Ten movies that stay with me, day two. Hearts of Darkness, a documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now.

I enjoy almost any documentary about the making of a movie, as long as it isn’t a mindless promotional puff piece. Filmmaking is fascinating to me. This is the best “making of” films I’ve seen. To me it’s even better than the film itself, which is a masterpiece.

Francis Ford Coppola made Apocalypse Now after the success of The Godfather I and II. It was an audacious move at the time - an unflattering film about the Vietnam War made during the war. Coppola’s wife Eleanor filmed and recorded much of the goings on during shooting. Years later, she and others turned it into “Hearts of Darkness, A Filmmakers Apocalypse.” It’s anything but a puff piece.

Coppola threw himself, his money, and his family fully into the film. Everything went wrong. I won’t give it away, but he had major issues with the cast, the weather, and the arguments with the Philippine military who were providing his helicopters - in the middle of a real war of their own. His perseverance didn’t just border lunacy, but crossed the line and kept on going. Fascinating. The end result was one of the best war films ever made.

The only thing I find confusing is the title. Apocalypse Now is based on the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness. I guess they wanted to use a similar (appropriate) title, and it fits, except the pluralization of Hearts. This is clearly about one heart, that of Francis Ford Coppola.

The documentary opens with a period statement from Coppola which sums it up nicely(?):

“My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. 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.”