We can be reasonably suspicious of an artist who claims that
a project turned out exactly as they planned it. Apocalypse Now, in which nothing went according to plan, is a good example.
Great art does involve planning and a steady facility of execution; however, it
also requires the potential to follow instinct up whatever dark river it sends
you. Just as Willard is unsure of how he
will act when he finally meets Kurtz, Coppola and his actors also pursued their
hearts of darkness. And from this chaos, a unique motion picture emerged. The
Redux version of this movie only confirms that retrospective vision is not
always true.
Given all this, it must have been baffling, and a bit
mortifying, to Dennis Hopper that Apocalypse
Now acquired the studio freedom to follow this irreproducible path,
particularly when it was applauded by by so many of the same critics who panned
his freshly-made, idiosyncratic picture, The
Last Movie. Baffling, too, must have been Hopper's treatment on the set. It
is a multiply reported fact, most recently by Peter Sarkind in 'Raging Bulls,
Easy Riders,' that Hopper only agreed to do the movie so that he could finally
act opposite his hero Marlon Brando. When Hopper arrived in the Philippines,
Brando declared that that would never happen and all of their scenes were shot
separately. In the DVD commentary for The
American Friend (his next movie) you can still hear the hurt in Hopper's
voice when he describes this insult. But I wonder.
In Apocalypse Now,
Hopper creates one of his signature roles as The Photojournalist, a character
who seems so like Hopper's in-the-day, drug-addled, public persona that no
acting was required. At the heart of his rambling monologues, Hopper evinces a
canine subservience to Kurtz, claiming that his greatness can't be judged by
assassin Willard. However, it is also clear that Hopper's character also hates
and fears Kurtz. It was essential for
Hopper to mime exactly the kind of respect he actually felt for the great, bald,
fat man playing Kurtz. Is it possible
that Brando, despite the stories, actually read the script and knew exactly what
he was doing? Is it possible that he deliberately provoked hurt anger in Hopper
to help his performance? This seems plausible given the fact that we have here
two actors most identified with The Method and its reliance upon painful sense
memories for emotional veracity.
But we'll never know. Brando is dead. And Hopper claims he
has forgotten most of what happened in that malarial muddle. What factually remains
is an iconic piece of 70's cinema. Maybe it just doesn't matter what was
scripted and what was madness-born