Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse

In the late 1970s, celebrated director Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, The Conversation) and his cast, crew, and family ventured into the dense jungles of the Philippines to begin work on what would eventually become his masterpiece, Apocalypse Now. But the journey from page to screen soon spiraled into a hellish, life-threatening nightmare that echoed the film’s narrative. Plagued with adversity, one of the most influential films ever made had one of the most notorious shoots in cinema history that few survived unscathed.

Meticulously documented at the time by Eleanor Coppola (Paris Can Wait), Fax Bahr (In Living Color), and George Hickenlooper (Dogtown) revisited the footage in 1991 and filmed new interviews with the cast and crew, resulting in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, a groundbreaking and intimate portrait of what went into making one of the best films ever made.