The Book of Sheen: A Memoir

The filming of Apocalypse Now is presented in The Book of Sheen as a pivotal moment in Charlie Sheen’s childhood, in which he discovered a love of filmmaking and his own budding aspirations as an actor. This connection is further contextualized by the film’s longevity and critical success, as well as its turbulent filming process. The film was plagued by difficulties, and within the larger crisis, Martin Sheen’s casting and health became central stress points that shaped the film’s production rhythms, creative solutions, and eventual mythology.

Director Francis Ford Coppola began principal photography in the Philippines in March 1976 after replacing his original lead, Harvey Keitel, with Martin Sheen, whose arrival on April 24 signaled a new approach to Captain Willard as a watchful, inward-looking observer. The recasting forced reshoots and further compressed a schedule already threatened by weather and logistics. On May 26, 1976, Typhoon Olga destroyed between 40 to 80% of the sets and shut the production down, pushing the film deeper into delay and debt. Coppola mortgaged assets and pursued insurance claims to keep cameras rolling, even as he continued rewriting key sections and postponing the film’s release.

One scene in particular, the Saigon hotel prologue, is iconic, both for Martin Sheen’s performance and for the story behind it. Shot on his 36th birthday in early August 1976, the sequence—with Willard drinking, dancing, and punching a mirror—drew on Martin Sheen’s real intoxication and produced a genuine hand injury, which Coppola filmed while worrying about the actor’s safety. The scene’s rawness set the tone for Willard’s interior narration and the film’s hallucinatory texture. It also underscored the production’s tendency to convert off-screen crisis into on-screen affect.

When Coppola resumed filming in early 1977, Martin Sheen’s ordeal deepened. On March 5, 1977, while filming in a remote jungle, he suffered a near-fatal heart attack. Fearing that investors would cut funding if the emergency became public, the production initially attributed his collapse to heat stroke. The shoot paused while Martin Sheen recovered. To maintain momentum, Coppola used Martin Sheen’s younger brother, Joe Estevez, as a stand-in for certain set-ups and as an uncredited sound-alike for Willard’s voiceover.

Martin Sheen’s medical emergency did not unfold in isolation. The Philippine military helicopters rented for the movie were subject to sudden recall because of real insurgent operations, which repeatedly scrambled the planning of the Wagner-scored cavalry assault and other set-pieces. Weather remained unpredictable, effects misfired, and large-scale sets had to be rebuilt after storm damage. Meanwhile, Marlon Brando’s late arrival and improvisatory working methods forced Coppola to reconceive Kurtz and to fashion an ending more mythic and less literal than originally scripted. The cumulative effect was a production that oscillated between paralysis and feverish invention, with Martin Sheen’s recovery and return (on April 19, 1977) marking one more pivot point in a process that ultimately consumed 238 shooting days and years of editorial work.

Contemporary and retrospective accounts make clear that Martin Sheen’s crisis was not merely a biographical footnote but a structural factor in how Apocalypse Now was made. Charlie Sheen, as a child, was often on the periphery of the set and, as he writes in The Book of Sheen, appears as an extra in the background of certain scenes. In the book, Charlie Sheen’s experience of watching his father’s suffering lays the groundwork for the similar struggles he would have on the set of his own Vietnam movie, Platoon.