- Francis Ford Coppola: My greatest fear is to make a really shitty, embarrassing, pompous film on an important subject, and I am doing it. And I confront it. I acknowledge, I will tell you right straight from... the most sincere depths of my heart, the film will not be good.
- Eleanor Coppola: The film Francis is making is a metaphor for a journey into self. He has made that journey and is still making it. It's scary to watch someone you love go into the center of himself and confront his fears, fear of failure, fear of death, fear of going insane. You have to fail a little, die a little, go insane a little, to come out the other side. The process is not over for Francis.
- [last lines]
- Francis Ford Coppola: To me, the great hope is that now these little 8mm video recorders and stuff have come out, and some... just people who normally wouldn't make movies are going to be making them. And you know, suddenly, one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart, you know, and make a beautiful film with her little father's camera recorder. And for once, the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed, forever. And it will really become an art form. That's my opinion.
- Francis Ford Coppola: I'm sure I have missed a whole bunch of opportunities and I am going to miss others, but I caught a lot of them too. In the end it's about how many I catch, not how many I lose.
- [first lines]
- Francis Ford Coppola: [speaking at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival to reporters with an interpreter translating his words] My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.
- Francis Ford Coppola: If Marty dies, I wanna hear that everything's okay, until I say, "Marty is dead."
- Francis Ford Coppola: First of all, I call this whole movie the Idiodyssey. None of my tools, none of my tricks, none of my ways of doing things works for this ending. I have tried so many times that I know I can't do it. It might be a big victory to know that I can't do it. I can't write the ending to this movie.
- Self - from 1938 radio broadcast: Good evening. This is Orson Welles inviting you to listen now to The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Imagine the feelings of a skipper of a fine frigate or a bark. A civilized man at the very end of the world. He'd land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery that stirs in the forests and the jungles in the hearts of wild men.
- Apocalypse Now Crew: [chanting word for good luck] Puwaba, puwaba, puwaba!
- Francis Ford Coppola: You should say that - all that, in the scene!
- Dennis Hopper: I do, but, you see, the director, you know, the director says, "You don't know your lines!"
- Francis Ford Coppola: Well if you know your lines, you can forget 'em. You can know, more or less...
- Dennis Hopper: Oh, I see. Well that's what I'm trying to do.
- [laughs]
- Dennis Hopper: Forget the lines.
- Francis Ford Coppola: No, but it's not fair to forget 'em if you never knew 'em.
- Eleanor Coppola: Last night, Francis watched the footage from the first week's shooting. They were the scenes with Harvey Keitel, who plays Willard. Afterward, he sat down on the couch with the editors and said, "Well, what do you think?" I went upstairs to say good night to the children, and when I came down 15 minutes later, Francis had made the decision to replace his leading man.
- Frederic Forrest: We felt after a while we really weren't there. It was like we were in a dream or something. We'd say to Francis, "I'm not here, Francis. I'm in Montana with Jack Nicholson." So they'd say, "Where are you today, Freddy?" I'd be in Waco, I could be in Des Moines... Wherever I wanted to be. And you would just go through your day. You weren't in that place.
- [a shirtless Coppola is being interviewed in the Philippines jungle]
- Francis Ford Coppola: This movie I'm making is not in the tradition of the great Max Ophuls or David Lean even. This movie was made in the tradition of Irwin Allen. I made the most vulgar, entertaining, exciting, action-full, sensoramic, give-them-a-new-thrill- every-five-minutes, have it everything, sex, violence, humor, because I want people to come and see it. But the questions that I kept facing or running into, into the stupid script about four guys going up to kill a guy... But that was the story. But the questions that that story kept putting me, I couldn't answer. Yet I knew that I had constructed the film in such a way that to not answer would be to fail.