10. Francis Ford Coppola (Nearly Went Insane Making Apocalypse Now)
Anyone who read the screenplay for Apocalypse Now had to know it wasn't going to be an easy production. An update of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam, being shot in the Philippines, with real tanks and real helicopters and a high powered cast that included by then legendary prankster/cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs performer Marlon Brando? Only an insane man and an insanely powerful one would dare to make that voyage. But in 1977, an insanely powerful man was exactly what Francis Ford Coppola was. The man who'd written and directed Godfather I and II had all the clout in the world, and essentially had the wealth and power to personally finance the production of John Milius' screenplay (originally intended for George Lucas to direct). Coppola, hopeful that his fledgling company American Zoetrope could make a big pay day that would allow for the funding of a series of small "personal" films, poured everything he had artistically, emotionally, financially - into making Apocalypse Now the biggest, wildest war film imaginable. It may have very nearly cost Coppola his sanity. Apocalypse Now turned out to be a hellish production: helicopters scheduled for the film's big battle scenes were flying off to fight rebels in the hills, lead actor Martin Sheen had a heart attack, a typhoon completely obliterated the film's sets. Coppola was plagued with fears that the film would financially ruin him, that it would be an artistic debacle. More and more, as the production went on, Coppola who was giving only semi-sane sounding orders to cover up Sheen's heart attack from the press (secretly recorded by his wife and used in the documentary Hearts of Darkness), who was having two simultaneous affairs, who was writing and rewriting and revising the ending of his epic on a daily basis - began to seem more and more like Colonel Kurtz, leading his army straight into the heart of darkness. Little wonder Coppola, at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, described the process of making them film by saying "we were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment and little by little we went insane." The parallels between the actual Vietnam War and Coppola's re-staging of it, while superficial - the air conditioned trailers, the New York stakes and wine flown into the jungle - were inescapable. Coppola has always been a director fascinated with the notion of films that are "cut from the same cloth" as the way in which they are made. The director's earlier The Rain People, about a cross country journey, was shot and staged
as a cross country journey; The Godfather, a film about an Italian mafia family, was made with significant contributions from Coppola's own family. But Apocalypse Now was the film where Coppola's "mix reality and fiction" ethos brought him almost to the brink of destruction.