What would it take to wager your house, your car, and your life savings on one work project while your lead actor was secretly having a heart attack and a typhoon was swallowing your sets? This episode explores the making of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 war epic, a production so chaotic that Coppola said it mirrored the war itself. It starts with screenwriter John Milius taking a professor's dare that Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella could not be adapted, and mapping its river journey onto Vietnam.

The conversation covers George Lucas's original plan for a 16mm documentary-style shoot, the Pentagon's refusal to cooperate, helicopters rented from Ferdinand Marcos, Steve McQueen and Al Pacino passing on the lead, Harvey Keitel's firing and replacement by Martin Sheen, Typhoon Olga, and a 238-day shoot. It then examines Sheen's hear ...