How it unravels, how it vanishes and rises again. Out of nothingness. Yesterday I met something fascinating. At least, something that fascinates me. Yesterday I saw how someone shaped failure as if it were a piece of hot iron. He moulded it to his liking, even if he burnt his hands with every gesture. He couldn't stop moulding, and he wasn't going to stop until he had finished. How something so strong, so alien to you, is capable of abducting you with such force. The force necessary to make you leave everything behind and get down to it. There is nothing, absolutely nothing stronger than that.
It was not a film. It was the journey of all those people who decided to embark on the difficult mission of making that film. Coppola himself said that his film was not about Vietnam, "my film is Vietnam".
"The film reflects the attitude of the Americans in Vietnam. We were in the middle of the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment. And little by little, we were losing our minds." And even though it was filmed in the jungle of the Philippines rather than Vietnam, he was right.
1975, as the war ends in Vietnam, another war breaks out in the Philippine archipelago. It is a guerrilla war and the army has every chance of annihilating the rebels. Still, it is a country at war. The Philippine military closely monitors every move of Coppola's production. His film took the crew into one of the biggest wars ever recorded on camera. The enemies were not the Filipino rebels, the enemies were the Filipino rebels themselves, entering a jungle of madness. This war would not result in the birth of a new people. But, like all wars, it undid the minds of those who thought it would be easy to win.
The journey from Saigon to Kurtz's Camp ended up being the journey from sanity to madness. But not only in front of the camera. Because, yes, Willard comes face to face with a tiger. But the man who plays him, Martin Sheen, wakes up one night feeling that his life depends on seconds. A heart attack in the middle of filming was the last thing Coppola could have expected.
While Sheen is in hospital, Coppola assembles the crew, in an emergency, closing all doors to the information flowing home. No one in Hollywood could know that Marty had had a heart attack. They had reached the 100th day of shooting, overcoming the complications of the flagrant war in the Philippines, the replacement of the lead (Harvey Keitel) and the endless script modifications and reshoots. At this point Francis Ford Coppola seriously considers self-harm. "What can I do to get sent home and get this shit over with?
Surely hiring Marlon Brando and paying him a million dollars in advance is not the best option for the mental health of a director in the midst of the apocalypse. But it was Marlon Brando, who, with a million in his pocket, made demands, probably didn't read the script and forced the crew to waste yards and yards of film on every failed improvised take.
Coppola decided to sell his house and put up all his money. He didn't want to give himself any more options. His only way out was to finish this "fucking film". He tied his hands and forced himself to keep moulding that burning metal. He forced himself to keep burning his hands, to keep crying.
Because it seemed that the only thing that mattered to him was that metal, that one day, to the chagrin of his initial idea, it would finally be moulded. Failure was just one more piece of that impossible puzzle. Failure was probably the piece that made it possible.
