The insanity and greatness of Apocalypse Now

This was a viewpoint Coppola himself would propose when an uncompleted version of the film screened in Cannes. “The movie is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam,” he tells the assembled press. His grandiose claim is backed up by one of the best “making of” documentaries ever created. Eleanor Coppola, Francis’s long-suffering wife, was at his side with a camera and a typewriter. She kept a diary which was published as Notes. The documentary she shot was put together later as Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which is currently being shown in cinemas across the UK and Ireland. 

In Notes, she had already observed how her husband was always dealing with his own unresolved problems through the films he made. She was writing and filming and looking after her sons Gio and Roman, and her daughter Sofia. They would all become filmmakers, or scriptwriters in their turn, most famously Sophia. But here they were in Manilla, with horrendous heat, fever and illness, a father going crazy and a mother documenting the descent into madness. 

However mad Apocalypse Now was, it could have been madder. The project had originally been conceived with George Lucas directing, to be shot in Vietnam with the war ongoing. Sensible heads prevailed for perhaps the last time. (Lucas would put his anti-Vietnam critique into his space opera Star Wars, with rebels fighting a technologically superior power). 

The shooting began in March 1976, with the Philippines standing in for Vietnam. But soon Coppola’s lead actor needed to be replaced – Harvey Kietel was out and Martin Sheen was in. Sheen then suffered a massive heart attack. Typhoons swept in and destroyed the sets and Marlon Brando turned up as Colonel Kurtz, the elite Green Beret par excellence, looking like he’d eaten the jungle.  

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At a million dollars a week, Coppola humoured his star, helping him learn the script and filming his improvisations. Some of it was rubbish – there are outtakes in the documentary – and some of it is gold dust. Oh, and there was also Dennis Hopper on all the drugs. 

Some films are made for “Making of” documentaries. Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams followed Werner Herzog as he dragged a steam boat over a mountain in the jungles of Peru while making his 1982 drama Fitzcarraldo. Herzog’s own documentary My Best Fiend portrayed the various collaborations with his homicidal frenemy Klaus Kinski, a man for whom spittle-flecked rage came as easily as inhaling. Terry Gilliam’s failed attempt to make his Don Quixote movie with Johnny Depp became the hilarious and tragic Lost in La Mancha, a film which was arguably better than The Man who Killed Don Quixote when it finally did appear in 2018, starring Adam Driver. 

Part of the fascination with these films is seeing behind-the-scenes footage of famous directors and stars melting down under the pressures of filmmaking and their own egos. Chris Smith’s 1999 documentary American Movie has no stars and the director Mark Borchardt downscales his ambition from making a feature film to make a short called Coven. The results are a hilarious mixture of the unstoppable force of the can-do spirit with the immovable obstacle of ineptitude. Mark’s friend Mike Schank provides moral support, music and is a resolutely cheerful factotum. To use a comparison Terry Gilliam would enjoy, he’s Sancho Panza to Mark’s Quixote as they stumble around rural Wisconsin, dealing with amateur actors, a senile uncle who’s providing the budget and their own addiction issues to alcohol (Mark) and gambling (Mike). 

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Quixote could be the patron saint of movie productions. Directors are fantasists on impossible quests, forever tilting at windmills they mistake for monsters: Herzog in Peru with his boat and Coppola going mad in the jungle. 

Apocalypse Now almost wrecked Coppola’s marriage and ruined him financially, and certainly worsened his reputation. For the risk averse studios, he was a dangerous bet. But the movie earned back its money and would become one of the most important films of Coppola’s career. The irony is that Coppola had envisioned it as an entertaining war movie, a relief from the darkness of The Godfather films, and the crushing paranoia of The Conversation. Eleanor Coppola reports him saying at the end of Notes that he could have tried making a film about Mickey Mouse and it would have ended up being a “personal journey into himself”. 

And that’s the secret of the film and the fascination of Hearts of Darkness. The true filmmakers, the true artists, even though they absolutely shouldn’t, they always get off the boat. 

Hearts of Darkness is in UK cinemas from 4 July