#344: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse
Release Date: November 27th, 1991
Format: DVD
Written by: Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper
Directed by: Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper
3.5 Stars
When Captain Willard arrives in the jungles of Cambodia and finally finds the man he has been commissioned to kill, the illusive Colonel Kurtz, in the final act of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, there is a telling exchange between the two men:
Capt. Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Col. Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Capt. Willard: I don’t see any method at all, sir.
Col. Kurtz: You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.
After watching Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse I can’t help but see the connection between this scene and Coppola’s feeling of overwhelming desperation during filming. Is Col. Kurtz not a representation of Coppola himself, hopelessly lost in the jungle for years, the target of doubts and rumors and vitriol from his critics? Is Capt. Willard not a representation of failure, of unmet expectations, of bankruptcy? Is he not the symbol of all the things that were out to destroy Coppola during the production of Apocalypse Now?
Featuring footage shot by his wife, Eleanor, behind the scenes of Apocalypse's production in the Philippines, Hearts of Darkness is the chronicling of a creative man, a pure artist (to his own detriment), in totally over his head. It’s the portrait of an unraveling psychologically, financially, and professionally.
You’ll see Coppola deal with typhoon ravaged sets, Filipino helicopter pilots that fly off to combat a rebel uprising in the surrounding mountains between takes, and the coordination of hundreds of locals building actual bridges and temples at dozens of shooting locations. You’ll see him sweat and curse and yell and worry. You’ll see his weight fluctuate wildly during the over 200 days of shooting on-location.
You’ll see a man driven to the brink of total collapse.
During a conversation with Eleanor after a particularly taxing day of filming, months into production, we hear a broken man:
“I’m feeling like an idiot, at having set in motion stuff that doesn’t make any sense, that doesn’t match, and yet I’m doing it. And the reason I’m doing it is out of desperation because I have no rational way to do it. What I have to admit is that I don’t know what I’m doing. [Everybody else] sees the magic of what has happened before. I’m saying, ‘Hey, it’s not going to happen.’ I don’t have any performances. The script doesn’t make sense. I have no ending. I’m like a voice crying out, ‘Please! It’s not working! Somebody get me off this!’ Nobody listens to me! Everyone says, ‘Yeah, well Francis works best in a crisis.’ I’m saying this is one crisis I’m not going to pull myself out of. I’m making a bad movie, so why should I go ahead? I’d rather…I’m going to be bankrupt anyway. Why can’t I just have the courage to say that it’s no good? There’s almost anything I’d do to get out of it. I’m already thinking about what kind of sickness I can get. I’m in the rain on the platform thinking, ‘If I just moved a little, I’d just fall 30 feet.’ It might not kill me, but it might paralyze me or something. It’d be a graceful way out.”
Although it took years, an extra mortgage on his house, and the leveraging of his rights to The Godfather to secure extra financing, Coppola ultimately finished Apocalypse Now. It went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1979, along with two Academy Awards, where he was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Director. If not his best movie, Apocalypse Now is undoubtedly his magnum opus.
No film of this magnitude will be produced in this way ever again. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse is a captivating chronicling of the horror of it all.
