I'm surprised the Coast Guard cooperated; all we read about at the time was that no branches of the American military would help you.

That is basically true, and it's one of the most interesting things about this film. I can't think of another film with a military theme done on this scale that didn't have the cooperation of the military. And no matter how neutral a presence, if there is a military presence on the set -- Colonel Somebody -- when you shoot the scenes, it inevitably sets a tone. There was none of that here -- in fact, just the opposite. Once the word got out that this film was being made in the Philippines, and that the Army was not cooperating with us, it attracted all these real-life Captain Willards like a magnet. They were people who had gone Missing In Action but were still alive and living anonymously on some island in the Philippines, doing bush-piloting or beachcombing. They came to this film and hovered around it and said, "No, here's how it would happen." So we did have advisors, but an opposite kind of advisors from the ones you'd normally get on a military film, who will naturally give you what the military wants you to put out.

Even the most realistic sounds in the film are sometimes hard to identify; they come at you as part of an integrated scheme.

That's partly because we took those realistic sounds and deconstructed them on synthesizers. One more wonderful thing about the way a helicopter sounds is that it has a different articulation as it passes by. You'll hear five or six different things going on when you get into different spatial relationships to it -- sometimes you'll hear just the rotor, then you'll hear just the turbine, then you'll hear just the tail rotor, then you'll hear some clanking piece of machinery, then you'll hear low thuds. The helicopter provides you with the sound equivalent of shining a white light through a prism -- you get the hidden colors of the rainbow. So we would hear a real helicopter at any point and say -- listen to that! Let's see if we can synthesize just that! And using a synthesizer we created artificial sounds to mimic the real sound.

We formed what became known as "the ghost helicopter" out of this, which was sort of an aural Lego kit. You could put the helicopters all together and they'd sound very realistic. But then you could take them apart and play any one of them individually, a single helicopter on multiple tracks, and that's what the film begins with. That sound -- that whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop sound -- is the synthesized blade sound. And in isolation it had this dream-like quality.

We used lots of isolated sounds in various places, wherever we felt we needed to color the realistic sound and make it hyper-real. Throughout the movie, the helicopter is positioned between realism and hyper-realism and surrealism. It can slide anywhere on the spectrum. In musical terms, we thought of the helicopters as our string section.

Small arms fire would be the woodwinds, I guess. The "Valkyrie" scene has the Wagner music in it. It has choppers in it. And it also has the small-arms fire, which occupies a different region. Then there are the artillery sounds -- the mortar fire -- and a vocal part of the sandwich, from the sounds the people are making. Another layer is the clinkity-clink sounds of people moving around. Then there's a layer of winds and fire and leaves blowing.

There were a lot of instruments in the film. The soldiers we talked to said that anywhere you went in Vietnam you could hear some low artillery going on. Thunk-a-thunk-thunk-thunk. That has a kind of timpani quality to it. But it also sounds like a heartbeat. We positioned it "way over in the next valley," so to speak. We put it in when Willard and Chef [Frederic Forrest] were coming in on the tiger. Before you know that there's a tiger in the jungle, you hear naturalistic sounds of the jungle. But underneath it is this thunk-a-thunk-thunk, thunk-thunk-thunk.

What's interesting when you're working with image and sound is to stretch the content of what you're looking at to the breaking point. In the case of the tiger scene, we stretched it to the point where nothing that you're looking at has anything to do with what you are hearing. Under these circumstances people tend not to hear sound consciously. But they process it nevertheless, and it has the effect of a heartbeat. If you stopped the film and asked, "What's that sound?" -- people would come to a certain level of consciousness, and say, "Oh, it must be distant artillery." But they don't: The sound operates at this subcutaneous level.

In the Do Lung Bridge scene, what was interesting was to create a sonic environment where we took sounds away. You look at the scene and see explosions going off, but you don't hear any of them. Because in that particular scene we're going into the aural consciousness of a character called Roach, who is a human bat. The way he hears the war, when he sets out to kill "Charlie" -- and he echo-locates Charlie -- he doesn't hear anything except Charlie. The goal was to get audiences into the place where they hear only what Roach hears.

I worked on the napalm sound for a day in the mix. It includes a real napalm drop we got from a recording the Swiss Army had made of it. We built on that. The trick is always to articulate it, not to have everything hit at once or else it turns into a ball of mush. You have to let the ear hear fragments of each thing so that the ear builds it together, rather than have the film build it for the audience.

Francis was depicting Vietnam as the rock 'n' roll war, which must have dictated part of what you did.

At one point in the film's evolution, there was much more Doors music. The funny thing was that wherever we put whatever piece of Doors music we had, it was as if we had Jim Morrison in the room looking at the images and coming up with words to describe them. It was too much. All of the classic Doors songs, when we put them up against the film, were doing exactly what you don't want music to do -- they were simply duplicating what you were seeing visually or commenting too exactly on it. So we shifted course. But I think "The End" becomes even more powerful because of its placement at the beginning and at the end and nowhere in between. It would have been watered down if we'd followed the path we'd originally chosen.

Even the original music by Carmine and Francis Coppola recalls musique concrete -- music made of sound.

I was greatly influenced by musique concrete when I was, like, 10. I was completely mesmerized by the idea that you could make music out of sounds. So that's been a constant influence on all my work. But the films I'd done before "Apocalypse Now" had all been mono films ["American Graffiti," "The Conversation"]. Here was not just a stereo film but a whole new format. It was like jumping from a Stone Age tribe into, say, Wall Street. I was terrified of misusing the palette; I thought the worst thing to do would be to overuse it. I thought, instead, what you had to do was shrink the film down to mono at times, and let it be there quite a while. People without knowing it would think, "This is mono." And then, at that moment, you could make it a stereo film, and that would be impressive because now it was different.

And when people got used to that, you could make it quintaphonic or six-track -- at the right, the necessary moment. I wrote down a master chart of the scenes in the film with two timelines running alongside it. The results were like four-dimensional Einstein drawings. Sometimes there were single lines, and sometimes triple lines, and sometimes sextuple lines. When we were mixing the sound it showed us when the sound effects were mono and the music was in stereo, or when we should open the sound effects to stereo and close the music down to mono.

It kept us from losing perspective. It was the equivalent of what mural-makers do by breaking a huge mural up into a grid pattern. You only work on one part of the grid at a time. But because you have visualized the whole thing in advance and broken it down into pieces, you know what to do when you're working on any one piece. When I think about it, my unique contribution to the film was this concept of "sound design." It was the working-out of the mural grid that underlay the structure of the film, which was being developed with a dimensionality that hadn't been attempted before.

Is it ironic that this film, which shows the impotence of our technology against the spirit of the North Vietnamese, used such advanced technology to convey its message?

The relationship between the human spirit and technology is not a simple equation. It's got many dimensions to it, too. Part of the lesson of the film is that war has a seductive power. There's that quote from General Lee, which goes, "It is a good thing war is so terrible. Otherwise, men would love it too much." People gravitate to the power that any kind of technology gives you -- the power of a sword, the power of a machine gun, the power of a napalm drop or the power of an atom bomb.

People like that power. They like the flash of fire and the sensory recoil that goes with it. They like the smell of it. You have to put that alongside the negative aspects of war. But you have to remember that quote from Lee. Why do we do this? We do it for all of the usual reasons of acquisition and influence. But we also do it because of the seductiveness of it. The technology that we marshaled to make this film allows the audience to participate in the seductiveness of it. If the film had less powerful sound and less powerful visuals, that wouldn't have been possible.

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