Marlon Brando is among the pantheon of the greatest actors to have ever graced the silver screen. He popularized the art of method acting and maintaining the intensity of his characters throughout production. His award-winning and acclaimed performances in A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and The Godfather continued to be analyzed and admired by current actors.
One of his most recognizable antagonistic performances was in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Brando has had an infamous reputation for being difficult to work with. During the film, Brando and his co-star Dennis Hopper had a misunderstanding, where Brando threw a tantrum, resulting in a feud that almost turned physical.
Dennis Hopper Got Pissed With Marlon Brando’s Insults and Almost Fought Him
By the late 70s, Marlon Brando was a two-time Oscar winner and had won for The Godfather some years prior. He reunited with Francis Ford Coppola for the 1979 epic war drama Apocalypse Now, loosely based on Joseph Konrad’s Heart of Darkness. Brando played the film’s antagonist Colonel Walter E. Kurtz. a colonel gone rogue and chronicles the journey of the team sent to kill him led by Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard.
Brando is infamously known for being a difficult actor to work with, and he and Coppola already had creative differences over the script and his character’s name in the film (via The Guardian). According to Dennis Hopper who played Kurtz’s disciple and a photojournalist, Brando did not even read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, despite several requests made by Coppola himself.
Hopper and Brando had a small misunderstanding which resulted in a big feud that almost turned nasty. Hopper and his team were doing military training for the film and had been given a special services “little red book,” used by the Green Berets. During the table read of the film’s script, Hopper assumed that Brando hadn’t read the red book and joked with him about it.
However, Brando mistook it for Heart of Darkness which Coppola had been constantly nagging him to read. Thus, he threw a tantrum shouting why a ‘punk’ like Hopper would tell him to do stuff. Hopper was personally affected by the insult and he openly challenged Brando to a fight later at a theatre when they were watching Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Hopper recalled, (via The Hollywood Reporter),
“I didn’t know this, but Francis had been on him for not reading the book, Heart of Darkness, and we have to do a story conference and there’s no ending. And I say to Brando, sitting across from him at dinner, I bet you haven’t read the book. And he thinks I am talking about Heart of Darkness. He gets up and says ‘I don’t have to listen to this! I don’t have to take this!’
And he is screaming and yelling ‘Why do I have to hear it from him? I have to hear it from this punk!’ And he storms out of the house. We go to see the Seven Samurai in a movie theater and I am sitting behind him. And at one point, I get up and say, ‘There’s an actor in here that said of a dead friend of mine…and I sure would like [to fight him].”
Hopper further stated that Brando and Coppola went on a two-week river excursion and came back with a finished script. However, Brando never wanted to work with Hopper at the same time and instructed that their scenes be shot separately. Fans can watch/rent Apocalypse Now on Apple TV+.
Francis Ford Coppola Hails Marlon Brando As His Personal Hero
Francis Ford Coppola and Marlon Brando have worked twice in their career in two of the most acclaimed works of their career, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. For the director, Brando is one-of-a-kind and a personal hero that he admires to this day.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Coppola stated that Brando’s yearning for knowledge and understanding things is what he really liked about the late actor. Whether it be about termites, Chinese settlers, or shortwave radios, his quest for knowledge was limitless. Coppola said,
“[Brando] could talk for hours about termites, or about the early Chinese settlers in America, or how shortwave radios worked. He just had this wonderful appetite to understand things.”
Coppola is back in the director’s chair after more than a decade with his epic sci-fi drama Megalopolis. The ensemble cast includes Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Jason Schwartzman, Talia Shire, Grace VanderWaal, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, and Dustin Hoffman. The film will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 16, 2024.
