When Does an Empire Die?

When a moviemaker creates a masterpiece, it is likely to affect how he conducts the rest of his career. This seems to have been the case for Francis Ford Coppola, who, as we all know, pulled up stakes for the Philippines in the mid-1970s to make a masterpiece, Apocalypse Now. It is still regarded as one of the most stylistically sinuous and thematically allusive of all films about the Vietnam War, but it was not birthed without great pains, including the termination from the cast of the original Captain Willard, Harvey Keitel (replaced by Martin Sheen), the reluctant participation and inconvenient weight gain of Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz, and the intervention of extreme weather events, including a typhoon that torpedoed the sets.