The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

36 Danny Boyle
nonsense. But, it seems to me they do hit nerves. Even nowadays, when
Brando talks about how they chop off the arms of children who’ve been
inoculated, there are moments where you get a glimpse of Pol Pot and you
get a glimpse of that.
Some people call it popcorn intellectualism, but I found and I still find
that it stretches my mind, really. It’s an experience.
And one of the things that people point to as influential in the film is
the use of music. The Doors’ music begins and ends the film.
Boyle: You don’t think of it in the way Scorsese uses music. Music had
always been invisible. Scorsese really championed music so it wasn’t hidden,
so that you were aware of it. It wasn’t working on you in a hidden
way. But again, you don’t think of Coppola like that, because even though
the two hits in the film—“The Ride of the Valkyries” and the Doors song
“The End”—are incredible visible bits of music, very deliberately placed
on there as pop culture moments. But you still think of them in a classical
sense because he just isn’t a stylist, he’s a classicist. But as we all know, it’s
the most perfect placing of a psychedelic war, really, which is through the
Doors and through the experience of the young men there.
And what do you make of the end? What happens afterward? Does he
go back and explain all this to Kurtz’s son?
Boyle: I guess so, I don’t know, really. When you watch films properly,
they’re moments. That’s what you take away. And the film ends for me with
the chopping down of Brando, with the killing of Brando and the bull. That,
for me, is the end of the film. I don’t think there are other bits that come after
it. It’s very difficult to explain, isn’t it?
I think it’s true. If you’re honest about what you remember from a film,
unless you have to study the whole film for a conversation like this . . . For
the vast majority of people, a film remains three or four moments.
What do you think of the recut and extended version, Apocalypse
Now Redux?
Boyle: I was expecting to be deeply taken by it, to be really interested by
it, and I wasn’t particularly. I watched it and it didn’t do particularly much