9. Francis Ford Coppola Mentally Breaks A Drunk Martin Sheen Apocalypse Now
If you watch the beginning of Apocalypse Now, youll see the iconic scene of Martin Sheens Benjamin Willard going cuckoo-bananas in a dingy hotel room. Hes suitably drunk, dishevelled and insane, and you think it must be a great bit of acting. Well I suppose youre right, but what you dont know is that Martin Sheen is literally drunk throughout this whole scene in an attempt to make it more realistic. Of course, inebriation does not a good performance make, or every high street on a Friday night would be filled with budding Brandos. To really make this into something good, Coppola took advantage of a drunk Sheen, refusing to tell him that the scene where he would pretend to be emotionally tormented would actually involve some real emotional torment. But who was tormenting Sheen in this scene? Why, Coppola of course! As soon as the inebriated actor got on set, the director took advantage of his condition by calling him worthless all the way through, saying he was a terrible actor, and a terrible father to boot. Sheen wasnt expecting this, and in his delicate emotional state suffered something of a breakdown one of many on this set. So really, all the pain you see in that scene is totally unfaked, entirely because Coppola neglected to tell Sheen that he was going to put him through a brutal emotional wringer.