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The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hearts of Darkness: A Film-Maker's Apocalypse review – Francis Ford Coppola and the mother of all meltdowns
The greatest ever making-of documentary is now on re-release: the terrifying story of how Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam war masterpiece Apocalypse Now got made – even scarier than Les Blank's Burden of Dreams, about the making of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. The time has come to acknowledge Eleanor Coppola's magnificent achievement here as first among equals of the credited directors in shooting the original location footage (later interspersed with interviews by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper), getting the stunningly intimate audio tapes of her husband Francis's meltdown moments and, of course, in unassumingly keeping the family together while it was all going on. With his personal and financial capital very high after The Conversation and the Godfather films, Coppola put up his own money and mortgaged property to make this stunningly audacious and toweringly mad version of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness from a script by John Milius; it is transplanted from 19th-century Belgian Congo where a rogue ivory trader has gone native in the dark interior, to south-east Asia during the Vietnam war where a brilliant US army officer is now reportedly being worshipped as a god among the Indigenous peoples and must have his command terminated 'with extreme prejudice'. Marlon Brando had a whispery voiced cameo as the reclusive demi-deity, Martin Sheen was the troubled Captain Willard tasked with taking Kurtz down and Robert Duvall is the psychotically gung-ho Lt Col Kilgore, who leads a helicopter assault. Haemorrhaging money and going insanely over-schedule, Coppola shot his film in the Philippines during burning heat, humidity and monsoons and borrowed army helicopters and pilots from President Ferdinand Marcos, only to find that on many occasions – especially during the legendary Ride of the Valkyries attack scene – filming had to halt as the Filipino military would ask for their helicopters back so they could suppress a communist insurgency. In fact, Coppola found himself reproducing reality on a 1:1 scale. As he said in his Cannes press conference, which opens the documentary: 'The film is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam, it's what it was really like.' Well, bravura auteur rhetoric is an accepted Cannes press conference tradition. The film was arguably just what Vietnam was like for the Americans – though nobody actually died and perhaps it is time to re-state something about Vietnam that gets lost for later generations: a considerable proportion of US soldiers were drafted. The agony was there from the beginning. Coppola originally cast Harvey Keitel as Willard but didn't like what he was doing and fired him on pretty much the first day – a traumatic and legally fraught event that can't be talked about too clearly in the documentary. Sheen, the replacement, was a heavy drinker and smoker whose 'breakdown' scene in his seedy Saigon hotel room was a dangerous, booze-fuelled improvisation. It was a personal primal scream, which contributed so much to his stress that he had a near-fatal heart attack, almost scuppering the entire production. The documentary's most gripping moment is Coppola yelling at someone on the phone not to talk about Sheen's heart attack in case the resulting gossip causes his financial backers to lose their nerve. Sam Bottoms, playing one of Willard's crew, talks cheerfully about doing speed and LSD during filming; he can't have been the only one. And all the time Coppola was suppressing intense anxiety that he was making a mediocre, pretentious movie. Like Conrad, he wanted to satirise the hubris and grotesque vanity of the west's imperial ambitions – and there is something else as well. Willard comes to understand that in killing Kurtz, he is not interrupting or thwarting his occult ritual; he is in fact participating in it, and completing it. Perhaps Coppola came to believe something similar, that he was having his own epiphany-slash-nervous-breakdown in the jungle. It wasn't quite an apocalypse for him, although he arguably never made anything as good again. As it is, it might have been good to have had Coppola and Milius discuss that title: it sounds like a demand, coming from someone who won't wait for apocalypse a moment longer. It might be prescriptive and absurd, but as with the film itself, you wind up believing in it. Hearts of Darkness: A Film-Maker's Apocalypse is in UK and Irish cinemas from 4 July, and on UHD and Blu-ray from 28 July.
Times
29-06-2025
- 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.
The Age
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Don't know what to call it? Just say ‘thing'. Everyone else does
Jed Bartlett, the fictional US president played by Martin Sheen on The West Wing, spoke for all of us when asking, 'I'm sorry. Leaf-peeping – is that something we do now?' Yes, said his staff, convincing their chief that leaf-peeping was indeed a thing. From something to a thing: that's how things escalate. And escalate, with 'a thing' only soaring since Aaron Sorkin's 2000 script. It's hard to pinpoint the first citation, since thing is ubiquitous and invisible, dormant in something and nothing, anything and everything. An all-purpose placeholder, thing can enter speech without a ripple, deputising for another out of reach. Or maybe the speaker can't be bothered to elaborate. Rather than list nail-chewing and bad jokes, Kat will tell Patrick there are 10 Things I Hate About You. Just as Sting's heart swells due to Every Little Thing. In the zeitgeist context, thing means craze, or phenomenon, especially when escorted by either article: a thing (a trend), or the thing (the hottest of the hot). Vogue says tank tops and tulle wraps are the latest thing, or the latest things made cool again. Yet thing surpasses fashion. The noun is shorthand for a mode of behaviour, be that leaf-peeping or gender-reveal parties. When Kim Kardashian mentioned 'pregnancy lips', the TikTok chorus asked 'Are they even a thing?' Ditto for kale smoothies or reading parties. Are any of these real – or popular enough – to matter? Is this a fad to follow, or register at least? Fittingly, given The West Wing cameo, thing has political roots. Icelandic in fact, where the word denotes assembly. (Althing remains Reykjavik's parliament, or all-council.) The origins are glimpsed when candidates hit the hustings – or 'house assembly' – pledging things on their agendas. In a sense, the minutes of the meeting have seized the moment on the street, yielding such phrases as 'know a thing or two' or 'make a thing out of something'. Notice that? A thing. Not just thing, but a singular thing. Romeo and Juliet, say, were a thing. An item. An entity. Just as 'the thing' is the gist you need to grasp, the key to unlock the whole. 'Look, the thing with Shakespeare you need to know…' What outsiders might miss, or the ignoramus fail to recognise. But that's not the only thing that thing is doing. Word-lovers on Language Log, a forum popular among linguists, have spotted the 'dismissive thing', where a parent reports their child is doing their acting thing, say.
Sydney Morning Herald
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Don't know what to call it? Just say ‘thing'. Everyone else does
Jed Bartlett, the fictional US president played by Martin Sheen on The West Wing, spoke for all of us when asking, 'I'm sorry. Leaf-peeping – is that something we do now?' Yes, said his staff, convincing their chief that leaf-peeping was indeed a thing. From something to a thing: that's how things escalate. And escalate, with 'a thing' only soaring since Aaron Sorkin's 2000 script. It's hard to pinpoint the first citation, since thing is ubiquitous and invisible, dormant in something and nothing, anything and everything. An all-purpose placeholder, thing can enter speech without a ripple, deputising for another out of reach. Or maybe the speaker can't be bothered to elaborate. Rather than list nail-chewing and bad jokes, Kat will tell Patrick there are 10 Things I Hate About You. Just as Sting's heart swells due to Every Little Thing. In the zeitgeist context, thing means craze, or phenomenon, especially when escorted by either article: a thing (a trend), or the thing (the hottest of the hot). Vogue says tank tops and tulle wraps are the latest thing, or the latest things made cool again. Yet thing surpasses fashion. The noun is shorthand for a mode of behaviour, be that leaf-peeping or gender-reveal parties. When Kim Kardashian mentioned 'pregnancy lips', the TikTok chorus asked 'Are they even a thing?' Ditto for kale smoothies or reading parties. Are any of these real – or popular enough – to matter? Is this a fad to follow, or register at least? Fittingly, given The West Wing cameo, thing has political roots. Icelandic in fact, where the word denotes assembly. (Althing remains Reykjavik's parliament, or all-council.) The origins are glimpsed when candidates hit the hustings – or 'house assembly' – pledging things on their agendas. In a sense, the minutes of the meeting have seized the moment on the street, yielding such phrases as 'know a thing or two' or 'make a thing out of something'. Notice that? A thing. Not just thing, but a singular thing. Romeo and Juliet, say, were a thing. An item. An entity. Just as 'the thing' is the gist you need to grasp, the key to unlock the whole. 'Look, the thing with Shakespeare you need to know…' What outsiders might miss, or the ignoramus fail to recognise. But that's not the only thing that thing is doing. Word-lovers on Language Log, a forum popular among linguists, have spotted the 'dismissive thing', where a parent reports their child is doing their acting thing, say.
Buzz Feed
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
17 Celebrities Who Were Forced To "Hide" Their Ethnicity To Make It In Hollywood
Recently, Reddit user Chewie83 posed the very interesting question, "Who was/is forced to hide their ethnicity to make it in Hollywood?" And the folks over at r/moviecritic had some very eye-opening responses. Here's what they said: 1. Rita Hayworth — Born: Margarita Carmen Cansino. Hayworth was convinced by executives in Hollywood to change her birth name and undergo a year's worth of painful electrolysis to "reshape" her low, dark hairline. 2. Martin Sheen — Born: Ramón Gerard Antonio Estévez. When he was starting out as an actor in the 1950s, there was significant discrimination in Hollywood (and in New York, where he was living) against actors with Hispanic names. He found it difficult to get auditions and roles because of his birth name. So, he adopted the stage name "Martin Sheen," combining: "Martin" from a CBS producer, Robert Dale Martin, who had encouraged him early in his career, and "Sheen" from Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the auxiliary bishop of New York at the time. Today, Sheen says he regrets changing his name. However, he explained that he never legally changed his name. "Ramon Estévez" is still on his birth certificate, marriage license, passport, and driver's license. 3. Raquel Welch — Born: Jo Raquel Tejada. Allegedly, Welch was instructed to change her "hair, look, name," by Hollywood studio executives early on in her career with some even suggesting "Debbie" as an alternative to Raquel. Welch was the surname of her first husband, James Welch. In the CW documentary I Am Raquel Welch, when asked if she thought she could have reached the same level of success at the time with her birth name, Welch said, "If I was Raquel Tejado, not a chance in hell, no. No way." 4. Ben Kingsley — Born: Krishna Pandit Bhanji. In a 2016 interview, Kingsley said that when he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1967, "a very senior director" there told him that with his birth name, he "would always play servants, and never play kings and leading men, politicians, leaders of their country." As a result, Kingsley combined the nicknames of his father (Ben) and his spice trader grandfather (King Clove). 5. Kirk Douglas — Born: Issur Danielovitch. Kirk told People in 2015 that he believed his birth name was "too unwieldy and too Semitic" for Hollywood. He made the decision to change it when he was starting his acting career in the 1940s. He later regretted the decision, saying he wished he had kept his original name. 6. Anthony Quinn — Born: Manuel Antonio Rodolfo Quinn Oaxaca. While Anthony was never "forced" to hide his ethnicity, he believed his career (and personal life) suffered because of Hollywood's attitude towards it. Speaking with the LA Times in 1995, he said, "At that time Hollywood — hell, America — looked down on anybody not blonde or blue-eyed as potential enemies. We all had to put up with it. I always said I was Mexican, Indian, and Irish." 7. Natalie Wood — Born Natalie Zacharenko. After moving to Los Angeles with her family in 1945, actor and director Irving Pichel suggested that Natalie change her surname to something more "Americanized." RKO executives David Lewis and William Goetz then changed her name to Wood, after director Sam Wood. 8. Tony Curtis — Born: Bernard Schwartz. In 2009, Tony said in an interview that when he was younger he 'despised' the name Schwartz and its German origins and that he would change his name when he would go out. He explained, "I had a relative on my mother's side whose name was Kurtz, so I took that name and Anglicized it. And 'Tony' came from ' Anthony Adverse,' the first novel I read." 9. Chloe Bennet — Born: Chloé Wang. In 2017, when questioned on social media about changing her last name, Chloe responded by saying, "Changing my last name doesn't change the fact that my BLOOD is half Chinese, that I lived in China, speak Mandarin or that I was culturally raised both American and Chinese. It means I had to pay my rent, and Hollywood is racist and wouldn't cast me with a last name that made them uncomfortable.' And Chloe had spoken out about changing her name before. In 2016, she told The Daily Beast. 'The first audition I went on after I changed my name, I got booked. So that's a pretty clear little snippet of how Hollywood works.' 10. Boris Karloff — Born: William Henry Pratt. Boris attempted to obscure his Anglo-Indian heritage, particularly early on in his career. He would often claim to be of Slavic ancestry despite having no such roots and would avoid discussing his family's background. After making the film Targets, director Peter Bogdanovich made a controversial comment in regards to Boris's skin color, saying he "had a hard time photographing its star, Boris Karloff, because he was dark — too dark." 11. Winona Ryder — Born: Winona Laura Horowitz. Although Winona reportedly changed her last name on a whim while being asked how she wanted to be credited for her early films, she has spoken before about her experiences with anti-Semitism in Hollywood. In an interview with the Times of London, Winona said that Mel Gibson once said to her at a party, "You're not an oven dodger, are you?" Later in the interview, she recounted being told by a studio head (who was also Jewish) that she "looked too Jewish," for the part. 12. Doris Day — Born Doris Mary Anne Kappelhoff. Early in her career, Doris had singing sessions on a local radio station where the bandleader Barney Rapp heard her. Rapp suggested she take inspiration from the song she sang, "Day by Day," and change her name. Apparently, he said"Kappelhoff" was "too long to display" on marquees. 13. Helen Mirren — Born: Ilyena Lydia Mironov. It was Helen's father, Vasiliy, who changed their family name from Mironov to Mirren when she was young. However, once Helen started a career in acting, she was the one who opted to change from Ilyena to Helen. 14. Gene Simmons — Born: Chaim Witz. In an interview on Howie Mandel Does Stuff, Gene explained that he purposefully "downplayed" his Jewish heritage at the beginning of his career. He said, "I was born Chaim Witz, and I understood that that didn't work — I did. I realized for myself that in order to succeed, I've gotta be a chameleon of sorts. Basically, dress British, think Yiddish. Yeah, you're Jewish. That's fine. Shut the f--k up. Nobody's interested." 15. Danny Thomas — Born: Amos Muzyad Yaqoob Kairouz. Danny had been struggling to "make it" early on in his show business career. However, after a talent agent, Leo Salkin, booked him at a nightclub in Chicago, the rising star changed his name to be more "stage-friendly." 17. Finally, Alexander Siddig — Born: Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abdurrahman Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi. The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine star said at a fan event that he changed his professional name from Siddig El Fadil to Alexander Siddig primarily because he felt that, "El Fadil" was difficult for people to pronounce. Toni Anne Barson / FilmMagic Submitted by B-Schak
