“THE THRESHOLD OF SANITY: ‘HEARTS OF DARKNESS’ AND ‘APOCALYPSE NOW’” (BY KERI O’SHEA)

The documentary film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991) starts with an overview of the making of its subject, Apocalypse Now (1979), by the film’s director, Francis Ford Coppola. His cast and crew were, he says, very much like the Americans in Vietnam. They went through too much money (over 30 million dollars), they were too many in number, they went through too much equipment, and they all went slowly insane. It’s a blunt comparison, sure, but this is just part of what happened during the making of this 20th-century behemoth ― a film which grew and grew beyond its initially envisioned size and scale, and a project which on several occasions nearly collapsed under its own weight.

Coppola’s late wife Eleanor accompanied her husband on the shoot and had been tasked with filming a behind-the-scenes documentary to provide promotional material for the new venture, but her project eventually did much more than that. This documentary, later with the directorial input of Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, is also spliced with additional, covert recordings made by Eleanor, giving a multi-layered, ambitious, and brutally honest account of what really happened during the 200+ days of location filming.

As Apocalypse Now is a loose adaptation of Ukraine-born author Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, it’s worth noting that such a project had been attempted before: in the 1930s, and only around 15 years after Conrad’s death, polymath Orson Welles started the process of making his own version of the story, though it never reached the production stage. Roll forward to the 1960s, and then up-and-comer Francis Coppola’s production company, American Zoetrope, began planning a version of Apocalypse Now to be directed by Zoetrope co-founder George Lucas; but given that the Vietnam War was still being fought, it proved far too fractious a time for such a political movie. The U.S. Army also refused to cooperate, though to be fair, the initial idea to actually film in Vietnam could have proved costly in more ways than one.

The project stalled again, only to re-emerge after the end of the war ― by which time Coppola’s successes with The Godfather (1972) and its sequel (1974) had made him a much more bankable name. After the project received the green light, Coppola selected the Philippines for the shoot, partly because of the country’s strong resemblance to Vietnam, with similar paddy fields and jungles ― but the resemblance extended much further. At the time of filming, the country was itself fomenting a Communist insurgency which first threatened and then escalated into a civil war, echoing old American establishment fears of the domino theory, which had also been used to justify their involvement in Vietnam. In this film about war, a real war was taking place just beyond the bounds of Coppola’s set, and had a direct impact on his shoot ― sometimes directly interrupting it. It’s just another way in which Apocalypse Now often straddles the boundary between the real and the unreal.

Eleanor Coppola’s documentary doesn’t just capture the shimmering humidity of the Filipino jungle; she’s also able to reveal the hard work behind building sets, employing a local workforce, and the level of improvisation and behind-the-scenes decision-making that helped to create the end product. But she does more: she was also there to chart the demise of Coppola’s initial optimism, as his film began to change in ways beyond his control.

There were many unanticipated changes with which to contend. There was the sudden decision to replace the original lead actor, Harvey Keitel, and then the civil war which kept making demands on the helicopters and pilots that had been loaned to Coppola by President Ferdinand Marcos. Then a typhoon hit, and destroyed most of the painstakingly built jungle sets. Between all of this, the endless rewrites, and the small matter of leading man Martin Sheen’s near-fatal heart attack during filming, and it’s clear to see why and how Apocalypse Now moved further and further from what it was originally planned to be.

Money was also an issue. As the production diverged from the original plans, Coppola was faced with the potential financial breakdown of a movie which had already demanded so much of him and his crew (not to mention his wife, still quietly documenting the chaos). In order to complete the film, Coppola was forced to raise and invest a significant sum of his own money. However, this being done, Apocalypse Now began to transform still further. Liberated from one kind of anxiety, at least for a while, Coppola allowed himself to give way to a vast new tranche of ideas and ambitions. As we see this sea shift take place in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, it’s clear that the movie was, by this point, both liberated from and dangerously detached from the norms of any writing and shooting process: this was freedom from rules, an exhilarating but challenging premise for a filmmaker by now struggling against personal mental breakdown.

Whilst Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse itself stays within the expected parameters of documentary filmmaking ― with its interviews, extracts from the novella (as read by Welles), and clips of the completed film ― you nonetheless feel carried along by its story of an extraordinary movie, by now growing ever more fractured and hallucinatory in nature. The drug and alcohol use on set is notorious, another way in which the movie emulates the Vietnam War itself, and the documentary reveals something of that heady, but feverish atmosphere. However, it is still underpinned by moments where it pauses to explore the ordeals being faced by the actors and the crew ― particularly Martin Sheen, who speaks very candidly about his role as Willard and what happened to cause his own brush with death. Apocalypse Now wrung out everyone involved, asking deeply personal contributions from people already exhausted and losing hope.

The ordeal aspect of the shoot perhaps reached its peak with the (eventual) arrival of Marlon Brando to play his cameo as Colonel Kurtz. Brando’s present-absence in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse ― he declined to be interviewed for the documentary, citing “unpaid wages” to the tune of two million dollars ― feels very fitting. Just as the character of Kurtz always hovers over the narrative in the Conrad novella, Brando does something similar here, coming across as a distant and enigmatic figure who controlled, or even jeopardized, the climax of Apocalypse Now. Undeniably, though, whatever artistic differences occurred, the addition of Brando as Kurtz does bring something significant to the movie’s overall ambience. Likewise, his own character’s descent into madness and unreason can perhaps be seen as a representative microcosm of the experiences of the rest of the cast and crew.

Looking back through the unique lens of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, it is possible to see Apocalypse Now just as Francis Ford Coppola came to see it ― a “Vietnam” in its own right, made about a war which was still sending shockwaves through American society, meaning that perceptions of Coppola’s movie were still being shaped by the war even years later. Skepticism about the shoot and about the director’s methods, ethos, and even personal character persisted during the lengthening time taken to get the movie made. But in his own update to Conrad’s novella, Coppola found himself ― by luck, by judgment, or with a little of both ― well placed to make his film an unflinching, if oblique, commentary on America’s own recent, devastating Southeast Asian war.

Philosophical in places, visceral in others, Apocalypse Now reflects and refracts America’s “battle royal” style of military campaign, revealing the bitter impact of combat on young men with no frame of reference for what they were experiencing. Willard and his mission are of course key to this, but all of the soldiers are each on their own transformative, devastating journeys. But most of all Kurtz, in this cinematic incarnation, becomes the dark, hidden face of American warfare, embodying a modern balancing act between Joseph Conrad’s vision and Coppola’s own. This is not only colored by Coppola’s ambitions and restrictions, but by the persistent specter of an unpopular war, still prompting uncomfortable questions about the bigger picture of American exceptionalism in an ever-changing century. In capturing all of this, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse does so much more than simply record the making of a movie; it captures art imitating life in ways which had never been seen before ― and haven’t been since.