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lassi cut
Apocalypse Now
KEVIN HILTON uncovers
the unconventional
approach taken to sound on
Apocalypse Now.
T
here are films that are an all-out
assault on the senses, hurling images, sounds,
performances, and ideas from the screen at the
audience. Apocalypse Now (1979) is such a film.
Even the Sound Designer, Re-Recording Mixer, and Picture
Editor on the movie, Walter Murch, wondered if the style
Audio Director Francis Ford Coppola wanted for it was
necessary. But when he saw the finished production, with
its big Panavision visuals, he says he realised the soundtrack
he helped create was the thing to do.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
agreed. Murch, along with Mark Berger, Richard Beggs,
and Nathan Boxer, won the Oscar for Best Sound at the
1980 ceremony but missed out on the Best Film Editing
award, for which he was also nominated.
In Apocalypse Now the sound works with the visuals
to create a histrionic, disjointed, and hallucinogenic
world that drags the viewer into the story. In a 1998
interview Murch told me he looks on the film in terms of
a number of firsts. It was the
first multi-track film he had
worked on; other new territory
was explored because it
was a multi-channel soundtrack
with low frequency
enhancement.
Apocalypse Now was shot
two years after the first Star
Wars movie, which had popularised
Dolby Stereo matrixed
surround sound. Murch and
his team decided to push
the technology further and
create discrete stereo surround
with six-channel
play-back (front left, centre,
right, rear left, rear right,
and a sub-woofer channel),
something that would
not become standard practice for nearly
15 years.
The only way this configuration could be put
on film was to use a 70mm print with six channels
of magnetic sound. Cinemas of the time
were not equipped to cope with this, so 17 selected
theatres in the US were rewired.
Breaking Away From Convention
There was also an unconventional approach to two
audio components of Apocalypse Now: the background
atmosphere of crickets and the narration. In Michael
Ondaatje’s book The Conversations, Murch explains that
just going out in the field and recording a thousand
crickets would not have given the “hallucinatory clarity”
he wanted. Instead he recorded individual crickets
and multiplied the sound electronically to produce a
thousand, giving the sensation that each insect had its
own mic.
The voice-over by Martin Sheen as Captain Willard
has an intimate, conspiratorial quality. This was
achieved by close-miking Sheen, who Murch directed
to imagine the mic was somebody’s head on a pillow
next to him, and then spreading the recorded narration
between all three front loudspeaker channels to envelope
the audience with Willard’s thoughts.
The original score for Apocalypse Now is credited to
Francis Coppola and his father Carmine, but this is overshadowed
by two pieces of “found” music. Wagner’s The
Ride of the Valkyries, played by the Wiener Philharmoniker
conducted by Sir Georg Solti, accompanies the approach
of Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) and his
helicopters. Just as the film was being finished Murch
couldn’t get permission from Decca Europe to use the
recording. The closet alternative version in terms of metric
pace was by Erich Leinsdorf and the LA Philharmonic,
but it highlighted the strings, rather than the brass.
In The Conversations Murch says this affected the visuals
because the brassiness enhanced the acidity of the blue
sea. Luckily Coppola contacted Solti, who persuaded
Decca to clear the rights.
Apocalypse Now opens with The End by The Doors playing
over images of a forest being napalmed, intercut
with footage of Martin Sheen drunk in a hotel room.
In 1998 Murch commented that although he was pleased
with the scene he was not a big fan of The Doors.
New Century, New Sound
In 2001 Coppola released Apocalypse Now Redux,
featuring 49 minutes of “new” footage taken from the
raw, unedited dailies. The audio on these sequences
had not been mixed, so soundtracks had to be built
up from scratch and then integrated into the fabric
of the existing footage. Several elements already
existed on six-track, including jungle backgrounds and
small arms fire. These were loaded into a DAW and
combined with new explosions and effects that were
unique to each particular section.
All this material was held either in a former salt
mine used as an archive or at Coppola’s vineyard home
and post facility in northern California. Coppola has a
reputation as a hoarder, or pack rat, but this proved
useful on the Redux, particularly when dealing with
the original mixes. These had been encoded in dbx and
were only converted into Dolby for the print master.
Because Coppola had kept all the dbx cards these
sections could be used again with little trouble.
Murch told me in 2001 that because he had spent
two “challenging, draining” years on the original film,
so he approached the new version with some agitation.
Apocalypse Now is recognised as much for the excesses
and problems of its production as it as a work of art.
The making-of-documentary Hearts of Darkness
shows the whacked out condition of the cast
and crew after so long on location: the God-like
Coppola, the bloated husk of Marlon Brando, and
an in-orbit Dennis Hopper. Unearthing the location
tapes during the preparation of Apocalypse Now
Redux bought home the strain on the crew. On the
early takes they’re bright and efficient, with the
standard “Scene 24, Take One” style of working.
Later on the voices were cracked, tired, and ironic:
“I’ve been in the jungle for 128 days now...”.
Despite Coppola saying that Apocalypse Now Redux
was now the official cut of the film, the version
presented to the Cannes Film Festival in 1979 has just
been re-released theatrically. Take the opportunity to
see this cinematic and aural assault in its natural
environment while you can. ∫
58 AUDIO MEDIA JUNE 2011