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
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Funerals & Snakes to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.