrors an internal one against the current of rationality, as it were, to the irrational source of his own nature and being. Interwoven with this psychological interest is a deeply political one that explores issues such as America’s role and culpability in the Vietnam war, Vietnam’s colonial history, and the complex dynamics set in motion when one culture imposes itself on another. In order to bring these two different directions and interests into a working harmony, Coppola’s ’79 version basically makes the film’s psychological dimension dominant and reduces the political dimension to a subordinate role. In the workprint, however, Coppola’s political interests remain intact -- it shows his interest in focusing on the Vietnamese people, and contains lengthy scenes and dialogue sequences that are overtly political in character. So much of this political dimension has been edited from the ’79 version that overtly political statements and images can no longer be easily recognized as such. This difficulty, however, is only partly due to their decontextualization. There is a tendency to imbue these once-political segments with a more psychological meaning, not only because the psychological context has been made the film’s dominant frame of reference in the ’79 version, but also because this frame of reference is overwhelmingly metaphorical and therefore functions to encourage psychologically-oriented construals.

Viewing the workprint I found it difficult not to ask: how is it possible that Coppola allowed his political interests, so palpable in the workprint, to be so thoroughly edited in the ’79 release version of the film? And if we look to the ’01 redux the question only becomes more perplexing. The ’01 version’s inclusion of the French plantation sequence is an obvious example of Coppola’s attempt to re-establish the film’s political heart. When Kurtz reads articles from Time Magazine to Willard that demonstrate that the American government and its representatives are capable of the most shameless and barefaced lies, we would have to be deaf not to hear the beating of that very political heart. In fact, images of destruction and decay dramatically increase as Willard’s nears the inevitable moment when he will have to kill Kurtz. And whilst these images, which culminate in the massive air strike which destroys the Kurtz compound, (a sequence which doesn’t actually appear in any current version of the film), seem perfectly geared to express the dark irrationality in human nature, nevertheless, when Coppola speaks of these images, and specifically of this scene, he does so in overwhelmingly political terms. He has even pointed out that he chose not to end Apocalypse Now on an image of pure destructiveness precisely because he wanted to register a political hope. Thus, in the ’79 and ’01 versions, Coppola has Willard lead Lance, a character who embodies childlike innocence, onto their boat to begin the return journey. Coppola wanted to express his own hope, his own deeply felt desire, that out of political chaos and madness a new beginning might possibly emerge. So to restate my question: how is it possible that Coppola let go of all these political elements that are so clearly dear to him?

The simple answer to this question is that in editing several hours off the workprint both Coppola and the editors seem to have agreed that all those long improvisational sequences and dialogues didn’t organically connect with the central narrative/emotional movement upstream. We could call this the aesthetic answer based as it is on Coppola’s supposed need to unify his film thematically and expressively. A second answer might go like this: Coppola’s representation of the Vietnam war and of Willard’s journey upstream as an increasing replacement of order and reason with a surreal almost-hallucinogenic madness, so perfectly melds with the mood Conrad expresses in his novel Heart of Darkness, (on which this film is based), that there seems to have been a natural tendency for the film to fall in this more psychological direction. Look at Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography, for example: whilst Coppola is constructing the French plantation sequence in political terms, Storaro’s mist-enveloped images are constructing it in deeply psychological terms which tap our fears about the dissolution of self, reason and order. The addition of Conrad’s famous phrase, "The horror! The horror!", (which is absent from the workprint), could be viewed as representing Coppola’s capitulation to the growing weight of this psychological dimension. And this leads me to a third and final answer to the question I posed. It seems that Coppola is often expressing two quite distinct levels of meaning in his films. On a conscious level, he expresses his political interests, and yet despite these interests he seems to be constantly attracted to the kind of dark presence that Conrad represents as inhabiting the human psyche. And traces of this attraction can be found right across Coppola’s oeuvre, not just in Apocalypse Now. Take, for example, the way in which Michael Corleone’s character develops over the course of The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather: Part II (1974): our first image of Michael is an innocent inexperienced young man who repeatedly states he could never lead the life his father leads as a mafia Don. And our final image of Michael? A gaunt, worn-out, morally-corrupt Don who has excelled his father both in ruthlessness and in violence. It seems that despite himself, Coppola’s political interests are regularly shed due to the appearance of an unconscious psychological fascination with the mysteriousness of the darker depths of human nature. This fascination is pronounced in the ’79 version of Apocalypse Now. And it was only after 20 years had passed, only after Coppola had carefully reflected upon and evaluated his film that he saw fit to reinstate the political focus which, in the clear light of prolonged conscious reflection, now seemed to be something which should always have remained as a central expressive element. Perhaps Coppola even wondered how and why he let it fall into the shadow of an altogether different element. Perhaps. I am only asking questions and suggesting possibilities. Apocalypse Now has always had a certain mystique about it. It’s a film of ‘lost’ scenes, a mist-shrouded object of which you can only ever see a part. The Apocalypse Now Workprint shows us a little more of that shrouded object. It allows us to enter a little further into the mythical realm of those lost images. It allows us to experience, a little more fully, the imaginative world from which the 1979 version was born. And finally, this workprint gives us the opportunity to understand Apocalypse Now more deeply by allowing us to see, at least in part, how Coppola’s film came into being, twice.

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