Something to watch tonight: Thursday 18 April

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (Coppola, 1991)

Eleanor Coppola passed away last week­end at the age of 87.

She was best known as a dir­ect­or for Hearts of Darkness, her 1991 doc­u­ment­ary about the mak­ing of Apocalypse Now, the film made by her hus­band Francis.

Much of what we now know about Apocalypse Now – the risk, the ambi­tion, the stress, the sheer extremity of it all – comes from that film and they work in tan­dem as a por­trait of artist­ic hubris and human over­reach. The doc­u­ment­ary is a por­trait of people los­ing their minds mak­ing a fea­ture film about people los­ing their minds. 

Watching it again last night, for the first time in over 30 years, I was struck by how much I remembered of it. The heart attack, the typhoon, the tiger. For young (male) artists in the early 90s it was some­thing of a sem­in­al text in ‘going hard or going home’, that film­mak­ing should be an adven­ture, and we lapped all that stuff up, in many ways to our cost.

The 1991 ver­sion of Coppola, inter­viewed in the doc­u­ment­ary, talks of film dir­ect­ing as being the last true dic­tat­ori­al pos­i­tion in a world made increas­ingly “demo­crat­ic”. I won­der if he still feels that way today, wheth­er his latest self-funded epic Megalopolis was built the same bullet-headed and single-minded way.

But this time around I was much more aware of Eleanor Coppola as a par­ti­cipant in the story, not just an observ­er. What comes through is her patience for her hus­band and his obses­sions, her empathy for his struggles, the work she put in to enable him – and not just by rais­ing his kids and keep­ing the house­hold together.

They were part­ners in everything, but only Francis was called a genius.

She was a great storyteller in her own right, it’s just that the story she was telling – in Hearts of Darkness and the book Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now – was his.

Only later in life did she turn her atten­tion to her own story and stor­ies – the book Notes on a Life and the under-appreciated romance Paris Can Wait.

Where to watch Hearts of Darkness

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Digital rent­al from AroVision

Australia: Digital rent­al from Ritz

Canada: Digital rent­al from Apple

USA: Digital rent­al from Apple or Amazon

UK: Streaming on StudioCanal

Hearts of Darkness is avail­able on Blu-ray as a stan­dalone edi­tion (a rent­al from Alice’s in Christchurch) but is also included in the Apocalypse Now Final Cut box set. Just not in New Zealand any longer.