Obvious and ironic parallels between Joseph Conrad’s seminal work Heart of Darkness and the venture Francis Ford Coppola took with Apocalypse Now are at the centre of this documentary. It is not an adventure, that would imply swashbuckling fun and intensity in all the right places. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse shows a man on the brink. Everything that could go wrong does and it is through nothing short of a miracle, divine intervention or just plain luck that Apocalypse Now came through as well as it did. Even a disastrous and murky film would have been a celebration after learning the details and woeful back and forth of government relations, Marlon Brando and natural disasters. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse charts that perfect storm.
Coppola here has that infamous, wrought relationship with himself that was the violent pairing between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski. Within that perfect storm, the trust of his work post-The Godfather and the financial responsibilities of a director charting a feature that gets bigger and bigger, is self-doubt. Hindsight is a wonderful perspective and there was no need for that doubt, but in the moment, that very real and worrying question rises. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse centres itself on that doubt, that ever-questioning presence that comes from what grows and grows into a greater risk than first expected. Coppola looks worn out by the end of the feature, and it is thanks to the crucial documentary form helmed by Eleanor Coppola.
She observes her husband in dark and intimate moments with all the fly-on-the-wall perspective someone can achieve when so closely tied to the project. Their house is up for grabs should it fall through, such is the faith in the project. Clear throughout this is not a loss of what to do but a struggle to match the ambition. Coppola never appears to be in over his head. Martin Sheen’s near-fatal heart attack and the disastrous setbacks that come through time and time again are challenged and adapted to. Not once does Coppola ever let the project spiral out of control through his own doing, and even when it does, even with that emotional toll inflicting hellfire and worry on him, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse does well to reflect, in earnest, on the impact at the time.
Worries were remarkable and often but dropping scenes from the feature to contrast the pandemonium behind the camera does a good job for the sake of contrast. Coppola, the defenceless and wounded golden boy of Hollywood, dropped right into the heart of military deals with at-war governments, dealing with a tide of woeful behind-the-scenes issues. To head into Apocalypse Now is to be aware of how large a horror show it was to make and be around. Brando rounds out the final third of this documentary as a problem that at the time would have been a grand frustration but in hindsight was a mild and unusual issue when compared to the helicopter rentals, the changing cast and the sickness that ran through and polluted the streams of influence founded on Coppola’s feature here. It is his Aguirre: The Wrath of God, in more ways than he could possibly have expected.
