The greatest ever making-of documentary is now on re-release: the terrifying story of how Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam war masterpiece Apocalypse Now got made – even scarier than Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, about the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. The time has come to acknowledge Eleanor Coppola’s magnificent achievement here as first among equals of the credited directors in shooting the original location footage (later interspersed with interviews by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper), getting the stunningly intimate audio tapes of her husband Francis’s meltdown moments and, of course, in unassumingly keeping the family together while it was all going on.
With his personal and financial capital very high after The Conversation and the Godfather films, Coppola put up his own money and mortgaged property to make this stunningly audacious and toweringly mad version of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness from a script by John Milius; it is transplanted from 19th-century Belgian Congo where a rogue ivory trader has gone native in the dark interior, to south-east Asia during the Vietnam war where a brilliant US army officer is now reportedly being worshipped as a god among the Indigenous peoples and must have his command terminated “with extreme prejudice”. Marlon Brando had a whispery voiced cameo as the reclusive demi-deity, Martin Sheen was the troubled Captain Willard tasked with taking Kurtz down and Robert Duvall is the psychotically gung-ho Lt Col Kilgore, who leads a helicopter assault.
