The whole ordeal was a hallucinogenic nightmare. Principal photography took an exhausting 238 days. A typhoon destroyed some of the sets. The director mortgaged his house to cover ballooning costs. He fired his first leading actor (Harvey Keitel) and found that his second (Martin Sheen) had suffered a heart attack. At one point the director told his wife, "I'm thinking of shooting myself." So when it was all over, Francis Ford Coppola figured he had earned the right to a public primal scream. "My film is not a movie," he told the press at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where Apocalypse...
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