The screenplay, co-written by Coppola, John Milius, and Michael Herr, is loosely inspired by the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, with the setting changed from late 19th-century Congo to the Vietnam War.

The film follows a river journey from South Vietnam into Cambodia undertaken by Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), who is on a secret mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a renegade Special Forces officer who is accused of murder and presumed insane.

The ensemble cast also features Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, and Harrison Ford.

Milius became interested in adapting Heart of Darkness for a Vietnam War setting in the late 1960s, and initially began developing the film with Coppola as producer and George Lucas as director.

Initial reviews were polarized; while Vittorio Storaro's cinematography was widely acclaimed, several critics found Coppola's handling of the story's major themes anticlimactic and intellectually disappointing.

Resisting Kilgore’s attempts to convince Lance to surf with him on the newly conquered beach, Willard gathers the sailors to board the PBR and continue on their mission.

Other episodes adapted by Coppola—the Playboy Playmates' (Sirens) exit, the lost souls ("take me home") attempting to reach the boat, and Kurtz's tribe of (white-faced) natives parting the canoes (gates of Hell) for Willard (with Chef and Lance) to enter the camp—are likened to Virgil and "The Inferno" (Divine Comedy) by Dante.

[25] It is often speculated that Coppola's interpretation of the Kurtz character was modeled after Tony Poe, a highly decorated Vietnam-era paramilitary officer from the CIA's Special Activities Division.

[27][28] Coppola denies that Poe was a primary influence and says the character was loosely based on Special Forces Colonel Robert B. Rheault, who was the actual head of 5th Special Forces Group (May to July 1969), and whose 1969 arrest over the murder of suspected double agent Thai Khac Chuyen in Nha Trang generated substantial contemporary news coverage, in the Green Beret Affair,[29] including making public the phrase "terminate with extreme prejudice,"[30] which was used prominently in the movie.

Eliot's original epigraph for "The Waste Land" was this passage from Heart of Darkness, which ends with Kurtz's final words:[33] Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge?

"[35] While working as an assistant for Francis Ford Coppola on The Rain People in 1967, filmmaker John Milius was encouraged by his friends George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to write a Vietnam War film.

He had read the novel as a teenager and was reminded about it when his college screenwriting professor, Irwin Blacker of USC, mentioned the several unsuccessful attempts to adapt it into a movie.

Rexer claimed to have experienced, first-hand, the scene relayed by Brando's character wherein the arms of villagers are hacked off by the Viet Cong; and that Kurtz was based on Robert B. Rheault, head of Special Forces in Vietnam.

Milius says the classic line "Charlie don't surf" was inspired by a comment Ariel Sharon made during the Six-Day War, when he went skin diving after capturing enemy territory and announced, "We're eating their fish."

They intended to shoot the film both in the rice fields between Stockton and Sacramento, California, and on-location in South Vietnam, on a $2 million budget, cinéma vérité style, using 16 mm cameras, and real soldiers, while the war was still going on.

While promoting The Godfather Part II in Australia, Coppola and his producers scouted possible locations for Apocalypse Now in Cairns in northern Queensland, as it had jungle resembling Vietnam's,[56] and in Malaysia.

[1] Al Pacino was also offered the role, but he too did not want to be away that long, and was afraid of falling ill in the jungle as he had done in the Dominican Republic during the shooting of The Godfather Part II.

[59] In a 2015 The Hollywood Reporter interview, Clint Eastwood revealed that Coppola offered him the role of Willard, but much like McQueen and Pacino, he did not want to be away from America for a long time.

"[53] With Brando not due to film until three months later, as he did not want to work while his children were on school vacation, Keitel left the project in April and quit the seven-year deal he had signed as well.

Apocalypse Now won the Palme d'Or for best film, along with Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum – a decision reportedly greeted with "some boos and jeers from the audience.

This mirrored the lack of opening titles and supposedly stemmed from Coppola's original intention to "tour" the film as one would a play: The credits appeared on printed programs provided before the screening began.

When Coppola later heard that the audiences interpreted this as an air strike called by Willard, he pulled the film from its 35 mm run and added credits on a black screen.

The website's critics consensus reads: "A voyage to hell where the journey is more satisfying than the destination, Francis Ford Coppola's haunting, hallucinatory Vietnam War epic is cinema at its most audacious and visionary.

Some evidence of the film's anti-war message includes the purposeless brutality of the war, the absence of military leadership, and the imagery of machinery destroying nature.

[118] Nidesh Lawtoo illustrates the ambiguity of the film by focusing on the contradictory responses the movie in general – and the "Ride of the Valkyries" scene in particular – triggered in a university classroom.

"[120] According to Coppola, the film may be considered anti-war, but is even more anti-lie: '... the fact that a culture can lie about what's really going on in warfare, that people are being brutalized, tortured, maimed, and killed, and somehow present this as moral is what horrifies me, and perpetuates the possibility of war'.

an anti-war film, I always thought, should be like [Kon Ichikawa's 1956 post-second world war drama] The Burmese Harp – something filled with love and peace and tranquillity and happiness.

Roger Ebert considered it the finest film on the Vietnam War and included it on his list for the 2002 Sight & Sound poll for the greatest movie of all time.

[194] It was likewise adapted for the Cat's Eye anime episode "From Runan Island with Love" and the Battle of Italica scene in Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri.)

Part Deux, includes a brief scene where Charlie is riding a boat up a river in Iraq while on a rescue mission and passes Martin, as Captain Willard, going the other way.