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Co-written by director Francis Ford Coppola and John Milius, a three hour work-in-progress print of Apocalypse Now premieres at the Cannes Film Festival to a standing ovation. Thematically based on Joseph Conrad's 1899 Congo-set novella, Heart Of Darkness, Coppola's operatic Vietnam war allegory charts the often surreal and hallucinatory odyssey of a young US Army captain (Martin Sheen) assigned to travel up the Nung river from Vietnam into Cambodia to locate and "terminate with extreme prejudice" a rogue Army Colonel (Marlon Brando) who has purportedly gone off the reservation. Co-starring Robert Duvall, Lawrence Fishburne and Dennis Hopper, the film shares the Cannes Festival's Palm D'or with Volker Schlondorff's The Tin Drum. and goes on to win Oscars for Sound Design and Vittorio Stottaro's cinematography. In 2001, Coppola releases Apocalypse Now Redux, a director's cut featuring 49 minutes of footage excised from the original theatrical run.
