Retro Review: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991)

Francis Ford Coppola on the set of "Apocalypse Now"

The documentary opens with a famous director addressing an audience. Without a hint of exaggeration, he says, “We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little… we went insane.” The lines are blurred: is he talking about the Vietnam War or the momentous film he made about it in 1979? The truth is, it doesn’t really matter. The fact is that they are a part of each other, and the beauty of the entire affair is that they are now wholly indistinguishable. “My film is Vietnam,” the director says, and he's right.

Francis Ford Coppola set out to create a film based on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, a terrifying journey into the dark side of the human condition. The result was the masterpiece Apocalypse Now. But the reason the final product was so extraordinary was because, quite literally, Coppola lived the themes of the source novel during the time spent making his movie. The experience of making Apocalypse Now was what Apocalypse Now ended up as. It was as if it was all meant to be. Hearts of Darkness documents the making of the gargantuan project. It leaves nothing out.

Moments into the documentary, I was struck by a feeling of sickness. I had just heard Coppola confessing his feelings on the production to his wife, Eleanor. It is her footage and recordings that make up the bulk of the documentary. He mentions to her that he wants to shoot himself. That is how tired and incomprehensible the project had become. Then we see the sheer size of the sets and the extras, the constant building work, the unfinished script, and the unreliable military who Coppola cooperated with when making the movie. The feeling of sickness came from my imagining. Imagining the Hell that making this movie really was. Coppola would have been crazy not to have gone to such a dark place in his own head. That’s a human reaction, after all.

We’ve heard of the nightmare shoots concerning Spielberg and Jaws and Ridley Scott and Blade Runner, but neither of these come close to the chaos that Coppola encounters here. You’ll see it all. Marlon Brando turning up overweight, unfamiliar with the source material, threatening to leave the production with a $1 million advance. Martin Sheen replaces Harvey Keitel weeks into shooting. Later he suffers from a massive heart attack. Coppola argues with Dennis Hopper over the purpose of his character. The script is never really finished, leaving the director to force improvisation upon his actors. It’s a mess.

But Hearts of Darkness is a riveting piece of filmmaking in the sense that it is as engrossing and affecting as the very film it documents. We share interviews with the principal cast, writers, production assistants, and anybody and everybody that had a hand in the making. Some interviews are new, some from the set, but all are revealing and truthful. That is what separates it from almost every other making of documentary – it’s brutally honest. Most importantly, it’s essential, because understanding Hearts of Darkness is to understand Apocalypse Now itself. (*****)