Focus Features

Writer-director John Milius

John Milius was born in St Louis, Missouri, on April 11, 1944. “Milius is the sort of person other people talk about,” wrote a thoroughly admiring Paul Schrader back in 1973. “It you haven't talked about him yet, you will. Sooner or later.” That prophecy was surely correct insofar as millions of movie-lovers round the globe can now recite immortal lines of Milius-penned dialogue – from Dirty Harry or Jaws or Apocalypse Now – even if they aren’t necessarily aware that Milius actually wrote said lines (and in fairness, he wasn’t always credited.) Milius the director has built up a smaller cult than Milius the writer, and yet an oeuvre that includes Dillinger, The Wind and the Lion and Big Wednesday is not to be taken lightly. Nonetheless, in the grand scheme it may transpire that it’s Apocalypse Now for which Milius will be best remembered; and in this extract from Peter Cowie’s definitive and authorized study of that movie’s making, The Apocalypse Now Book (published in 2000 by Faber and Faber), Cowie offers a short primer to the distinctive Milius mode of thinking. 

Tracing the genesis of a masterpiece like Apocalypse Now yields no easy eureka. Its roots may be detected in a schoolroom in Colorado in 1962, where a seventeen-year-old John Milius heard his English teacher, Irwin Blackler, extol the splendor of Joseph Conrad's novel Heart Of Darkness. Or in the gatherings at the University of Southern California Film School five years later, when Milius's fellow students would listen quietly to his dreams of a film called The Psychedelic Soldier. Or around the same time, when those very students – Milius, George Lucas, Walter Murch, Caleb Deschanel, Willard Huyck and others – would drive across town to Burbank.  There, in the words of Francis Coppola:

"We sat around in my office on the Warner Bros. lot, talking about our dreams. Obviously, many of then were trying to get their projects going. I recall George Lucas and John Milius mentioning a lot of guys who were returning from Vietnam, bringing word of the craziness of it, the drugs, the hallucination, the surfing...And they were cooking up a script that John would write for George. "

Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now

John Milius, a native of St Louis, Missouri, had served as a lifeguard and honed his skills as a surfer on the beaches of southern California. At the age of twenty-two, he was enrolled at the Film School of USC. When everyone asserted that no film-maker had licked the challenge of bringing Heart Of Darkness to the screen, "that as like waving a red rag in front of a bull" declared Milius in later years.

He resolved to forge a career as a screenwriter and to adapt Heart Of Darkness in some shape or form. George Lucas, about to serve as intern and assistant to Coppola on The Rain People, encouraged his friend Milius, who remembers that "He wanted me to write a Vietnam movie. He didn't care what it would be. Just as long as it was a Vietnam movie.  He didn't know Heart Of Darkness from Mary Poppins."

With American troops still charging ashore on the beaches of Vietnam, and anti-war fervor mounting on campuses around the United States, the concept of transplanting that protest into a jungle setting and lacing it with intellectual speculation proved extraordinarily alluring. Soon The Psychedelic Soldier became Apocalypse Now.  The new title was inspired by a badge – “Nirvana Now” – worn by hippies during the period. 

By the time Apocalypse Now emerged in 1979, Milius had established himself as one of the hottest screenwriters in Hollywood. Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, Dillinger, Jeremiah Johnson, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean and The Wind And The Lion attest to his grasp of man's struggle to come to terms with his animal self – and to deploy his weaponry to maximum effect.

For the Flashback on John Milius, click here>>

Writer-director John Milius

John Milius was born in St Louis, Missouri, on April 11, 1944. “Milius is the sort of person other people talk about,” wrote a thoroughly admiring Paul Schrader back in 1973. “It you haven't talked about him yet, you will. Sooner or later.” That prophecy was surely correct insofar as millions of movie-lovers round the globe can now recite immortal lines of Milius-penned dialogue – from Dirty Harry or Jaws or Apocalypse Now – even if they aren’t necessarily aware that Milius actually wrote said lines (and in fairness, he wasn’t always credited.) Milius the director has built up a smaller cult than Milius the writer, and yet an oeuvre that includes Dillinger, The Wind and the Lion and Big Wednesday is not to be taken lightly. Nonetheless, in the grand scheme it may transpire that it’s Apocalypse Now for which Milius will be best remembered; and in this extract from Peter Cowie’s definitive and authorized study of that movie’s making, The Apocalypse Now Book (published in 2000 by Faber and Faber), Cowie offers a short primer to the distinctive Milius mode of thinking. 

Tracing the genesis of a masterpiece like Apocalypse Now yields no easy eureka. Its roots may be detected in a schoolroom in Colorado in 1962, where a seventeen-year-old John Milius heard his English teacher, Irwin Blackler, extol the splendor of Joseph Conrad's novel Heart Of Darkness. Or in the gatherings at the University of Southern California Film School five years later, when Milius's fellow students would listen quietly to his dreams of a film called The Psychedelic Soldier. Or around the same time, when those very students – Milius, George Lucas, Walter Murch, Caleb Deschanel, Willard Huyck and others – would drive across town to Burbank.  There, in the words of Francis Coppola:

"We sat around in my office on the Warner Bros. lot, talking about our dreams. Obviously, many of then were trying to get their projects going. I recall George Lucas and John Milius mentioning a lot of guys who were returning from Vietnam, bringing word of the craziness of it, the drugs, the hallucination, the surfing...And they were cooking up a script that John would write for George. "

Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now

John Milius, a native of St Louis, Missouri, had served as a lifeguard and honed his skills as a surfer on the beaches of southern California. At the age of twenty-two, he was enrolled at the Film School of USC. When everyone asserted that no film-maker had licked the challenge of bringing Heart Of Darkness to the screen, "that as like waving a red rag in front of a bull" declared Milius in later years.

He resolved to forge a career as a screenwriter and to adapt Heart Of Darkness in some shape or form. George Lucas, about to serve as intern and assistant to Coppola on The Rain People, encouraged his friend Milius, who remembers that "He wanted me to write a Vietnam movie. He didn't care what it would be. Just as long as it was a Vietnam movie.  He didn't know Heart Of Darkness from Mary Poppins."

With American troops still charging ashore on the beaches of Vietnam, and anti-war fervor mounting on campuses around the United States, the concept of transplanting that protest into a jungle setting and lacing it with intellectual speculation proved extraordinarily alluring. Soon The Psychedelic Soldier became Apocalypse Now.  The new title was inspired by a badge – “Nirvana Now” – worn by hippies during the period. 

By the time Apocalypse Now emerged in 1979, Milius had established himself as one of the hottest screenwriters in Hollywood. Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, Dillinger, Jeremiah Johnson, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean and The Wind And The Lion attest to his grasp of man's struggle to come to terms with his animal self – and to deploy his weaponry to maximum effect.

For the Flashback on John Milius, click here>>