Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
Written and directed by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper
Documentary footage directed by Eleanor Coppola
Winner of the Best Documentary 1991 at the Sydney and Tokyo Film Festivals
Showing at Melbourne's Valhalla and Kino Cinemas from February 21
Reviewed by Peter Boyle
It is unusual for a "making of the movie" documentary to come out 12 years after the movie. But this film of the making of Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now is more than what has now become a standard promotional exercise in all Hollywood productions. It explains just what succeeded so brilliantly in Apocalypse Now and what failed so miserably. Perhaps this is why Eleanor Coppola's footage was kept on ice for so long.
I remember being forced to sit in the very front row of a packed cinema to see Apocalypse Now back in 1979. As it turned out, this only enhanced what, in my opinion, was the film's strongest point — its graphic portrayal of the immense and grossly imperial US military intervention in Vietnam.
"My film is not a movie about Vietnam", said Francis Coppola in Cannes in 1979."It is Vietnam. It is what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, there was too many of us. We had access to too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane."
Apocalypse Now didn't say the US didn't have a right to be there, but millions of people of who saw it thought so, making it one of the great antiwar movies of the period.
But as Hearts of Darkness shows, all through the making of the movie, Francis Coppola thought he was failing. He couldn't carry through his intention to interpret the psychological theme of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, which inspired the script for Apocalypse Now.
Conrad's book was the story of a white missionary, Kurtz, who goes into deepest Africa and then goes mad under the influence of the jungle and the "primitive" culture of the natives. In 1939, Orson Wells gave up an attempt to make a film from the book.
In Apocalypse Now, Kurtz is a US special forces operative who is sent to train a secret tribal army as an anti-Communist force in Cambodia. Kurtz goes out of control, and the CIA sends Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) to "terminate Kurtz with extreme prejudice". Most of the film is made up of Willard's journey to Kurtz's jungle stronghold.
Conrad's dubious psychological theme was to be captured in Willard's moral problems in killing Kurtz. Willard's dilemma becomes ridiculous since we are expected to believe that one killing becomes a problem after hundreds of Vietnamese are massacred on the way to Kurtz! He didn't have to go deep into the jungle to look savagery in the face.
There were other problems. Francis Coppola could never work out a rather ordinary predicament that is embellished somewhat in the documentary), Martin Sheen had a heart attack mid-shoot, a typhoon destroyed expensive sets (and with little consequence for the film, killed or rendered homeless thousands of Filipinos) and Marion Brando (who played Kurtz) turned up grossly overweight, expensively petulant and with a speech problem. In a strange way, these problems may have contributed to what was successful with the film because it made Coppola go overboard with the first part, spending in the process millions of dollars over budget.
He was also helped along by the fact that the long shoot in the Philippines (238 days) in 1976 took on an uncanny resemblance to US intervention in Vietnam.
The well-paid white cast and crew, the over-inflated egos of the main actors, the large numbers of Filipino extras and porters who were hired for a dollar or two a day, the steaming jungle, the real military officers who watched over then president Ferdinand Marcos' entire helicopter fleet (leased to Coppola when they were not used to fight the real Filipino guerillas), all made for realism. According to a Filipino who lived at the location of the shoot at the time, the local people were treated like dirt and were resented by many. And overlord to the lot was white emperor Coppola (he admits that he had the closest thing to absolute dictatorship in the modern world).
If Apocalypse Now was Coppola's apocalypse, his perseverance even when he knew he had failed is presented in the documentary as a testament to the artist's obsessive pursuit of his vision.
A cynical viewer might conclude that it was more a reflection of Coppola's supreme confidence that with enough money, his reputation from Godfather and good timing (Vietnam movies were still taboo among film investors and the US establishment then) would make the movie a winner, despite the stupid story-line. Hearts of Darkness really gives us one of those all too rare frank and thought-provoking looks behind the powerful multimillion dollar images spun by Hollywood.