Perhaps no film shoot was as legendarily taxing on everyone involved as Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now; that nobody died during filming is nothing short of a miracle. Shooting on location in the Philippines, the production was beset by cast changes, tropical diseases, and natural disasters that wiped out entire sets, but those were the least of its problems—because Coppola was running a drug-fueled, psychologically abusive madhouse that was out of control from the very beginning.
Lead actor Martin Sheen, replacing the fired Harvey Keitel, stepped straight into the worst possible environment for him at that time. In the middle of a personal breakdown and mired deep in alcoholism, Sheen was fed a steady diet of alcohol and abuse by Coppola, who brought out the darkness in Sheen's character by screaming at the actor and telling him how evil he was.
Sheen would eventually have a heart attack, yet somehow continued on with the production. Coppola lost 100 pounds and threatened to kill himself three times. Dennis Hopper stumbled through the shoot on a daily regimen of a case of beer, half gallon of rum, and three ounces of cocaine, and actor Sam Bottoms spent the entire shoot—which ended up taking over a year to complete—tripping on LSD. Coppola would later say "We had access to too much money and little by little we went insane," while Hopper commented, "Ask anybody who was out there, we all felt like we fought the war."
