What editions are available?
- Theatrical (153 min.)
- Redux (202 min.)
In 2001 Francis Ford Coppola premiered an extended cut of his epic war film titled Apocalypse Now Redux at The Cannes Film Festival. Coppola along with his editor Walter Murch added 49 minutes of restored footage, that was cut out of the original film, to the Redux.
“…when we showed it to all the distributors, we realized that, for its time, it was pretty unusual,” said Coppola in an interview with Rotten Tomatoes. “It was supposed to be sort of a war movie in their minds, and what they got was strange; it was surreal, it was long.” Coppola stated that he edited the theatrical version to be more conventional. “Anyway, years later, I was sitting in a little hotel room with a little 17-inch television in London, and it came on, and I always liked the beginning of the picture, so I started watching it, and I was planning to see the whole thing. But I watched the whole thing, and my reaction was, “Gee, this is nowhere near as far out or as unusual as we thought at the time.” And you know, as often happens, art or work that everyone finds controversial, 15 years later… You know, I always like to say the abstract art of one period becomes the wallpaper a few years later. And I thought, gee, that original version had a lot of stuff that we liked but we took out. And really, people had said, “What happened to the French plantation?” So we just basically put it back. And the “Redux” version was nothing more than the original version as it had been before we shortened it for the release.”
Source: Rotten Tomatoes
The director’s preferred edition: Redux
Comparison of the editions with courtesy of Movie-Censorship.com
