For years, it sat in a cave in Pennsylvania. Every scrap of film that Francis Ford Coppola shot for the Vietnam fantasia ''Apocalypse Now'' -- all 250 hours of it, from which the two and a half hour original version was winnowed in 1979 -- lay in an environment perfect for preserving movie negatives. So what spurred Coppola to strip mine this cache after more than two decades to create ''Apocalypse Now Redux,'' a 3 hour, 16 minute reedit that Miramax is unspooling in theaters? ''It wasn't some great life thing I had to do,'' says the director, 62. ''It was a relaxed sort of decision.'' That's understandable, since the avalanche of unfavorable, ''he'll never finish it'' press Coppola got while struggling to complete filming evidently still hurts. ''I thought... Why are they picking on me? Why don't you pick on Warner Bros. putting their money in 'Superman' -- a comic book character?''
For that matter, why revisit ''Apocalypse Now'' now? The answer can be traced to the original film's French distributor, Paul Rassam. He'd long wanted Coppola to restore a 20 minute sequence in which Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) stumbles upon a French plantation while on a mission to kill traitorous Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) -- especially after seeing excerpts in the 1991 ''Apocalypse Now'' documentary ''Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse.'' The trick was convincing Oscar winning editor Walter Murch, one of the original's key architects, to help with the reconstructive surgery. ''Certain bones in the script had to be broken,'' Murch, 58, says of the 1979 version, which required reshoots to cover narrative holes that opened in the scramble to compress the film to a commercial length. ''It was such a delicate balance, I was frightened of going back into it.'' What ''broke the ice'' for Murch was his pleasant experience revising Orson Welles' ''Touch of Evil'' in 1998, so he called Coppola and finally consented to rework ''Apocalypse Now.'' Here's a handy guide to their new version.
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