10 Films That Directors Just Made Up On The Fly

1) Apocalypse Now

“We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” These are the infamous words spoken by Francis Ford Coppola, regarding his 1979 masterpiece Apocalypse Now and how the shoot came to be one of the most chaotic in Hollywood history. So bad that at one stage Coppola, freely admitting “I have no idea where to go with this,” considered shooting himself rather than continuing trying to make sense of the movie.

There was a screenplay for Apocalypse Now (though writer John Milius was so full of ideas he churned out over a thousand pages), but once on-set Coppola added new ideas as he filmed. A proposed five-month shoot lasted over a year, 1.5 million feet of film was shot, and Coppola was forced to improvise both Marlon Brando and Dennis Hopper’s scenes and concoct an ending out of nothing. That the final film is merely coherent is seriously miraculous.