Then you had the fact that the film is told from a particular person’s point of view, that it presents the war as seen by Captain Benjamin Willard. I think people were impressed because there was this whole new way of listening to movies and it matched the main aural subjects, which were helicopters. Helicopters can position themselves and swoop and go in circles they are kind of circular beings. So it’s a perfect format for a helicopter movie, compared to, say, a submarine movie, or a boat movie, or an airplane movie. And helicopters are ideally suited to that, because they fly and move around and hover. Essentially the format we established for Apocalypse Now is now the standard for DVD and any big Dolby Stereo film: three channels in the front and then two channels in the rear and then subwoofers. The cavalry-horsemen-Apocalypse thing was bred in the bones of the project.Īnd here Murch discusses how the electronic helicopter sounds meshed with the decision to mix in 5.1.:īut Francis made the decision to make this film quadraphonic. And, of course, we thought of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. The helicopters were the horses of the sky - the whole “Valkyrie” idea came out of that discussion. Then we got the cavalry back, with helicopters, to a certain extent in the Korean War, and really got it back in the Vietnam War. The last time the cavalry was used was in World War I, which demonstrated that it didn’t work anymore. Helicopters occupied the same place in this war that the cavalry used to.

There was a lot of discussion between George and me, and between us and John Milius, who was writing the script, that what made Vietnam different and unique was that it was the helicopter war. They began by discussing those helicopters. In 2000, Murch spoke to Michael Sragow in Salon about Apocalypse Now‘s sound design. Check out Murch’s hand-drawn diagrams about just now those effects are sequenced and mixed. In the video above - a section of a documentary commissioned for the Paramount 2006 home video release and made by Zoetrope’s former head of post, Kim Aubry, and editor Serena Warner - sound rerecordist Richard Beggs and post-production sound recordist Randy Thom illustrate the ambitious use of the helicopter effects within the film’s 5.1 mix. And, of course, those weren’t just any helicopter sounds. The famous helicopter sounds actually enter over black - they are the first input of any kind an audience member receives. But how many put as much care into its first sound? Francis Ford Coppola did, along with sound designer Walter Murch, when constructing the opening of Apocalypse Now. In Filmmaker Videos, Filmmaking, Post-ProductionĪpocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola, Walter MurchĪ film’s first shot, its first image, is one that’s obsessed over by many directors.

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