#HELECOPTER SOUND EFFECTS MOVIE#
#HELECOPTER SOUND EFFECTS PLUS#

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. It was something that came up long before the film ever got made - back when George was going to direct it.

#HELECOPTER SOUND EFFECTS MOVIE#

When did you and Francis know that you would key so much of the movie off the sound of the helicopters? Murch stole time away from his recon mission to explain how he and his collaborators originally came up with the film's eerie and illuminating sounds. On the disc, Coppola explains that he never intended the conflagration to complete the action of the film. The only additional footage in the current DVD is the destruction of Kurtz's compound, which ran under credits at the close of the film's 35mm prints in '79.

#HELECOPTER SOUND EFFECTS PLUS#

Amazingly, Murch was once again working on 'Apocalypse Now.' The French film company Canal Plus has funded what Murch calls 'a fishing expedition.' He and Coppola are sifting through outtakes that had been kept in underground storage to find deleted scenes worthy of inclusion in an expanded edition that is being released in August in theaters and will ultimately wind up on DVD. I spoke with Murch at the San Francisco editing rooms of Coppola's company, American Zoetrope. And Walter Murch, who both designed the sound and edited a healthy chunk of the movie (from the opening through a My Lai-like attack on a civilian sampan), says that the choppers' audiovisual potency was built right into the movie's DNA.

None of the movie's sounds is more indelible than the roaring, buzzing and whirring of its helicopters.

Years later, even those who resisted the film (like I did) find its brilliant and insidious meshing of imagery and sound sneaking into their heads when they think of Vietnam.

When the film premiered in 70mm stereo in 1979, this deliberately elusive opening put many viewers under a hallucinatory spell. Suddenly, the choppers' propellers become the blades of a Saigon hotel-room fan - and we enter the mind of Willard (Martin Sheen), who will soon trek through a Southeast Asian heart of darkness in search of the military madman Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Palms burn abruptly with napalm, not with a dramatic burst but as naturally as sunflowers opening up to daylight, while the Doors' dirge 'The End' plays out against the blaze. Helicopters swoop through the images, seemingly close enough to touch, but insubstantial, like shadows. The movie opens in a soft blue haze: a junglescape enveloped in a smoky aura that bathes the scenery in a golden pseudo-dawn. This is Coppola's Wagnerian extravaganza, with streamlined, fire-breathing dragons. Its force is heightened even further by 'The Ride of the Valkyrie' on the soundtrack. A quartet of needle-nosed jets finishes the job with napalm. An arbitrary attack on a tiny Viet Cong village appears to have an entire squadron of air cavalry supporting it. Francis Ford Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now' renders Vietnam as the Inferno, with a psychedelic swirl of helicopters, flames and fog.

Helecopter sound effects