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Hampton discusses "Apocalypse Now Redux," director Francis Ford Coppola's reedited, restored, three-hour nineteen-minute "Director's Cut" of his most insanely audacious and problematic films. The new version will premiere at this year's Cannes, where it was first shown in 1979 as a "work-in-progress."

Somewhere far upriver, two or three clicks past the last outpost of progress, the last figment of civilized imagination, they're still out there. Still riding the backwash of the war as deep into the jungle as their recon boat will take them, still set on completing their mission. Or simply trying to remember what the hell they were looking for in the first place - maybe in the back of their blown minds some recall "Nirvana Now!": the peace-and-love slogan this war turned upside down on them. Whatever it was, Willard had dragged Lance and the rest of them (shades now, ghosts of some American Experiment, as if they were ever anything else) all this way to find it; if he was going down, they were going with him. So the crew drifted toward the mouth of the whirlpool, the undead and the dead floating where the current takes them now, slowly circling the black hole at the heart of the world....

Of the ten-thousand-and-one things that can he said of - or read into - Apocalypse Now Redux, Francis Ford Coppola's reedited, gorgeously restored, three-hour nineteen-minute "Director's Cut" of his most insanely audacious and problematic film, the first and last have to be that Coppola's Doors and "Valkyries" and 'copters Vietnam fantasia remains just as wild and crazy and unresolved after all these years as it was when it was first shown at Cannes in 1979 as a "work-in-progress." If anything, the Redux version that will premiere all over again at this years Cannes is all that but even more so: a methodically luxuriant jungle-fever dream - a stately, processional acid trip through a tropical Inferno - from which its inhabitants (and perhaps its audience) can never really awaken, where no real ending is possible. At least none that can satisfactorily square the conflicting debts (of history and poetic license, hubris and ambivalence, sensuality and intellect, vision and blindness) the movie so recklessly incurs. Burrowing further inward even as it spills into new terrain, Apocalypse Now Redux (a dud title no one seems to have been able to talk Coppola out of) hasn't untangled the original's meanings and deceits and cross-purposes but instead has lovingly elaborated the strangeness inherent in the journey to begin with. Everything here feels both dispersed and intensified, making those darkness-visible contradictions feel more viscerally and poignantly irreconcilable: the bitterness, the giddiness, the savagery, the mockery, the California surfers, the Playboy Bunnies, the crackpot mythopoeia, the white man's angst, the banality, the absurdity, and the overriding romance of Otherness. And all of it in a mesmerizing, open-ended form that manages to combine your classic tragical-history Odyssey with your basic let's-fuck-Gidgetand-kill-anything-that-moves Beach Party. So even if you happen to feel some gnawing unease about something Francis left out (or in) this time around, there are other potential versions waiting their eventual turn, other footage that has yet to be resurrected. The eternally dubious Willard-and-Lance-- sail-away wrap-up might still someday be jettisoned in favor of "the other one" he described to Rolling Stone in 1979: "Ending with Willard up on the steps, after killing Kurtz. He's in front of the people; the people all bow. He looks, he looks back, he looks again - then it goes to the green face and 'the horror, the horror.' "

After all, in the same interview he said of all the material that was cut in the first place: "We don't have another hour of real stuff. What we have is there." So who knows? - by 2021 he may have another change of heart and mind, reenlisting ace editor and sound designer Walter Murch to go on another "fishing expedition" (just like Willard) back into the vaults, getting Canal Plus to once more put up seed money, and releasing the whole shebang as an interactive digital Super-Hi-Def holographic DVD: Apocalypse Now Deluxe, 14 hours long, featuring all of the stunning, desperately naked (and funny) behind-- the-scenes footage Eleanor Coppola shot that was included in the documentary Hearts of Darkness, the destruction of the Kurtz compound (omitted from the rerelease because it can't be integrated into the story, yet the one passage where Coppola truly found the beautiful and terrifying visual correlative to "the horror" he was after), the virtual-reality option where you can see the action unfold through Captain Willard's or Colonel Kurtz's or even Coppola's own bloodshot eyes. (When Orson Welles prepared his adaption of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, he planned not only to play both Kurtz and Marlow -- renamed Willard in Apocalypse - but to shoot the entire movie in first-person POV, with the camera showing everything through Marlow's eyes: if it had been green-lighted instead of Kane, the project likely would have gone down as the grandest folly in film history. The Conrad source material seems to have had much the same effect on Coppola, goading him to try out a form of "method directing" by attempting to turn himself into Willard and Kurtz too.)

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For now, though, we'll have to settle for Apocalypse Now Redux to hold us over for the next couple decades, and it will more than suffice in the meantime, thank you. "I began to think in terms of the kind of movie that is impossible," Coppola said after completing his original version, and it is those latent traces of impossibility that have always given Apocalypse Now its spectral allure, its enduring hold on the imagination that no other Vietnam film - indeed few other movies, period - can claim. The bare bones of the plot itself are nothing special - Martin Sheen's burnt-out Willard is sent to find and assassinate Marlon Brando's renegade Col. Kurtz - and even in Redux, with more room to breathe and less emphasis on steadily advancing the putative story, it never escapes the script's origin in John Milius' flaky, zap-pow comicbook sensibility. Willard, Kurtz, Robert Duvall's pitch-perfect caricature of the Air Cavalry cowboy Col. Kilgore (think John Wayne in The Surfers), the stock character PBR boat crew (Sam Bottoms' surfing stoner Lance is spared, but Albert Hall's by-- the-book black skipper Chief, Frederic Forrest's "wrapped too tight," zoned-out Chef, and Larry Fishburne's baby-faced kid Mr. Clean are killed off one by one), the Bunnies, the French Colonial holdouts -- they're all ciphers and stereotypes, and you can still see the remnants of dialogue balloons coming out of their mouths. They're figures in an AWOL passion play, draped in the progressive layers of irrationalist allegory and allusion Coppola kept churning into Milius' psychedelic-warrior mulch, and then bathed in cinematographer Vittorio Storaro's ravished, otherworldly auras of light and darkness. (Apocalypse Now Redux's new Technicolor dye-transfer print has an almost overabundant richness of painterly detail: Brando's shaved head looming out of the pitch-blackest shadows like some primeval lunar talisman or the play of sunlight off the water and the lens making the river itself into a silent, watchful character amid the floating carnage and desolation.) What keeps the movie from either coming unglued altogether or imploding under the weight of its solipsistic tendencies is the presence of another dimension behind the main action, the uncanny penumbra of things unseen but suggested, intuited - a fitful trance where the madness and unreason of war intersects with the madness and unreason of moviemaking.

"My film is not a movie," you can watch Coppola tell the assembled press corps at Cannes in Hearts of Darkness, facing down a thousand-odd reporters in 1979 to refute the years of rumors, half-- truths, and innuendo that both dogged the film's immensely difficult production and elevated it to legendary status before even a frame had been seen by the public. "My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam." That's Kurtz talk, or maybe Francis speaking in the guise of Orson Welles playing Citizen Kurtz. (Peter Cowie's The Apocalypse Now Book reports that Coppola sent former Godard collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin the following telegram: "Come to the Philippines and teach me two or three things about Godard, and I'll teach you two or three things about big-time filmmaking!" You supply the dialectics - I'll supply the war.) But watching the movie, you have to take him at his word. Not because "it's what it was really like" in any remotely literal, realistic way -- looking to Apocalypse Now for historical perspective is like reading the Book of Revelation for stock tips - but because it captures a highly infectious strain of balls-out, full-tilt viral craziness: "The way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane." That visionary megalomania comes straight from the heart: Coppola's built a bridge between the ambitions of Welles and the countercultural hangover represented by Dennis Hopper (whose gibbering acid-casualty sidekick routine in the film tortures the audience more thoroughly than Kurtz does Willard); it's at once a larger-than-life meta-movie and a "terminate with extreme prejudice," end-of-cinema Last Movie. As in the phantasmic Do Lung Bridge sequence, Coppola blows the film up and rebuilds it as an endlessly spasmodic loop that begins with "The End."

Apocalypse Now aspires to be more than a mere film, more than even a "masterpiece." It aspires to be a total work of art that absorbs reality (the fusion of opera and documentary) and transforms it into an all-encompassing experience: the dream that feels more real than life. It isn't a picture of the real war or the real people there, but a peerless evocation of the war as filtered through technology, the mass media, and the ruins of dead mythologies. In Coppola's 'Nam, what's inescapable isn't the VC so much as TV (that wonderful cameo of Coppola as the television news producer yelling at Willard and his men to pretend they're in combat: "Don't look at the camera"), old movies (the supposedly "authentic" voiceovers Michael Herr wrote for Willard sound to me like standard hardboiled-dick talk, as if Conrad's Marlow had metastasized into Raymond Chandler's Marlowe), show business (let's hear it for those fabulous USO-touring centerfolds, minus only Bob Hope), and the buzzing feedback of rock'n'roll. Apocalypse Now isn't about how we invaded Vietnam so much as how the war invaded our psyches, how it permeated pop culture (Jim Morrison serving as the PBR's unofficial tour guide) and came to be the sight-andsoundtrack to a new, bad American dream. In that idyll of apocalypse, defeat takes on a perfect, preordained inevitability - when you've got nothing left to lose, on some level the war really does become Disneyland with live ammunition, at least until your ticket's punched - and it develops its own downward-spiral momentum and exhilaration. Kafka would have understood the somnambulist journey undertaken here; he would have recognized Willard and Kurtz as brothers-in-mutilated-- arms (though he might have given them less mumbo-jumbo to mutter); he would have smiled at the conceit of this fairy-- tale Amerika fighting so zealously on behalf of its Playmates' innocence and for the inalienable right of every red-- blooded soldier-boy to take his turn defiling that innocence.

Some of the fleshed-out sections in Apocalypse Now Redux (particularly involving the more irreverent, adversarial relationship between Willard's PBR crew and that murderously "goofy fuck" Kilgore) heighten the feeling that the movie at least periodically has one foot planted in an actual time and place. There's even a new moment where Brando gives Kurtz a shot of lucid intelligence, and for the only time in the movie you glimpse the authority and force of personality that could have made him a threat and a real leader: calmly reading Time magazine's deluded war reporting to his just-about-broken captive Willard, quoting a Rand Corporation expert who says, "Things felt much better, they smelled much better over there." And then in an aside to poor Willard, Kurtz savoring the witch-doctor irony of that assessment: "How do they smell to you, soldier?" The previously unused medevac scenes and the fabled, fog-enshrouded French plantation sequence (the Apocalypse faithful have waited for it as if it were footage of the Last Supper) have the opposite effect, expanding the film into an interior landscape of hallucination and breakdown. The boat stops at a medical evacution post that is almost submerged in rain and mud (the exteriors shot during a real monsoon) where the Playmates who fled the riot at the USO show are now stranded. The sequence proceeds into an evocatively deranged vaudeville sketch in which soldiers wrestle each other in the slop, a plaster water buffalo serves as a camp mascot, a straggling enlisted man sneers, "I'm just a working girl," to Willard, and the blithely prostituted Playmates are so much sexual cannon fodder. "They made me do things I didn't want to," sighs Cyndi Woods' malleable Playmate of the Year, paralleling the dehumanization of the war just a tad too neatly. In the bootleg video of the five-hour plus rough-cut that has circulated among Apocalypse connoisseurs, the Playmate stuff is flat and interminable, but in Redux Walter Murch kick-starts it by adroitly inter-- cutting between Woods' scene with equally doe-eyed Sam Bottoms and Colleen Camp's with Fred Forrest (Miss December rattling on about birds while Chef gets her into the wig and pose he remembers from the magazine layout) to build to a suitably creepy punch line. After a corpse of "someone's son" falls out of a coffin, a semi-hysterical Woods is comforted by Lance only to see Cleans eager face at the window: "Who're you?" she snaps; "I'm next, ma'am."

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The French plantation is something else again - a trip back in (or out of) time where Willard's crew meets the ghosts of Colonialism Past. The tough, romantic fatalists they encounter are also ghosts of the movie past, a band of hearty French resistance fighters who settled at Fort Apache. (The Vietnamese communists are their Indians: resourceful, cunning, invisible adversaries.) As gallant military men, they assist in Cleans funeral; the ceremony's stirring displacement is straight from an imaginary Jean-Luc Ford Far-Eastern. That feeling carries over to the dinner, shot in autumnal tones verging on sepia, where as natural aristocrats the French serve their visitors an elegant dinner and talk history, albeit the phantasmagorical kind where a cranky old uncle appears with an accordion and blurts, "We are dead - I believe in nothing." The discussion veers from B-- movie poli-sci to outright travesty, then Sheen and Aurore Clement sneak off for a ludicrous little romantic interlude, very Fifties soap opera, with a dash of nudity and opium and perfumed howlers like "There are two of you -- one that kills and one that loves."

There remains a degree of conventionality in even the film's most brutally harrowing sequence, when Clean mistakenly opens fire on a sampan carrying Vietnamese refugees: Willard's ruthless execution of the female survivor makes for a too-facile contrast - both ironic and sentimental - with the unscathed puppy Lance adopts. The same goes for the much-too-beloved Kilgore helicopter attack, with its blaring Wagner and thrilling action spectacle, brilliantly staged, edited, and mixed, but whose satiric qualities pale in the wake of its war-machine exhilaration. You get a sense of the limits of Coppola and Co.'s imagination when you realize the VC girl who wordlessly throws a grenade into one of the choppers and is then instantly hunted down from the air is the closest thing to a Vietnamese presence in the whole three-plus hours. Apocalypse Now Redux is still very much about the white man's blindness, but it's also afflicted by it (as with the newly added story Clean tells about an American G.I.'s revenge on the South Vietnamese officer who messed with his copy of Playboy: "Blew his ass clean off the dock." To which Chef philosophically replies, "Bummer for the gook, though").

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But the deepest paradox of Apocalypse Now (Redux or otherwise) is that none of this really diminishes its weird power: in some perversely appropriate way, its hopeless blind spots and unrealized possibilities embody the doomed, chaotic essence of the Vietnam Trip just as much as its fully realized setpieces. The private war going on in Coppola's head is whether to try and impose some kind of moral order on all this abject irrationality, or jump ship and join Kurtz and Willard in deserting reality and partaking of their controlled madness. However, the arrival and confrontation at the Kurtz compound is still paralyzed by a fatal indecisiveness, a loss of nerve or inspiration, or an unwillingness to pursue the ghosts and demons he shared with Willard and Kurtz to the end of the line. At that point, Coppola falls back on gimmicks ranging from spooky synthesizer music and ominous lightning flashes to Werner Herzog-ish images of tribalism conquering the conquerors (Aguirre: The Wrath of God obviously made quite an impression on Coppola; Chiefs earlier, ignominous death-by-- spear derives from the same source). Instead of Kurtz as the shell of a once-- great man, we see Brando, the impetuous, bored shell of a once-great actor: a fearsome mask with nobody inside it. Perhaps if the last three reels had fallen silent, Coppola might have discovered the danger and enigma he was after, instead of drowning his images in all those hollow, posturing explanations. "Can you imagine," Coppola rhapsodized to his wife Eleanor in postproduction, "improvising the whole ending and it all being there, and being great." Well, maybe it is somewhere other than here, stowed away in the five-and-a-half-hour rough cut (where the ceremonial dance and ritual slaughter is much more protracted and sensual, set to "When the Music's Over," giving it an anarchic-hippie symmetry with "The End"), but Apocalypse Now Redux hasn't salvaged the ending, or even attempted to; it's just made it more superfluous.

On the DVD of the original version, Coppola gives a brief account of how the phosphorescent, abstract footage of the Kurtz compound going up in strobe-lit flames came to be shot, why it was excluded from the final film, and the mistake he made in using it for the end credits of the 35mm version. He explains why it doesn't fit and why it only gave people the wrong impression of how the movie really ends. Then he goes on to interpret the ending he settled on, saying, "I wanted Willard to throw away his weapons and have the Montagnard followers throw them away as well, and have him take young Lance by the hand and maybe lead him to a new age." In light of everything that transpires before that moment in Apocalypse Now, it is hard to accept such an unambiguous, untroubled resolution, and reading what Coppola said in Rolling Stone in '79, he doesn't sound so convinced by it himself. He saw in Kurtz "the idea that you could go so far that you couldn't get back, even if you wanted to get back." And he described the alternate ending that was never released, with Willard on the steps, "oscillat[ing] back and forth between [staying or going back down the river], caught in that dilemma of choice.... I thought that was what the movie was about." I'm sure it's that intense aura of contingency and the provisional that keeps Apocalypse Now alive, a work-in-- progress to this day, its meanings far from exhausted, a Pandora's box worth of choices, still in doubt and open to revision. The journey isn't complete, and in the movie there's no going back to the safety of civilization and closure: the myth and mise-en-scene has assumed an independent, unpredictable life of its own. There's no telling when Apocalypse Now Redux itself might be subject to some future revision as small as substituting the funky Otis Redding cover of "Satisfaction" used in the rough cut for the Rolling Stones' original - a minuscule detail that might open up a whole set of considerations (racial and otherwise), and begin to turn it into a new movie all over again.

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