Here is a brief excerpt from an interview of Francis Ford Coppola by Jake Coyle for the Associated Press. To read the complete article, please click here.

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If filmmaking is a war, then Apocalypse Now was very nearly Francis Ford Coppola’s Waterloo.

The battles Coppola fought while making his 1979 epic nearly destroyed him. A typhoon wrecked a major set. Harvey Keitel was replaced by Martin Sheen. Coppola searched desperately for an ending. He worked even harder to coax a few lines out of Marlon Brando.

But out of that tumult Coppola created a masterpiece. And 40 years later, “Apocalypse Now” has never looked so good.

Coppola has supervised a 4K restoration of the film and, for the second time, tweaked the cut. Having perhaps gone too far in his 2001 “Redux,” which added 53 minutes, “Apocalypse Now Final Cut,” which opens in theaters Friday and on home video August 27, splits the difference at 183 minutes.

In its present and restored form, the majesty and madness of “Apocalypse Now” is more vivid and hallucinatory than ever. Coppola considers it the definitive version. It completes a four decade journey turning what was almost a mess into the masterwork he envisioned from the start.

Coppola, 80, has lately been busy with equally audacious plans.

In 2017, he published a book, “Live Cinema and its Techniques,” about his experiments and hopes for a new art form that combines cinema, television and theater in a live experience. He’s also recently returned to a long delayed passion project, “Megalopolis,” a sprawling sci-fi, New York-set epic. Coppola has been working on the script and casting, and searching for production partners. “Or maybe now it’s at the stage I can do it by myself, I don’t know,” he says.

In a recent interview, Coppola spoke about “Apocalypse Now” then and now, why he was “terrified” after making it and why he has trouble letting go of his films.

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Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter.

To read the complete article, please click here.