Lawrence.com

Cannes, France — The Cannes Film Festival helped save Francis Ford Coppola from financial disaster on "Apocalypse Now."

The "work in progress" he showed at Cannes in 1979 won the festival's top honor, the Palme d'Or, and the Vietnam epic went on to critical and commercial success that pulled Coppola out of a sinkhole of debt resulting from the production.

Coppola returned to this year's festival with the rendering of "Apocalypse Now" that he did not think he could get away with then: A three-hour, 16-minute cut with refreshing humor, a restored love scene and new insights into Marlon Brando's character.

"I think there had been concern and advice that to make our money back, we had to make it as much like an action genre war film as we could, which means, kind of, all male action and tension," he said.

So, many darkly comic or romantic scenes wound up on the cutting-room floor.

Financed by Coppola himself, "Apocalypse Now" was fraught with delays and disasters, including a typhoon that shut down production in the Philippines and a heart attack that disabled one of the stars, Martin Sheen.

Bad press mounted, the budget doubled to $32 million and Coppola was on the verge of losing his family's wine estate to cover his debts. After positive reaction at Cannes, Coppola released the movie and made his money back.

Last year, Coppola got together with Walter Murch, an editor on the original, and sifted through raw footage to create the new version, "Apocalypse Now Redux."

It runs an hour longer, but Coppola said audiences may find it moves more briskly than the 1979 cut.

"Ironically, I think it plays better for the public," Coppola said. "I think it's more absorbing and therefore plays faster in a funny way than the old version because it has more facets. It has humor. It has women, thank God."

"Apocalypse Now Redux," which opened in French theaters this weekend, makes its debut in the United States in August.

Inspired by Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," the movie recounts a nightmarish journey upriver through Vietnam by Capt. Willard (Sheen), ordered to execute the maverick Col. Kurtz (Brando), who rules a tribal outpost decorated with rotting corpses. The new version "is more complete," said actress Aurore Clement, whose entire part was cut from the 1979 release. "You have sentiment, familiarity. You have sensuality. More life."