“I carried a green Penguin paperback copy of Heart of Darkness with all my underlining in it. “You have to realise, when I was making this I didn’t carry a script around,” he says. The film transposes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness on to the conflict in Vietnam, and Coppola rewrote and reworked John Milius’s original script so that it would be more faithful to the book. “I really feel that this version of Apocalypse Now achieves more of what that theme has to give than any of the previous versions,” he says. He has now cut back about 14 minutes to finally arrive at his ideal, which he argues is the strongest elucidation yet of the film’s examination of human morality. In contrast, however, he feels he somewhat overegged the 2001 redux version, which added 49 minutes to the original’s running time of two hours and 33 minutes. Watch the trailer for Apocalypse Now: Final Cut - video It seemed that’s what had happened with Apocalypse,” he says. “What is considered avant garde in one moment, 20 years later is used for wallpaper and becomes part of the culture. In a nutshell, his assessment was that he had made too many concessions in the film’s original 1979 release, and that the march of time had blunted some of its surreal edge. It is 40 years this month since Apocalypse Now first hit cinemas, and to mark the anniversary Coppola returned once again to his editing suite. He is well aware that he’s doing this, of course, but, as he observes with a smile: “When you’re 80, you don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to talk about.” In conversation he tends towards the philosophical, and his elliptical answers stray from his films towards his admiration for the likes of Aristotle and William Morris. He has also dropped four and a half stone (64lb), the result of four months spent at a weight-loss clinic. Gone are the hirsute beard and thick-rimmed spectacles that were once his trademark they are replaced by neat white stubble and, slung loosely around his neck, a modern pair of magnetic glasses that unclip at the nose. When he welcomes me to Inglenook, Coppola, who turned 80 in April, is almost unrecognisable from his 70s heyday. It is also here, in the estate’s old carriage house, that Coppola has spent the past two years restoring and refining a new – and he says definitive – version of that film: Apocalypse Now: Final Cut. Bought in 1975 by Francis Ford Coppola, using his spoils from The Godfather, he promptly risked the property, staking it to raise money for what would become one of the most arduous and challenging productions in the history of film. Yet arguably the greatest war film of them all owes much to Inglenook.
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