The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

26 Danny Boyle
Starring Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Dennis
Hopper, Frederic Forrest, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne,
Albert Hall, and Harrison Ford
How would you describe this film to someone who has never seen it?
Boyle: This movie is impossible to pigeonhole. It’s the greatest war movie
ever made. There are greater movies that condemn war, but no film captures
our abhorrence of war and yet the pleasure we get from seeing it depicted in
the movies. That’s what’s extraordinary about it. It’s not just a war movie, it’s
about the nature of cinema and why we go and watch it—that journey we
want to make in the cinema.
It’s summed up obviously by Coppola, who appears in it himself, screaming
at the guys to “keep going!” so he can get better pictures.
He plays a war documentarian and yells at the soldiers, “It’s for television,
just go through, go through!”
Boyle: [laughs] And so it’s not just a war movie. People make war movies
and you feel the horror and the pity, but this is also about moviemaking
because he went through such an extraordinary passage in order to make
the film. And so to encapsulate it is virtually self-defeating in a way. That’s
what’s extraordinary about it.
It is a master film. It’s my own personal favorite; if I had to nail one film
on my heart, this would the one. This would be it because it is unclassifiable.
Let’s start with the basics, then. Preliminarily, it’s based on Joseph
Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, and it’s about Willard, played by
Martin Sheen, who is sent to hunt down a rogue colonel, played by
Marlon Brando. Existentially, it’s about a guy sent to kill his darker
self. Is that simplifying it too much?
Boyle: I guess that’s it, yeah. That’s a good summation of it, really.
My relationship with it, and my relationship with most films that I love,
is not really an intellectual one at all. It’s a passionate, visceral, emotional
one, and in a funny kind of way I learned to value and appreciate that more
as I go on, really, rather than try to ever understand the films.