The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Apocalypse Now
27
You saw this at what age?
Boyle: I come from a place, a very small town outside of Manchester. I
came to London—I guess I was twenty-one—and I moved to London to
start my work, my career, whatever it turned out to be. I remember there
were huge, anamorphic, black posters. [laughs] They just seemed to be the
biggest posters I had ever seen and there was nothing on them other than
“Apocalypse Now” and of course, “A Francis Ford Coppola film.” It was
obviously juggernaut publicity that was really concerned about how overreaching
the film was and the devastation that was caused by everyone who
was involved with it.
Coppola rides two horses in the film; that is what pulls you toward the
film of course, immediately. It’s not just the sense you’re going to see a successful
film, like a product. You’re going to see something that is beyond the
film that has destroyed people’s lives, that has bankrupted a genius. So it’s a
celebration of the destruction as well as a condemnation of its subject matter.
It’s the war in Vietnam. And when you consider that nobody wanted to
make films about Vietnam, that America turned its back on it, here was this
great boy genius, really.
Sure, sure, but it was after he had won Best Picture twice already, for
the first two Godfather films.
Boyle: It’s obviously made at the absolute Everest of megalomania, the absolute
peak of, “I can do nothing wrong, and I must just push myself.” And that’s,
of course, one of the things celebrated in the film. You do see a film made at
the absolute edge of sanity, really. In terms of the indulgence that movies can
induce in people. But there’s a great side to it as well because it is his ambition
and it is about bigness, and I think that’s something that we have lost.
We now watch big films in terms of impacts and scale. I’m sure we’ll get
it back, hopefully. But we really lost big films, these slightly overwhelming,
overly ambitious big films. We’ve lost them, for whatever reason: confidence,
marketing, whatever other factors you build into it. We do seem to
have lost that ambitiousness, I think.
But tell me about that very first time you saw it. And what was your
mind like as you left the theater?