FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: Well, I very much would like to make another film on the level of “Apocalypse Now,” and I don’t think I could make it now. The only reason I was able to make “Apocalypse Now” in the first place is because, at age 40, I basically put up the ranch in order to finance it. No one would really back me on such a project.

But it was still a little easier back then. Today big corporations own all the distribution. These companies are all struggling to get their stock price up, so they want to make films that will be successful in the short term. Nobody would touch a film like “Apocalypse Now.”

COPPOLA: More and more you can only make a film that’s like another film, in a style that was like another film. But when I make a film like “Apocalypse Now,” I embark on something that I don’t know the answers to yet. I say, oh gee, it’s a film about morality. What do I know about that? Only through the process of making it might I come to understand it. Well, that doesn’t fit into any kind of business model.

DAVID HALBERSTAM: It’s funny you said that, Francis, because when I start a book, it’s the same question. When I began “The Best and the Brightest,” I’d spent two years in Vietnam. I was enormously troubled at what had gone wrong and the question that I tried to answer in the book was: how could it happen at all? The people who were the architects were allegedly the brightest people and the ablest people to serve in government in the 20th century. You’re driven by wanting to know the answers. If you knew the answers, you wouldn’t look that hard. It’s really in the search that you find these things out.

COPPOLA: I always liked the idea that the film was originally a little more diverse. It had women in it. It had the French. It gave more perspective than just the people on the boat going upriver. But I was under pressure to deliver a war film, and we were very worried that it would be just too strange, too against the popular mood. But the times and the culture now seem to be curious and anxious to receive it.

HALBERSTAM: Vietnam never goes away. We’ve either had people criticizing it or whitewashing it and saying it was our finest hour. Everybody in this country is always going to try and use it for partisan reasons and manage it. It’s the second American civil war. It’s really us against us. But in my new book, I didn’t go looking for Vietnam, it found me. As I researched the book, the shadow of Vietnam was everywhere.

When Clinton comes in as president, and Clinton meets Colin Powell, you have a president who not only didn’t go to Vietnam but quite deftly danced around the ROTC in Arkansas. And you have Powell, who spent two tours in Vietnam and who believes that the most important thing he ever did in his career was–not being a kid of Jamaican background, a City College of New York kid getting to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs or running the gulf war–but cleansing the Army of the viruses of Vietnam. So there you have the two sides of this divided America, and it is still unreconciled.

COPPOLA: For a long time America has provided for the world a kind of a vision of what was going to come. A little bit of the anti-Americanism today is based not just on the fact that we’re very rich and powerful but also on the fact that other people are used to us providing some hint as to what the future will be. And that’s not coming from us now, because we have no idea of what the future will be. And perhaps when you don’t know what’s coming, you tend to look back to the first point in the past that shows some contradiction or some uncertainty.

COPPOLA: Well, Willard, Martin Sheen’s character, is like Marlow in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” He was like a witness or an observer.

HALBERSTAM: But no, there are no heroes. I mean, there’s nothing likable about Martin Sheen. We don’t particularly like him or identify with him. It’s a world without heroes.

HALBERSTAM: Yeah, I like [Gen. John] Shalikashvili. I like Colin Powell. I don’t think he’s a hero, but I think he’s a very decent man.

HALBERSTAM: There’s no doubt there is a fault line running through the military for a variety of reasons. The gay thing, and women in the military. But they’re very good. They get good people. It’s ferociously competitive now. And the technology that we used first in the gulf war and then in Kosovo is so awesome. I mean, these smart bombs are smarter than ever. You could figure out which office you want to take out and do it from 200 miles. In Vietnam, we lost 50,000 kids in a very tough war. In Kosovo, we didn’t lose anybody.

COPPOLA: Well, my only point is, to what end? In other words, you fight a war, you make a great sacrifice, but to what end? What are we moving toward? That’s what I’m interested in. Because I think that’s when empires fail–when no one understands what the vision is.

HALBERSTAM: Have we ever had a vision, Francis? Sometimes a vision is a very dangerous thing. The last country to have a great vision was the German people.

COPPOLA: Well, as a child of the ’50s, we used to think about things related to utopia. I know it’s a very dangerous idea, but that’s what we used to think about–H. G. Wells, higher intelligence, creativity and things like that. I don’t have any idea of what’s in store.

HALBERSTAM: When you finished “Apocalypse Now” the first time, what did you think it said about America?

COPPOLA: Oh, I think it said, first of all, there are many Americas. But it was the hypocritical idea, the perfumed nightmare of double and triple standards that got me. It’s one thing to be really evil or greedy or unfair, but it’s quite another to be saying, oh, aren’t we good, aren’t we moral, aren’t we the kindest culture in the world. There was one line in the movie that I thought was very telling: “They teach the boys to drop fire on people, but won’t let them write f–k on the wings of their airplanes.”