(Credits: Far Out / Paramount Pictures)

Marlon Brando marched to the beat of his own drum. The iconic star had a reputation for being eccentric and difficult thanks to the abundance of strange behaviour he exhibited throughout the years, which often derailed the movie productions he worked on and made his co-workers’ lives hell.

On the other hand, though, even those who hated how Brando conducted himself on-set never wavered from their belief that he was the greatest actor in Hollywood history. This is precisely why he was able to get away with things other stars would never even attempt, such as demanding $70,000 to say one line in a production that had already descended into chaos.

In the 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola made The Godfather, The Conversation, and The Godfather Part II in a purple patch, the likes of which few directors have ever experienced. However, when he embarked upon Apocalypse Now in 1976, he likely had no idea that he was submitting himself, his cast, and his crew to an experience that almost broke every single one of them.

A five-month shoot in the Philippines ballooned into a year-long war of attrition, during which the production was forced to cope with severe weather, leading man Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack, and an inexperienced director was grappling with the elaborate, complicated pyrotechnics involved in making a war movie.

To make matters worse, Brando also added to Coppola’s headaches from day one. He had signed up to play the mysterious and enigmatic Colonel Walter E Kurtz in the movie, which was inspired by Joseph Conrad’s classic novella Heart of Darkness. To Coppola’s chagrin, though, he arrived in the Philippines 30 pounds overweight, having not even cracked the spine on the book, and proceeded to spend the first four days refusing to shoot and turning down all Coppola’s suggestions for his character.

Some observers have suggested that Brando was cynical in his motives here because he had signed a lucrative contract that guaranteed him $3million for only four weeks’ work. It was also stipulated that he would only work weekdays and finish each day at 5:30pm, so critics argued that he was simply content to pick up his exorbitant fee for the first four days without doing any real work. Whatever the case, he eventually began working and agreed to shave his head for the role like the Kurtz character in the novel, despite initially stonewalling Coppola on the matter.

Once Brando got into the groove, though, he turned into the “genius in a class of his own” that Coppola knew he could be from their time on The Godfather. Interestingly, while there has been a back-and-forth over the years about how much input Brando had into Kurtz’s dialogue in the film, his letters and audio files from the time period suggest the actor should arguably have received a writing credit. Screenwriter Michael Herr even claimed Brando “wrote a stream of brilliant lines for his character,” while biographer Peter Cowie noted that Brando’s input gave the film its thematic backbone, as “Kurtz’s scenes alight unerringly on the reasons for the American predicament in Vietnam.”

Naturally, though, Brando’s brilliance didn’t come cheap, and when Coppola tried to talk the star into shooting one last line out of the goodness of his heart, he had a rude awakening. You see, on Brando’s final day, he retired to his hotel in Manila to get ready for his flight home. When a message arrived from Coppola, though, asking him to return to set for an hour to shoot a close-up of Kurtz’s classic line, “The horror! The horror!” from the novella, Brando baulked.

“Well, first of all, it’s never an hour, you know that,” read Brando’s reply to Coppola. “And secondly, you’ll have to pay for that day—$70,000.” Brilliantly, he signed off this withering response by adding, “I’m in the Marlon Brando business. I sell Marlon Brando. Would you go to the president of General Motors and ask him for a $70,00 favour?”