Stockholm Film Festival

A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT THE MAKING of Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now. Coppola's wife Eleanor describes in unique footage Coppola's three year long manic struggle to finish the heavily manageable and in one case, fatal production. Eleanor's pictures are mixed with recent interviews with the director, the actors and the film team.
Comment:
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA'S APOCALYPSE Now is today nearly to a film legend, a monument over Hollywood's grandiosity and to a certain extent megalomania. The film is based on Joseph Conrad's study of the backside of colonialism in his now classical novel Heart of Darkness. In Coppola's version the action, based on the same theme, has been moved to the Vietnam war. A young officer is sent away to execute Kurtz, unforgettably portrayed by Marlon Brando, a colonel who's established himself as something between baron and God at the other side of the Cambodian border, a continuous pain in the neck for the war bureaucrats in Washington.
Orson Welles had already in 1939 planned to make his Hollywood debut with an adaption of Heart of Darkness. Welles exploded all economic frames already during the introductory stages and since then the novel has been regarded as more or less impossible to handle. Coppola, obsessed with the infinite possibilities of film as medium, was considered capable of carrying Welles' crown. The screenplay was finished as early as 1969, but the production itself did not begin until 1976. Afer eight months shooting on the Philippines and another half year at the editing board, the film could be presented to the audience at the Cannes festival in 1979.
The great difficulties permeating the whole production are well-known: for instance, the broken budget, the main character Martin Sheen's heart attack, the Monsoon rains' destruction of the expensive props ... The stories now exist, documented on film. Coppola's wife Eleanor Coppola followed the whole development with her camera and the material, after twelve years on the shelf, has now been edited by the two American documentary film makers Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper into the pushy Hearts of Darkness, a unique portrait of one of post World War II:s most mythologized creations in film.
The plural ending added to Conrad's title refers to the parallel psychological process which the main character in the film, and Coppola himself, went through - the journey into the heart of darkness. According to his wife, Coppola suffered purgatory's all horrors: fear of failing, fear of insanity, fear of death itself. An enormous responsibility came to hang on Coppola's shoulders after the budget had been broken. At the same time he had difficulties making the story believable. The result was a kind of early Hollywood modernism, an early version of the fragmented images in rock videos, accompanied by Randy Hansen's guitar flows and Wagner's Valkyria, where the lack of continuity symbolically represented the experience of alienation.
Hearts of Darkness is maybe most of all a psychological portrait of Francis Ford Coppola, filtered through the eyes of his wife. Still, it has much to tell about Hollywood, the Vietnam war, and the problematic role of the artist_
ERIK HEDLING

Medverkande

Documentary

Producent

George Zaloom, Les Mayfield, Doug Claybourne, Fred Roos

Manus

Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper

Foto

Eleanor Coppola

Musik

Todd Boekelheide

Talat språk

English

 

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