Clint Eastwood's career path, in addition to his favorite westerns and thrillers, includes work on a wide variety of genres, and the experience of the actor and director won over even the most famous filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola. A few years after the great success of The Godfather, Coppola decided to try himself in war themes, and when it came to casting, the choice immediately fell on Clint Eastwood.
Coppola's dreams, however, did not come true, and Martin Sheen eventually came to replace him. Subsequently, however, Eastwood never regretted turning down the opportunity to work with the cult director - perhaps because the filming of his war drama became a real test of the actors' nervous system.
Partially based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Coppola's film was a large-scale story about the Vietnam War, the potential success of which was believed in by many famous actors, but not by Clint Eastwood. At least at that time, the actor simply could not afford to devote so much time to one film - according to Coppola's original plan, the shooting was supposed to last as long as 4 months.
Eastwood himself once admitted that he doubted the director's idea almost immediately, not believing that he could play the role of Captain Benjamin L. Willard. According to Eastwood, he even read Conrad's story in his youth, but simply could not imagine himself a participant in such a story, in the end, all factors came together in the decision to turn down Coppola, which became a real salvation for Eastwood.
Filming of Apocalypse Now ended up dragging on for almost a year
If Eastwood's tight schedule couldn't possibly accommodate 16 weeks of filming for Apocalypse Now, then he would have definitely felt bad about the way the filming process actually turned out. Instead of the promised four months, filming lasted for eight, which, of course, affected the film's budget, Coppola invested his own money in the creation of Apocalypse Now and therefore was terribly stressed throughout almost the entire filming process, fearing that the project would simply lead him to bankruptcy.
Later, both the director and the actors admitted that the protracted filming simply drove them crazy, but the result exceeded all expectations, the film became a box office hit and even won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
