One of the other things I was told as we... as I started working on the film was that there was no narration on the film. My last memory of having read the screenplay about a year earlier was that it had narration. And I asked, 'Well, why?' 'No, it's not going to have narration; we got rid of that idea.' So I went back to my editing room, looked at the schedule and thought if we had a couple of years maybe we could find a way to tell this story without narration. But it was shot from a script with narration, but not... it wasn't reinvented as if it did not have narration. So how can we do that in the time that we have left, which at that point was probably nine months to finish the film. And I thought there's no way; we have to have narration.

So on the spur of the moment, I got the old script, and a microphone and recorded this old narration with me speaking it. And then started putting it into the film, and I created a version of the first 30 minutes of the film with narration. And then called Francis [Ford Coppola] and everybody in, Richie and Gerry, and I gave my spiel. 'I think we have to have narration, and I think it will be good.' The thing I didn't say is that I had just finished the film Julia, which had narration, and so my mind was predisposed because of that experience of thinking about films with narration. I don't know what would have happened had I been working on another film that didn't have narration; I may not have come to that decision. Anyway, I was passionate about what I thought was right. I ran the film, and people thought, 'Yeah, okay, let's have narration.'

So we limped along with my narration for a month or so. And then Michael Herr, who wrote the book Dispatches and was a big influence on John Milius when he was writing the original screenplay. Michael Herr joined the team as the writer of the narration. He wound up living in San Francisco on and off for the next year or more with his wife, and he would be writing the narration. Then we'd screen that version of the film, then everyone would have new ideas, notes would be given and Michael would write another. And so it went through probably eight iterations of different narration for the film as the film went along with Marty Sheen coming in replacing me obviously and reading Michael Herr's narration.