Listening to you Marlon

I watched the 2015 documentary Listen to Me Marlon at the weekend, and thought it a fascinating, absorbing piece of work, and quite a refreshing departure from the usual talking-heads biographical format. I’ve read two chunky Brando biographies over the years – Peter Manso’s 1994 book, and more recently William Mann’s 2019 biography, so there were no great revelations along the way, but I was surprised to hear Brando’s vexed comments about Francis Ford Coppola in the wake of Apocalypse Now: “Francis Coppola, he's a prick, a card-carrying prick, the cocksucker, how could he do that to me ? I saved his fucking ass, and he showed his appreciation by dumping on me". One deficiency of the documentary is the lack of onscreen dates for the snippets of audio heard in the film, and I wonder when Brando recorded those comments ? I suspect it might have been when Brando was working on his autobiography Songs My Mother Taught Me, published in 1994, some three years after the release of the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness which revealed the full extent of Coppola’s struggles to get Apocalypse Now made, and presented Brando as a sort of brilliant but wayward force of nature that Coppola had to valiantly wrestle with to complete the film. One could hardly blame Brando for feeling so raw about it.

Interesting too to hear Brando say he re-wrote “the entire script” which sounds on the face of it rather fanciful but according to Peter Cowie’s 2000 book on the film, Coppola was having discussions with Brando about the film as early as February 1976, just a month or so before filming began in the Philippines. Like so many great films, the precise authorship of Apocalypse Now is perhaps unknowable, but if I had to choose a side, based on everything I’ve read about the film over the years, I’d credit the bones of the film to Coppola and John Milus, with Brando’s contributions confined to shaping the Kurtz character. Still, it’s pleasing to note that Brando’s first appearance (if you could call it that) in Apocalypse Now is as a voice on a tape recorder…