The laboured shooting and production of Apocalypse Now is extremely well-documented. There was Marlon Brando's incredible weight gain and erratic behaviour, a typhoon that destroyed many of the film sets and Martin Sheen's massive heart attack (to name but a few associated disasters). With all that being said, the end product is spectacular, and one of the main reasons for this are the lengths to which Francis Ford Coppola was willing to go to portray his vision. Take the opening shot of the movie, for example, which sees the brutal destruction of a Vietnamese jungle, showered with napalm by American helicopters. You'd be forgiven for thinking these shots were merely stock footage of the actual Vietnamese war, or footage of a natural jungle fire, but the reality is something else entirely. Coppola orchestrated and filmed the entire scene, recruiting actual military personnel to dump around one-thousand two-hundred gallons of fuel onto the trees, setting them alight in huge explosions. By the end of the shoot (which ultimately lasted mere minutes that's how quickly the trees burned) Coppola had destroyed a substantial amount of jungle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU0DxJVWhGw
