| |
|||
 |
|||
 
|
|||
|
|
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
The subject of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse is the grueling process that Coppola suffered to make Apocalypse Now, which went on to become arguably the greatest war film ever made. After watching this documentary, we understand that if Francis Ford Coppola had lived in the fifteenth century, he would have beat Michelangelo in painting the Sistine Chapel. Here is a filmmaker willing to sacrifice his fortune, his family, his health, and his sanity to place himself in extreme situations to make his films. Against all odds, the results have been some of the greatest movies of all time, with Apocalypse Now probably on the top of the list. Of course, if you had told Coppola that Apocalypse Now would be such a masterpiece during the filming process, he would have thought you were out of your mind. When he barks lines to his wife like, “I have no idea where I am going with this,” and “I know from the bottom of my heart that I am making a failure,” you realize what a remarkable documentary this is, because it effectively captures the agony and the ecstasy that Coppola endured while shooting his film to the point that you literally ache for him. The list of mishaps during filming seems endless: What was originally going to be a sixteen week shoot ended up lasting over a year. Coppola had to personally fund most of the film once it ran over schedule, and when a typhoon destroyed most of the set, he nearly went bankrupt. It didn’t make matters any easier that most of his principal cast was either doped up or high for most of filming, and that the actor playing his protagonist, Martin Sheen, suffered a nearly-fatal heart attack in the middle of shooting. In addition, Marlon Brando, who played the main antagonist, came to set not having read the script or the book in which it was based. All this on top of unbearably heat, a war in the Philippines (where the movie was filmed) that the director had to constantly elude, mockery from peers back in Hollywood, and constant sickness created what is perhaps the most unpleasant filmmaking experience in motion picture history. The documentary presents all of these complications in graphic detail, spliced with interviews with the actors and film crew, who recall the horror of making of the film as if they are survivors of the Vietnam War itself. Coppola’s wife Eleanor shot the footage that we see. Fax Bahr with George Hickenlooper created this documentary out of her archives, which includes conversations between her and her husband that he didn’t know she recorded. As a result, we get to see more to Coppola than he had ever planned. When he barks, “If he [Sheen] dies [from his heart attack], I still don’t want to hear anything but good news unless it comes from me,” we wonder if he really means it. When we see the mad look in his eyes on the two-hundredth day of shooting, we don’t wonder anymore. Ironically, like Apocalypse Now and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, this is a story of a protagonist, in this case Coppola, who allows himself to be driven mad with obsession over the darkness around him. Whereas Marlow’s obsession was the Congo and Willard’s was Vietnam, Coppola’s is Apocalypse Now. This documentary is nearly as difficult to watch as the film that it chronicles because it is so brutal and unremitting in the way that it depicts a good man’s descent into self-destruction. We watch as an excited, eager director with good intentions faces difficulty after difficulty, and how he is eventually driven to the point of despair and depression. At one point, Coppola laments that he should just give up, hurtle himself off of a cliff, paralyze himself, and go home. “Not kill myself,” he says, “but if I just paralyze myself, I wouldn’t have to do this anymore.” If Hearts of Darkness does its job, by the time that he reaches this point of agony, we feel it with him. We do: Here is a film not so much about the making of a film but the making of madness. Yet when we consider the greatness of Apocalypse Now, and when we realize that Coppola’s struggle resulted in one of the most cherished films of all time, we cannot deny that this horrid ordeal has been worth it. In that sense, Hearts of Darkness ultimately makes Coppola’s final film all the more memorable: Its production was not one that Coppola ever had under his control, but somehow, through suffering to the breaking point, he created a film that was the essence of Vietnam. By the time Apocalypse Now was finally released, Coppola bitterly remarked, “My movie isn’t about Vietnam. My movie is Vietnam.” When one understands that the nature of Vietnam wasn’t so different from the making of Apocalypse Now—confusing, ill-advised, and disoriented—perhaps a film about the war’s harrowing effects should not have been made any other way. Click here to read my review of Apocalypse Now. Cast: Paramount Pictures presents
an American Zoetrope Film. Written and directed by Fax Bahr, George
Hickenlooper, and Eleanor Coppola (documentary footage). Rated
R for language and violence. Running time: 96 minutes. Original
United States theatrical release date: November 27, 1991. Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
||
