Francis Ford Coppola couldn't secure finance for Apocalypse Now

Francis Ford Coppola had to finance Apocalypse Now with the money he made from The Godfather as nobody wanted to touch it.

The legendary filmmaker’s 1979 masterpiece is one of cinema’s most famous films, but Coppola struggled to get his Vietnam war epic made.

At the time, no one had made a feature on the conflict, and the young director found it impossible to secure funding for the movie.

“The Godfather was very formal and classical. The styles of my movies were very, very different,” Coppola said during a recent talk at the Tribeca Film Festival. “So, basically, nobody wanted to do Apocalypse Now, no actors wanted to go to the Philippines, and I was very confused about the situation.

“Ultimately, the deal I did had to guarantee a budget, and I used the money I had earned with The Godfather, so in truth, what happened was that the movie was so uncertain.”

Eventually, Marlon Brando, whose career was revived after Coppola cast him as Don Vito Corleone in 1972’s The Godfather, signed on, along with Martin Sheen and Robert Duvall.

The film went on to win two Oscars and was nominated for a further six - though it ran into trouble during production when it went way over budget, and critics originally called it a disaster.

“My thinking was, ‘Oh, we’re never going to be able to survive this.’ Interest rates in those days, you couldn’t imagine it today, it was over 26 per cent, and I think I owed about $30 million. I didn’t have the kind of money like that at all, and I was just so scared. I had three kids and a family,” the five-time Oscar-winning director recalled.