The movie opens in a soft blue haze: a junglescape enveloped in a smoky aura that bathes the scenery in a golden pseudo-dawn. Helicopters swoop through the images, seemingly close enough to touch, but insubstantial, like shadows. Palms burn abruptly with napalm, not with a dramatic burst but as naturally as sunflowers opening up to daylight, while the Doors' dirge "The End" plays out against the blaze. Suddenly, the choppers' propellers become the blades of a Saigon hotel-room fan -- and we enter the mind of Willard (Martin Sheen), who will soon trek through a Southeast Asian heart of darkness in search of the military madman Kurtz (Marlon Brando).

When the film premiered in 70mm stereo in 1979, this deliberately elusive opening put many viewers under a hallucinatory spell. Years later, even those who resisted the film (like I did) find its brilliant and insidious meshing of imagery and sound sneaking into their heads when they think of Vietnam.

None of the movie's sounds is more indelible than the roaring, buzzing and whirring of its helicopters. And Walter Murch, who both designed the sound and edited a healthy chunk of the movie (from the opening through a My Lai-like attack on a civilian sampan), says that the choppers' audiovisual potency was built right into the movie's DNA.

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I spoke with Murch at the San Francisco editing rooms of Coppola's company, American Zoetrope. Amazingly, Murch was once again working on "Apocalypse Now." The French film company Canal Plus has funded what Murch calls "a fishing expedition." He and Coppola are sifting through outtakes that had been kept in underground storage to find deleted scenes worthy of inclusion in an expanded edition that is being released in August in theaters and will ultimately wind up on DVD. The only additional footage in the current DVD is the destruction of Kurtz's compound, which ran under credits at the close of the film's 35mm prints in '79. On the disc, Coppola explains that he never intended the conflagration to complete the action of the film. Murch stole time away from his recon mission to explain how he and his collaborators originally came up with the film's eerie and illuminating sounds.

When did you and Francis know that you would key so much of the movie off the sound of the helicopters?

It was something that came up long before the film ever got made -- back when George [Lucas] was going to direct it. There was a lot of discussion between George and me, and between us and John Milius, who was writing the script, that what made Vietnam different and unique was that it was the helicopter war. Helicopters occupied the same place in this war that the cavalry used to. The last time the cavalry was used was in World War I, which demonstrated that it didn't work anymore. In World War II there was no cavalry. Then we got the cavalry back, with helicopters, to a certain extent in the Korean War, and really got it back in the Vietnam War. The helicopters were the horses of the sky -- the whole "Valkyrie" idea came out of that discussion. And, of course, we thought of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. The cavalry-horsemen-Apocalypse thing was bred in the bones of the project.

The beginning of the film was a trigger for the psychic dimension of the helicopters. Later on, when you get into the attack on the village [when Robert Duvall's ramrod Col. Kilgore tries to clear a VC-held coastal town], it's dramatic and it's fantastic, but it is fairly much "what you see is what you hear." Whereas at the beginning of the film it's some drunken reverie of this displaced person, Willard, who is trying to bring himself back into focus. There are fragmentary images of helicopters, then he comes more and more back into his abysmal reality -- this stinky hotel room in Saigon -- and we get the fan.

That connection, between the helicopters and the fan, was latent and waiting to be done. For me, the moment when it came to be done was like one of those moments when Kennedy was shot: I remember I was at the KEM [a horizontal editing machine with two large screens and two soundtracks], early on in the assembly of that scene, when I put a helicopter sound over that fan. Suddenly it sounded right. I believed the fan was making that noise, which is what Willard believes. So I felt that if I could believe it, as the "seen-it-all" editor, then it would have that effect on an audience. And if we could have that effect, then we could put the audience in the place of that person.

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