Daily Dialogue — April 30, 2016

Kurtz: Did they say why, Willard, why they want to terminate my command?
Willard: I was sent on a classified mission, sir.
Kurtz: It’s no longer classified, is it? Did they tell you?
Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Willard: I don’t see any method at all, sir.
Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? Are you an assassin?
Willard: I’m a soldier.
Kurtz: You’re neither. You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.

— Apocalypse Now (1979), written by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola

Trivia: Marlon Brando improvised a lot of Kurtz’s dialogue, including an eighteen-minute speech of which only two minutes survived the final cut. According to Peter Manso’s “Brando,” Meade Roberts, screenwriter for The Fugitive Kind (1960), later heard the entire monologue and said that while some of it was incoherent, most of it was brilliant. At the end of the speech, Brando reportedly said to director Francis Ford Coppola, “Francis, I’ve gone as far as I can go. If you need more, you can get another actor.”

Dialogue On Dialogue: The first intersection of these two characters. No subtext. Up top direct dialogue, both men laying cards out on the table.