The 1979 shoot of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now famously spiraled into chaos—jungle typhoons wrecked sets, Harvey Keitel was fired and replaced by Martin Sheen (who then nearly died), Marlon Brando turned up unprepared, actors battled parasites and heatstroke, and Coppola nearly went bankrupt financing the over-year-long shoot. As he put it at Cannes: “We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.”
Now Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse—built from Eleanor Coppola’s on-set footage and pieced together by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper—has been lovingly restored in 4K. The documentary lays bare every typhoon, temper tantrum and creative breakthrough (including secret audio tapes of Coppola’s self-doubt), painting an almost mythic portrait of a production as harrowing and hallucinatory as the Vietnam War it tried to recreate.
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