What would it take to wager your house, your car, and your life savings on one work project while your lead actor was secretly having a heart attack and a typhoon was swallowing your sets? This episode explores the making of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 war epic, a production so chaotic that Coppola said it mirrored the war itself. It starts with screenwriter John Milius taking a professor’s dare that Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella could not be adapted, and mapping its river journey onto Vietnam.

The conversation covers George Lucas’s original plan for a 16mm documentary-style shoot, the Pentagon’s refusal to cooperate, helicopters rented from Ferdinand Marcos, Steve McQueen and Al Pacino passing on the lead, Harvey Keitel’s firing and replacement by Martin Sheen, Typhoon Olga, and a 238-day shoot. It then examines Sheen’s heart attack and the cover story of heatstroke, brother Joe Estevez standing in and recording narration, Marlon Brando arriving overweight and unprepared, and the Fisher King myth that turned that problem into atmosphere.

• The hippie button Nirvana Now that inspired the title
• Why Coppola put up his house and Godfather profits as collateral
• Walter Murch rebuilding the jungle soundscape and pioneering multi-channel theater audio
• The unfinished three-hour cut that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1979
• The creditless 70mm release with printed programs, and the demolition footage audiences misread as an airstrike