As the audience, we are aware of Sheen, but in a way that increases our understanding of Willard. What we witness is some deeply private humiliation being worked out with unrestrained candour. What Sheen had done, without a script, with only himself to improvise with, was to strip away the last layers of artifice between the actor and the image. As a piece of acting, it was extraordinary. There is an old Hebrew saying, he says now: "Choose your enemy well, my friend, for he is what you will become." Sheen had become his own enemy, as in the film Willard becomes Kurtz - merges with the man he is sent to murder. When Coppola ordered the cameras turned off, after Sheen injured his hand, Sheen insisted he wanted to go on. That day, August 3 1976, his 36th birthday - just over half way through the Bible's three score and ten - Sheen acquiesced in Coppola's vision and showed himself on camera: pathetic, vulnerable, wretched, alone. Who is Willard? What kind of guy kills people for a living? And Coppola would tell him: Whoever you are today, is who Willard is. By this time he had been in the Philippines filming for four months, and every day he would ask Coppola the same questions. The next day Sheen had to be coaxed back into the room to continue shooting. Then, in real life as in Francis Coppola's film, Martin Sheen - military assassin Capt Ben Willard - passed out. In one movement, as if some deep impulse within himself has to be answered, he smashes the mirror, destroys the image, and paints his face with his own blood. The man is drunk, he has been drinking all day and, as he falls about the room, he turns suddenly to be confronted by the reflection of himself in a mirror. The opening scene of Apocalypse Now: a man lies naked on a bed in a room a long way from anywhere - a beautiful man with a magically smooth face and khaki green eyes that move with an incredible attentiveness.
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