Auteur and Apocalypse Now

 Coppola's auteurship focuses on the aesthetics, and overall how the scenery looks. Throughout most of the movie he makes sure that the aesthetics are on point and match the overall mood of the environment. He likes to make sure that the scenery looks realistic and for that he uses a lot of props and people to make sure that the background looks authentic. One example of this would be how he made people in the Philippines stand in a whole with their entire bodies covered to act out as corpse-less bodies that had been decapitated so it can be seen in the war background as soldiers run around. 

Coppola likes using  lot of cuts during scenes to show point of views and what other characters are doing  in scenes, from Willard spacing out whilst they make their way to Kurtz to his comrades driving the boat and doing drugs, Coppola likes to show points of view and realism of a war.

Something that Coppola did whilst making Apocalypse now was improvise and influence actors' ideas onto his movie, Coppola had to write the script and make the movie whilst producing the actual movie, and to help with this he asked actors like Marlon Brando who played Kurtz for help and ideas and would spend entire days discussing what to do with certain scenes, scenery , lighting , etc. Marlon Brando's main idea was to get Kurtz' scenes in a dark room constantly because he didn't want to be seen as the fat evil man, he wanted to be seen as something better then that, and to do that he had to use a dark room where you can barely see his body.

The main signature move of Coppola is the "Dolly Move" where he uses a camera dolly to film a zoom in of a scene, now what Coppola does it that he uses sandbags to put on the dolly to add extra weight, therefore making the dolly move slower and the camera effect sort of feels more spacy and adds a sense of having no gravity almost.