The character may also have been partially inspired by the British-Australian photojournalist Tim Page. Willard learns via the dispatch that another MACV-SOG operative, Special Forces Captain Richard Colby, was sent on an earlier mission identical to Willard's and has since joined Kurtz.

film negative has been done away with in all releases since Coppola's American Zoetrope reassigned home media rights to Lionsgate Home Entertainment in 2010. After Christmas 1976, Coppola viewed a rough assembly of the footage but still needed to improvise an ending.Willard, like Marlow, becomes more perceptive to the moral darkness around him as the film proceeds. Ebert added Coppola's film to his list of The Great Movies, stating: " Apocalypse Now is the best Vietnam film, one of the greatest of all films, because it pushes beyond the others, into the dark places of the soul.

However, due to the studios' safety concerns and Lucas's involvement with American Graffiti, and later Star Wars, Lucas decided to put the project on hold. Murch thought that there was a way to assemble the film without narration but that it would take ten months, and decided to give it another try. By the time he reaches Kurtz, he has gone back to the era of primitive tribalism, of “savages”, to use Frazer’s word. Total Film magazine gave the film a five-star review, stating: 'This is the original cut rather than the 2001 'Redux' (be gone, jarring French plantation interlude!As the Manager feigns great concern over Kurtz's health in Heart of Darkness, General Corman acts pained and upset when he tells Willard, "Every man has a breaking point. The novella ends with Kurtz dying on the trip back and the narrator musing about the darkness of the human psyche: "the heart of an immense darkness".

An important difference between these characters, however, is that Willard begins the film as a man already accustomed to the "horror" around him. Another variation of the end credits can be seen on both YouTube and as a supplement on the current Lionsgate Blu-ray. Francis Ford Coppola has stated that Willard’s journey upriver is a journey through time: “My idea was that as they progressed up the river, they were going back more and more in time in a funny kind of way” ( Karl French on Apocalypse Now, Bloomsbury, 1998, p. Apocalypse Now was honored with the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered unfinished. Milius had no desire to direct the film himself and felt that Lucas was the right person for the job.The opening scene—which features Willard staggering around his hotel room, culminating in him punching a mirror—was filmed on Sheen's 36th birthday when he was heavily intoxicated. Coppola was a graduate of Hofstra College and evidently had read somewhat widely in early-20th century and modernist literature.