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In the opening scene of the 1979 Apocalypse now , Captain of the army in intoxication Benjamin L. Willard ( Martin Sheen ) is on a bed under a rotation ceiling fan in a Saigon hotel room, martial arts move while the first bars of "The End" by the doors begin to play, then confront themselves in a mirror And strikes the glass, cutting his hand open in hand in the process. It is a difficult scene to look at, but perhaps the most disturbing part is that Sheen was really intoxicated During the shooting, saying later that he was "dangerously drunk" and experienced legitimate depression in front of the cameras. Continue reading to learn more.

Read this then: Oliver Stone said that working with Richard Dreyfuss was "the worst experience" of his career .

The filming of this infamous scene took place in Manila on August 3, 1976, the 36th anniversary of Sheen. He was drinking all day. He admitted to an interview at the Dubai International Film Festival in 2013 that he was " So dangerously drunk [He] could barely get up "when he expected to shoot the scene. AE0FCC31AE342FD3A1346EBB1F342FCB

Meanwhile, the crew was afraid that he will turn against the cameras or the director. "There was electricity in the room, everything could happen", " Eleanor Coppola would tell later in the 1991 documentary on the production of the film, Hearts of Darkness: Apocalypse of a filmmaker . "They were inside someone on their personal territory with the single man in his most private moment."

Rolling cameras, director Francis Ford Coppola asked Sheen to go to the mirror and admire. Then he told the actor to be afraid. "I was so in intoxication, I did not know how close I was the mirror," said Sheen in his interview with the film festival. Suddenly, he struck the glass of the mirror, shouting: "Hiya!" And he opens his thumb. By examining his bleeding hand, the actor got rid of and started to cry. Coppola then moved to cut the shooting.

However, in a vintage interview of later with Bob Costas , Sheen revealed that he arrested the director to cut the plug, the begging to continue. "I bled a lot and Francis tried to stop the scene, and I begged him to continue rolling. He said that he could not do it and that they had a standing nurse. And I said, "Please. I have to do this for myself. ' And he did it. And it allowed me, in a sense, to fight with demons with which I have been fighting for a long time. ""

To say Costas that he was an alcoholic, Sheen recalled the "demons" of dependence that had haunted his life. "I had made this scene in bars, I had made this scene at home," said the star. "I had to fall asleep. I had to exorcise this."

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The notorious production of Philippines, based in the Philippines of the film, would extend for more than a year after the shooting of Willard. Meanwhile, Sheen also underwent a heart attack which forced him to be transported by plane to Manila in a helicopter. His wife Janet was on site at the time and accompanied him to the hospital. "She smiled, leaned, whispered in my ear: ' It's only a film, baby , "" He remembers Yahoo! In 2022. "And after that, I started to heal."

However, it would take another 10 years before Sheen was ready to approach his alcoholism. He would later reflect that the heart attack was part of the process. "I chose to have this heart attack," he told Costas. “I needed to have this heart attack. There was a part of me who was already dead. I had to die to this part of myself ... I was a desperate man, a terribly dishonest man. I lived two kinds of existence and you can "I don't live this way.

Sheen told Costas that he always wears the scar to break his hand on the mirror Apocalypse now . This dark period of dependence, distance and overwork also left an indelible mark on his family. Son Emilio estevez called Sheen " A terrible drunk " For The telegraph In 2011, saying of his childhood: "Some people are pleasant drunkards. He would become sentimental and angry. It scared us." THE Powerful ducks Star also told by asking his parents how they allowed him to walk there at Manila at a time when martial law meant that he could be shot in sight if he was caught after 1 am. He said he replied, "We had four of you. If we had to lose one, we would do it. We were just trying to survive."

One of the Apocalypse now The other children of the actor, Charlie Sheen , who was only 11 years old when his father left for Manila, also fought publicly with drug addiction, Suffer linked to the mistreatment of cocaine in 1998. The star was dismissed of the successful series Two and a half men , where he had been the best paid actor on television, after ransacked his creator Chuck Lorre in 2011.

In the midst of Charlie's very public difficulties, his father sympathized by recalling the real depression now praised as his greatest performance. "I know in what hell he lives," said Sheen The telegraph . "I had psychotic episodes in public. One of them was on the camera - the opening scene of Apocalypse now . So I know what Charlie is going through. ""