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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The helicopter sound isn't just a combat sound in this movie. It's like the defining sound in World War II movies of the German police cars ...
Duh-dah-duh-dah-duh-dah ...
Right -- so the sound of helicopters conjures up this sense of an existential prison. It's like a jail sound that envelops Willard periodically.
Right. But all of this was latent. Even the idea of starting with the shot we started with. That was something that came to Francis when he was looking at dailies. The film never began that way in the script. He was looking at the napalm drop when Kilgore calls in the planes to drop napalm on the jungle so that his guys can surf. There were six cameras shooting. The sixth camera had a telephoto lens and was shooting at, oh, 120 frames per second. Francis saw this shot from the sixth camera and recognized something about how the jungle was compressed and flattened by the telephoto lens, and about how the helicopters, because of this visual compression, just sort of slide sideways across the frame in a very dreamlike way. That's when he got the idea, "This is Vietnam," just by looking at this scene that explodes in fire. There was something dramatic about these three elements of green jungle, helicopter and fire.
Then we took things from the end of the film, and put the Doors' "This is the end" and worked that in -- so that somehow the end of the film is contained in the beginning. And then, once that was in place, there were shots done specifically to feed that thought. The images of Willard in his room alone drunk were actually character-rehearsal shots. Francis had the notion that if you wanted an actor to investigate a certain part of a character in an improvisational way, you turn film on it, even if you think the film will never be used, because it makes the actor wake up -- after all, it could be used, resources are being expended. What you wind up with has a different feel than if it were just an actor and a director alone in a room saying, "Let's investigate" (although some of that is done, too). Even those shots at the time were not meant to be in the film, but such amazing things came out of it that we felt, all right, let's put that shot of the helicopters and the jungle together with this stuff and see what we need to get from here to there.
As I said, the whole idea of the helicopter sound of the war wasn't a discovery; that was talked about in 1969. But Francis made the decision to make this film quadraphonic [or quintaphonic]. Essentially the format we established for "Apocalypse Now" is now the standard for DVD and any big Dolby Stereo film: three channels in the front and then two channels in the rear and then subwoofers. And helicopters are ideally suited to that, because they fly and move around and hover. So it's a perfect format for a helicopter movie, compared to, say, a submarine movie, or a boat movie, or an airplane movie. Helicopters can position themselves and swoop and go in circles; they are kind of circular beings.
I think people were impressed because there was this whole new way of listening to movies and it matched the main aural subjects, which were helicopters. Then you had the fact that the film is told from a particular person's point of view, that it presents the war as seen by Captain Benjamin Willard. And we establish right from the start that the helicopter sound is part of what makes you identify with Willard -- it subjectivizes your experience, so it's not just an impressive technical sound, it's got a psychic dimension that is very deep. So you have all this working at different levels at the same time. Some of it was deliberately investigated right from the beginning, even when there was a different director, so it was inherent in the script. But a lot of it was also discovered in the process of making the film.
I remember, having edited the attack scene, I knew that there was rarely a moment when you were seeing more than [approximately] eight helicopters. Francis had gotten these helicopters under contract from the Philippines' army; at night they were repainted and sent down to the south to terrorize the Communist rebels. We never knew the next morning how many would come back and in what condition. And they had to be repainted in American colors -- it was an unbelievable process.
We didn't have that many helicopters, but when you edit a scene, you cut it so that there seem to be eight helicopters over there, and -- here come another eight from this direction, and here are four more flying overhead from the north, and here are three more from the south. So eight plus eight plus four plus three is 23! And the funny thing is, that when I was cutting it, that didn't occur to me -- I knew it instinctively, but it wasn't conscious stuff. Then, when I set out to mix the film and talked to the sound editors, they said, well, these are coming from there, and you have to keep those sounds going when you bring in the other ones. It was like coming upon the Grand Canyon after wandering in the forest.
I realized how immense this was really going to be. You are hit by the immensity of that sound, but visually there's a tricky thing going on, because you're never looking at more than eight at one time. That was another discovery -- and, again, it was latent. You only confronted the monumentality of this picture when you were doing it. And the movie became particularly monumental because of the nature of the format we were dealing with. Nobody else had ever done it before: We were grappling with sound in three dimensions.
I'm old enough to remember the black-and-white TV footage and the choppers being part of that, but I don't have a specific memory of the sound from that footage. Did you in the late '70s?
Again, it was probably there but latent. The soldiers that we talked to would talk about it. And there was a wonderful documentarian who had worked in Vietnam -- Eugene Jones was his name. He said you always heard these whirling sounds: They permeated everything.
Was the recording of the helicopters done on location in the Philippines?
No, that was done at a Coast Guard station up in Washington. We did three days of recording there. The Coast Guard was very cooperative. We went up with a list of what we needed, and they had all the different kinds of helicopters. The LOACHes, some acronym for these buzzy little helicopters, and the HUEYs, another acronym [for the war's main helicopter utility vehicle], and a third one, with the double rotors on it, which makes a thuddier sound. A great thing about helicopters is that their variety has a musical element to it. So the LOACHes were the high strings, and the HUEYs occupy the middle range, and then these helicopters with two blades, fore and aft, have a huge thwud-thwud-thwud sound to them.
