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Francis Coppola had more than his share of production difficulties while shooting his epic-scale Vietnam War drama Apocalypse Now , including disastrous weather conditions, problems with his leading men ( Harvey Keitel was fired after less than two weeks on the project and was replaced by Martin Sheen , who suffered a heart attack midway through production), and a schedule and budget that quickly spiraled out of control (originally budgeted at $10 million, the film's final cost was over $30 million). But Coppola 's troubles didn't end when he got his footage into the editing room, and he tinkered with a number of different structures and endings before settling on the film's 153-minute final cut in time for its initial theatrical release in 1979. Twenty-two years later, Francis Coppola returned to the material, and created Apocalypse Now Redux , an expanded and re-edited version of the film that adds 53 minutes of footage excised from the film's original release. In addition to adding a number of smaller moments that even out the film's rhythms, Apocalypse Now Redux restores two much-discussed sequences that Coppola chose not to include in his original edition of the film — an encounter in the jungle between Willard ( Martin Sheen ), his crewmates Chief ( Albert Hall ), Clean ( Larry Fishburne ), Chef ( Frederic Forrest ), and Lance ( Sam Bottoms ) and a trio of stranded Playboy models on a U.S.O. tour, as well as a stopover at a plantation operated by French colonists De Marais ( Christian Marquand ) and Roxanne ( Aurore Clement ). Apocalypse Now Redux received a limited theatrical release in August of 2001 after a well-received screening at the Cannes Film Festival — the same month that the film finally reached theaters in 1979, after a rough cut received a Golden Palm award at the Cannes Festival. — Mark Deming
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