During the post-screening Q&A with Coppola, moderator Steven Soderbergh sounded almost baffled that someone with two best picture wins and a Palme d’Or under his belt would have so much trouble getting his masterpiece green-lit. The same cannot be said for the scene in which the squadron encounters a downed helicopter containing the Playboy bunnies from an earlier USO show, and trades them two tanks of fuel for two hours with the girls.Ĭoppola has at last gotten everything right where he wants it, which testifies to the real evolution of this project, as an insane risk that gradually vindicated everyone crazy enough to have believed in it. A comic interlude involving Willard’s men purloining the surf board of the gruff Lieutenant Kilgore (Robert Duvall) also remains in place. An extended tangent bringing Sheen’s unstable Captain Willard to a French plantation made the cut, perhaps due to Coppola’s affection for his late son Gian-Carlo, who appears as a nobleman’s boy at dinner. The just-right Final Cut splits the difference between the creative concessions of the original and the unwieldy sprawl of the Redux, a massive feat of film craft reined in to the general neighborhood of perfection.Ĭurious parties will be relieved to know that only the choicest Redux additions have earned the spruced-up picture and audio of the Final restoration. He’s gone back in to edit the film once before, assembling the 202-minute Redux version in 2001 using scenes excised from the theatrical cut at the behest of the studio and other higher-ups. For Coppola, however, last night’s Tribeca film festival premiere of the new and definitive Final Cut – commemorating the 40th anniversary of the original release – offered him a chance to rewrite his own history.
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