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THERE'S MORE... THERE'S MORE... Brando said much more in Apocalypse Now's final death scene than Coppola will ever reveal

Even though Francis Coppola gave us 40 minutes of additional footage for his release of Apocalypse Now Redux there is still a five-hour version floating around out there. In it are a good number of subplots that are missing - some of which would change the character motivations and the overall scope of the film considerably. One of those sequenecs is Brando's ...er ... Kurtz's death soliloquie. Most agree that the film falls apart once Willard confronts Kurtz. One reason is because Coppola seems to let go of any control he has on the story and instead hand it over to Brando and the rest who all seem to be improvising there lines. In Marlon Brando's autobiography he writes that he did two 45-minute improvised death scenes but Coppola cut them to four infamous words: "The horror. The horror." When I worked at Film Threat Magazine in the mid-90's we got our hands on the 5-hour version and it included the first 45-minute take. If you read the whole speech it's easy to see why Coppola scrapped it - most of it is redundant, some of it embarrasing and a few lines are incomprehensible. Despite this Brando says that this death scene was one of the best performances he ever gave. Here then - with much thanks to the work of Paul Cullum - is an excerpt from Brando's 45 minute 'horror' speech. The complete speech is printed in Film Threat Issue 27 April 1996.

"To approach the horizon of endurable anguish and to pass it, you must have eyes without eyelids, for if you blink once you will incinerate."

(Deep Breaths) I...I...I...I had...I had immense plans. I was on the threshold of great things. And what you've hacked here to the ground like a tree is not the end of it. No, you've also shaken the seeds from that tree. And I will take root in you. I will sprout. I will be nourished by your violence. Nothing. Nothing. To look into the abyss without drawing away is everything. The highest...The highest of honors. To approach the horizon of endurable anguish and to pass it, you must have eyes without eyelids, for if you blink once you will incinerate.      We are winning this war. We are winning it. And you will...you will help to win it. And just beneath the surface is your strength. Just below your skin are the vital forms, your vital forces running like eternal springs. Wild. Restless. they will guide you, and give you council.      And when they call you murderer, and when they judge you, then turn on them, hang them, all of them, by their lying jaws on meathooks til they soil themselves and ask forgiveness. The bloodlust. The bloodlust -- you don't think of it. You don't think of the bloodlust; you experience it. You must experience it. Masses...people -- any people-- they will go anywhere, do anything, as long as the ring of faith...the ring of faith is in there noses. Yes. Put the rings in their noses. Call it God. And Country. And Mother. Then you run a slim cord through the rings of all of them--ten milluon, a hundred million or more -- and herd them wherever you will.      The human animal has no limits. He will generate a force to overcome the gravitational pull of society and fling himself into outerspace to find a new orbit around Jupiter or the sun, determined by far greater forces.      And the instinct to submission, the longing to obey, to be ruled by the strong, the will to submission is stronger than the will to power...Eichman...Eichman ...six million Jews jumped into their graves...Dusseldorf...Bremen...Wounded Knee...Coventry...Nagasaki...Ten-year-old boys carrying...carrying grenades in baskets of fruit. And pregnant women, nursing women, carrying explosives in their vaginas...inside their vaginas, crossing beyond our checkpoints. Extremsim in the defense of liberty is no vice....No....No vice...No vice.

"The world needs us now, and we will stay here until mushrooms grow out of our faces."

This war will never be won by the priests of misery, The Rand Corporation and not in the Situation rooms in Washington. The people here, those yellow and white who lie stuck in the muck and who can stand the rain and no food, the stink and the rot of dying.... People who get sick and wake up numb and still have he will to fight. They're the ones who will stand it. And the ones...and the ones who will win...None other...None other....They just need the will, the guns and the grace of God.      Presidents, all of them, all the presidents, want to retain power, so they lie. Congressmen... lies. Lies. Magazines...lies. This is not a war of people and freedom and rights and self-determination. Lies. Only oil, power, manganese, cobalt, geopolitics, staying in office...must have these...we must have these...lies.      Stay with the primitive here. Stay with these people. Stay with them. They're small feathers in this hurricane of change, this whirlwind. But they know, they understand, they're made of the Earth. They live without fear. They do not hide in masks of guilt. Platinum. Platinum. There are some things, there are some things of which I cannot, I dare not speak.      To raise a stench, a stench so strong as to break the stride of...of a pack of jackals. To be familiar with death as maggots are with manure. The world needs us now, and we will stay here until mushrooms grow out of our faces. These men, these tired ticks that crawl across...across the anvil of history. A time for giants, and they send us pygmies armed with chalk, computers, tennis rackets, Santa Monica hotlines to human misery. The eager students of suffering and violence. The sick and twisted hippies, long haired hypocrites, rotting with decay.      In every powerful civilization, violence stills those inner ancient passions, that primordial slim that lies in the bottom of our minds waiting aeons and aeons to be ... only to be stirred and - what? And the silkworms...the silkworms writing those fawning reports of victories while we die out here like blind martins. The experts, the air-conditioned priests, who only look for the breaking point in human misery. McNamara ... Bunker ... Rostow ... Bundy ... Bunker ... Bunker ...Johnson.