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Wall Street Journal
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse': Francis Ford Coppola's Chaos in 4K
Last summer, New York's Film Forum opened a 4K restoration of Les Blank's 'Burden of Dreams,' a documentary about the torturous creation of Werner Herzog's 'Fitzcarraldo.' This weekend, the theater is opening a 4K restoration of another behind-the-scenes look at an infamous film shoot: that of Francis Ford Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now,' as captured in 1991's 'Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse,' directed by Mr. Coppola's wife, Eleanor, alongside Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper. (The restoration will travel to select cities in the coming weeks.) The two documentaries share a sense that the films they are about are inextricable from the wild circumstances of their production, the movies and their making fusing into fever dreams of ego and anguish, debt and danger, long days and longer odds that the projects at hand will ever see the light of the silver screen. But whereas to my eyes 'Burden of Dreams' eclipses 'Fitzcarraldo' in artistic interest, 'Hearts of Darkness' is the story of a masterpiece, one arguably flawed and assuredly visionary.
BBC News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'Vietnam was insane, Apocalypse Now only slightly less so': The inside story of the wildest shoot in film history
No production has been as troubled as the 1979 war epic. As behind-the-scenes documentary Hearts of Darkness is re-released, its director, and two of those who were on set, reveal all. "The way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam," explained Francis Ford Coppola, after the Cannes Film Festival screening of Apocalypse Now in 1979. "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." While the troubled production of Coppola's epic, brutal, psychedelic war film had been well documented in the press while it was being made – from finance issues to actors being re-cast, and health problems to extreme weather – it would not be until 1991 that the true extent of the chaos would become clear via Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. The documentary was assembled from extensive footage that Coppola's wife Eleanor shot while on set, depicting a film production that while breathtaking in scope, ambition and vision, was equally messy, drug-addled, and riddled with seemingly insurmountable setbacks. Fax Bahr and the late George Hickenlooper were the two young directors tasked with combing through reel after reel to piece together the madness and tell the gripping story of the film's making. Now that film, having undergone a 4K restoration, is back in US and UK cinemas from this weekend. Bahr still recalls the first day he saw Coppola's footage, which had been sitting, largely untouched, for over a decade. "Some of the reports had been, 'Oh, there's a lot of out-of-focus stuff,'" he tells the BBC. "But the reels we looked at were extraordinary. Just beautiful footage. Clearly, she had been copiously recording everything that was happening. It was absolute gold." The long list of troubles Apocalypse Now, loosely based on the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, is considered one of the greatest works in cinematic history. However, it nearly fell apart at various stages. With filming starting in the Philippines in March 1976, it was initially set to be a five-month shoot – but in the end would last over a year. Coppola fired his leading man, Harvey Keitel, a few weeks in, and replaced him with Martin Sheen, who then suffered a near-fatal heart attack on location. Expensive sets were totally destroyed by a typhoon, and some actors were infected with hookworm parasites, while others leaned into heavy partying and drug-taking on set. Then Marlon Brando, who was playing the AWOL Colonel Kurtz, showed up on set heavily overweight and completely unprepared, which forced Coppola to re-write and shoot the ending of the film to suit him. As time went on, the film was so drastically over budget that Coppola took on the role of financing it himself, which would have ruined him had it not made its money back. According to Eleanor Coppola's book, Notes, even after the shoot had wrapped, during post-production, Coppola only gave himself a 20% likelihood that he could pull out a credible film from the wreckage. The documentary paints a picture of a production that sets out to recreate the Vietnam war and, in many ways, ends up mirroring many of the same patterns of behaviour that took place among soldiers. One person suitably placed to make such a comparison is Chas Gerretsen, the Dutch war photographer and photojournalist who was brought onto the set for six months (the results were collected in the 2021 book Apocalypse Now: The Lost Photo Archive.) "Vietnam was insane, Apocalypse Now only slightly less so," Gerretsen tells the BBC. The harsh conditions were totally alien to most people there. "The crew complained a lot about the heat, humidity, hotel rooms, bugs, mosquitoes," he says. "The mud – sometimes knee-deep – was a real challenge." Damien Leake, who played a machine gunner in the film, was on set for three weeks and similarly remembers the physical as being unlike anything he had encountered. "The first thing I remember is getting off the plane and the humidity hits you like a wet mop," he tells the BBC. "Having been from New York, I know humidity, but this was unbelievable." The water was not safe to drink, geckos climbed the walls of the hut he stayed in, and the weather was biblical. "Every day it would rain," he says. "It would rain like it was mad at you. It would rain sheets like I had never seen before." As the production dragged on, it became tough for the cast and crew, who started to miss life back home. "They were pretty much like the soldiers in Vietnam, who had never been further away from home than Canada," recalls Gerretsen. "There was a lot of homesickness. One member of the crew went nearly every weekend to Manila – a three-to-four-hour trip, each way, over a bad road – and rented a hotel room overlooking the airport, just watching planes take off for the USA." Coppola's vision was crumbling more and more as time went on. In particular, he couldn't nail the ending of the film which, to this day, varies in several different edits and versions of the film. "I call this whole movie the Idiodyssey," Coppola said at the time, as recorded in Hearts of Darkness. "None of my tools, none of my tricks, none of my ways of doing things works for this ending. I have tried so many times that I know I can't do it. It might be a big victory to know that I can't do it. I can't write the ending to this movie." However, his cast seemingly stayed loyal and committed. "Actors would walk through fire for Francis," says Leake, "because he gives them such leeway and such a sense of them being able to make this [scene/character] their own. Then he then shapes it into what he wants. You can't ask for more than that." While homesickness plagued many, Leake had a different experience. He calls his time on the shoot "the most glorious three weeks of my life. I would go hang out with Filipino people, which I adored. I thought they were wonderful. I fell in love with a beautiful girl and if I had had a bigger part in the film, I'd probably still be there. I loved it that much." Telling the behind-the-scenes story Once Bahr began to work through all the footage, it was only then that it sunk in just how miraculous it was that this film existed at all. "I knew that it was an extremely challenging film to pull off, but until you get into the nitty gritty of the footage, you couldn't really understand the horrendous obstacles that they kept facing." As such, the task Bahr had in telling the story behind the story was a challenge itself, requiring him to dig through around 80 hours of footage. "The first cut of the documentary was four and a half hours," he explains. "Because Ellie (Coppola) kept shooting after the production was over, we had a whole post-production section [in the original cut]." And of course, there was plenty of drama during that process, even when Coppola and his team were out of the jungle and back in the comfort of a studio. "One of the editors absconded with the print and holed up in a hotel room," Bahr recalls. "Nobody could find him and they thought that the whole thing was stolen. Then he would send back burned celluloid in envelopes saying, 'I'm getting rid of the film, scene by scene'. They were just freaking out." Thankfully, the creative differences that had caused the rift and theft were resolved before any serious damage was done. Bahr recalls the moment when he knew that the documentary had uncovered something foundational. "The discovery of the audio tapes that Ellie made of Francis was revelatory," he says of the audio recordings that play out over scenes in the film. "Ellie was the only person on Earth who was capable of capturing Francis like that – up close and personal. This was putting you right here with an American master in his most private moments and it was a real glimpse into the very centre of creativity: its doubt, worry, angst, and working out these ideas. That was incredibly special." Coppola gave Bahr and Hickenlooper his blessing to do what they wanted with the footage. His only instruction was: be honest. "He said, 'There's some ugly things that happened here, but as long as you tell the story honestly, I'll support it.'" The only request he made was that the narration, which had been done by a voice actor, was re-recorded by his wife, given that the material was hers and, in many ways, this was a story seen through her eyes. It was a final masterstroke move that made the documentary feel like even more of a raw insider's look at the film shoot. More like this:• How Brokeback Mountain challenged Hollywood• Full Metal Jacket and the ultimate anti-war films• 10 of the best films to watch this July "The nicest thing that anyone says to me about the documentary is that it's a necessary accessory to understanding Apocalypse Now," says Bahr. "People say, 'Well, I saw Apocalypse Now and loved it, but after I saw your documentary, I understood it in a more comprehensive way.' That's the highest compliment possible." For Bahr, Apocalypse Now exists as a total one-off. "It was such a unique film in film-making history," he says. "I don't think anybody will ever be able to do anything like that again. Not just because Francis was willing to stake his whole fortune on it, but also just because of the ambition. I mean, he intended to go to the Philippines and recreate Vietnam for the crew and have everybody in the company go through that experience. It was such a brilliant vision." For Gerretsen, his experiences have become almost impossible to distinguish from his memories of actual war zones. "The explosions, the coloured smoke, the hours of waiting for the scene to be set up – everything is mixed," he says. When he did watch the finished film, its impact was significant. "It was incredible in the way it brought it all back. It was a masterpiece, no doubt, but it would be several years before I could watch it again. Both the Vietnam and Cambodian wars, and Apocalypse Now, continue to be with me because the insanity of war is still with us." Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse is in UK cinemas from 4 July, and will play at New York's Film Forum from 4 July, and other US cinemas nationally from 18 July. A 4k Blu-ray collector's edition will be available to buy in the UK from 28 July. -- If you liked this story sign up for The Essential List newsletter, a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week. For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X, and Instagram.
Times
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
The inside story of Apocalypse Now: ‘Martin Sheen refused to work with corpses'
In May 1979 Francis Ford Coppola took Apocalypse Now to the Cannes Film Festival. It wasn't finished, despite two years of postproduction, as the director of The Godfather struggled to carve a film from his chaotic 238-day shoot and more than a million feet of footage. His hope was that the 139-minute work-in-progress print would at least extinguish reports that his transposition of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the 19th-century Congo to the Vietnam War was an overblown mess. In fact it won the Palme d'Or. At the press conference, Coppola told the world's media, 'My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam,' speaking both to the film's scale and his ego. 'We had access to too much money, too much equipment and, little by little, we went insane.' Twelve years later Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, a documentary directed by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, premiered at Cannes to rave reviews. Assembled from 16mm footage shot by Coppola's wife, Eleanor, their astonishing chronicle captured all the behind-the-scenes drama as Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) journeyed upriver to assassinate the rogue Special Forces officer Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). There were the set-destroying typhoons; the leading man Harvey Keitel being let go a week into filming; his replacement, Martin Sheen, suffering a near-fatal heart attack; the Filipino army recalling its loaned helicopters to fight a communist insurgency; and the horror (the horror!) of Brando, who was pocketing $1 million a week, arriving overweight and underprepared for the film's final scenes. 'It was extraordinary,' Bahr says of that initial Cannes reception. Sitting in his Los Angeles home, the man who went on to create the US comedy series MadTV (based on the satirical magazine Mad) exudes the benevolent air of someone who still can't quite believe that he managed to corral the chaos of Apocalypse Now — or, indeed, was allowed to. Next month a restored print of his documentary will get a cinema release, before coming to Blu-ray. Bahr had never made a film when he contacted the Coppolas in 1989, on hearing of Eleanor's unseen reels. 'They said, 'Sure, the [80 hours of] footage is just sitting in a vault.' We looked at it and thought, 'This is gold.' So we put together an eight-minute reel, and sold it based on that. They shipped all the footage down. It was just a bunch of boxes. Chaotic. And there was this shoebox of audio tapes with dates on them — Ellie taping Francis at night, in utter despair. How he was failing, how terrible the film was. Right then I knew what the heart of the movie was.' Bahr's breakthrough was to introduce a metatextual narrative articulating Coppola's Kurtz-like journey into darkness. ('My greatest fear is making a really shitty, pompous film on an important subject!' he can be heard raving. 'I will get an F. I'm thinking of shooting myself.') To Coppola's credit, he rarely interfered, allowing for a warts-and-all portrait of his obsessive behaviour. With one exception. Bahr smiles ruefully. 'I did an interview with Martin Sheen and he talked about when he first came to the Kurtz compound, and there were all the dead bodies strewn around, and he said, 'This looks very realistic.' And the art director said, 'Yeah, we got them from the medical school.' And [Sheen] flipped out and said, 'No! I will not do this!'' The corpses were removed, replaced by made-up extras. 'Francis had put the crew in a state of mind where everything could go. That was his aesthetic — everyone was supposed to go to this extreme place that Kurtz goes.' Even so, the Coppolas vetoed this part of Sheen's interview from Hearts of Darkness. On set for stretches of the shoot were Francis and Eleanor's three children, Gian-Carlo (who died in a boating accident in 1986, aged 22), Roman and Sofia. Roman was ten when filming began, and recalls it primarily as an adventure. The costume department made him a Patrol Boat, River (PBR) uniform, and the make-up team covered him in fake scars and wounds. Most thrilling of all was witnessing the famous airstrike, as helicopters blasting Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries gratuitously firebomb a Vietnamese village. 'I remember the explosions, the helicopters flying through the air,' Roman tells me. 'It was a very sensual, exciting time for a kid to be in that setting.' As for his father putting up his personal assets as collateral when the film's budget spiralled from $12 million to $25 million, Roman seems every bit as unfazed as his mother is in Hearts of Darkness. 'She was a very thoughtful and in-tune person,' he says. 'She was clearly supportive of my dad and recognised that he was an artist making some striking, original work — work that needed to go through these steps of uncertainty and difficulty to get to the other side. You know, my dad has always been a dynamic person, taking on adventures — as recently, with Megalopolis, [which demonstrated] a similar instinct to just follow his passions. Our family always supports that. I think that's the beauty of a life in art: you're an explorer, an adventurer.' Megalopolis was dedicated to Eleanor, who died, aged 87, in April last year. There are clear parallels between Apocalypse Now and Megalopolis. Premiering at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Coppola's first movie for 13 years was self-funded to the tune of $120 million; he had sold off a portion of his wine-making business to finance an idea he had been wrestling with since the early 1980s. Just as Apocalypse Now riffed on Conrad (with elements of The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy and the poetry of TS Eliot thrown in), so Megalopolis drew on Roman history with side helpings of Shakespeare and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Apocalypse Now reflected on American interventionism; Megalopolis drew comparisons between contemporary US politics and the collapse of the Roman republic. 'Yeah, I do see the parallels,' says Bahr, who found much to admire in Coppola's more recent epic. 'I felt it was what Francis always saw himself as — which was a master creator, not just a film-maker, but touching on architecture and societal issues. I think he was playing with what was always his dream for Zoetrope [the San Francisco-based studio Coppola co-founded in 1969, which aimed to democratise film-making]. He always bucked the Hollywood system because it was so restrictive.' If Megalopolis and Apocalypse Now were huge gambles, Bahr had to take some of his own to bring Hearts of Darkness to the screen. In 1990 he wangled his way on to the set of the Mob comedy The Freshman, with the sole purpose of asking Brando to grant him an interview. 'They'd finished shooting for the day and Brando was on his way to his trailer,' he says with a grin. 'I chased him down. He looked at me like, 'Who's this asshole?' I gave him my whole spiel and said, 'I would love to interview you.' He said, 'Kid, I do my shit and I go home.' Then he walked into his trailer and shut the door.'Hearts of Darkness is in cinemas from Jul 4; the collector's edition Blu-ray is released on Jul 28 Do you have a favourite moment from Apocalypse Now? Let us know in the comments below.
