10 Directors Who Nearly Killed Their Actors

2. Francis Ford Coppola Gave Martin Sheen A Heart Attack

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD1jkBL6NwA The story behind the production of Francis Ford Coppola's wartime masterpiece Apocalypse Now is so mental that it wound up becoming a story of madness itself, getting its own documentary made and being just as fascinating as the crusade to take down Colonel Kurtz. The above scene from the start of the film, in which Willard (Martin Sheen) has a hotel room freakout, was the result of Coppola basically leaving the camera running and letting Sheen do his thing. Sheen confessed himself that he drank too much on set and this torturous (but brilliant) scene was not really acting; his distress and expiation of some sort of personal demon was very real, yet Coppola, so consumed with making his film, didn't think to get the actor checked out. This is when disaster struck. Sheen ended up suffering a heart attack in the jungle, though Coppola seemed more concerned about what this might mean for the film. Desperate to ensure production was not shut down, Coppola downplayed the heart attack as heat exhaustion, and gave Sheen a month to rest-up. I don't think anyone would have been surprised if Sheen had just dropped dead a few days after returning to set; no film was as plagued with problems as Apocalypse Now, though the end result is pure movie magic.