After watching the gorgeous 4K restoration of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, my mind immediately went to Roger Ebert’s opening of his review of Apocalypse Now, “They were giants who walked the earth in those days.” The critic even quoted this to Coppola when the Redux was unveiled in 2001.
Indeed, they were. Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper and Eleanor Coppola’s documenting the making of Apocalypse Now is a grand story behind the grand story that as Francis intones early in the film, that was not made in the tradition of the David Lean epics, but in that give ‘em a thrill every five seconds tradition of Irwin Allen’s packed cast disaster-pieces.
A candid moment of Francis Ford Coppola and Eleanor Coppola captured during the behind-the-scenes chaos of Apocalypse Now, as featured in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.
“…documenting the making of Apocalypse Now…”
“My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam,” Coppola says, who, just as Tarantino has said, considers De Palma his guy when considering the greats that came out in the 1970s. Well, for the cinephile, Coppola was my guy. Maybe it was because, like Don Francis, I was coming out of theatre, and I saw Coppola like a modern Orson Welles. A figure that had so much charisma and showmanship, combined with a dynamic, fearless artistic nature. It is well documented the monumental rises and falls of Ford Coppola. If you’d like to know more, then you really need to read Sam Wasson’s The Path to Paradise: A Francis Coppola Story.
But, getting back on topic, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse is glorious. Certainly, up there with the greatest films about film along with Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha and He Dreams of Giants, Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner by Charles de Lauzirika and more modern entries such as Daniel Griffith’s Maelstrom: The Odyssey of Waterworld all chronicle the art of storytelling and world-building on the largest scale money could buy. Titanic artists seeking to birth titanic visions which would each carve out the place in cinema history.
"…simply the immaculate companion piece to a masterclass in photographic opulence..."
