Francis Ford Coppola isn’t above tinkering with his greatest works. Much like filmmakers such as Ridley Scott (who loves a good re-edit as much as the next person — looking at you, “Blade Runner”), Coppola will go back to the editing bay if it means turning in a version of a film that he feels is better than the original. And that is perfectly illustrated with his 1979 film, “Apocalypse Now,” which is about to receive its third official release with a brand-new cut of the film.
Titled “Apocalypse Now: Final Cut,” Coppola has gone back and finally gotten the chance to cut his war epic exactly how he envisioned it in 1979. Except for this time, according to a new interview with Rolling Stone, he doesn’t have people in his ear dictating what to do with the cut of the film.
“When we were releasing the film in ’79,we knew it was too long, and too weird,” said Coppola. “The film was surreal — my feeling was the war was surreal, so anything trying to get to the heart of it was going to be out-there. But distributors kept telling us, ‘Make it shorter, make it less weird.’ So we did.”
He continued, “Then, when folks were making my wife’s documentary [1991’s ‘Hearts of Darkness’], they had access to all of the hours and hours of footage. And by that point, the mainstream has sort of absorbed what we were doing in ‘Apocalypse,’ so it didn’t seem quite so weird anymore. Ironically, it was the distributors who came to me and said, ‘Well, you have all this stuff, why not put what you cut back in?’ That’s how ‘Redux’ happened.”
“Apocalypse Now: Redux” is a bit of a sore subject for many fans of the original. With its release in 2001, there seems to be a large number of film fans that started with that version of the film, before finally viewing the original (if they ever go back and watch the original at all). For those that love “Apocalypse Now,” ‘Redux’ is more of a completionist endeavor, not really the definitive version of the film, but an added bonus if you’re a fan of the classic.
But that’s where ‘Final Cut’ comes in, as Coppola explains why this third cut of the film is the definitive one, in his eyes, at least.
“But I always felt that the first version was too shortened — not too short, too shortened — and the other version was . . . well, maybe we shouldn’t have put everything back in,” said the filmmaker. “A movie is in service to a theme that runs through it, and I always felt that ‘Redux’ never quite supported the theme of the film as fundamentally as I wanted. So we started with the second version, because that already had the restorations and corrections, and we began to tweak from there. I didn’t intend to make a new version . . . but I felt that [‘Final Cut’] being longer than one and shorter than the other was the perfect blend.”
So, for those wanting to revisit “Apocalypse Now” in the truest Director’s Cut that has yet to be released, it would appear that ‘Final Cut’ is the way to go. The new restoration and edit of the film will be in theaters later this month, including IMAX, before being released on 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD.