Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse

A movie set scene with a boat carrying crew and equipment in the water, surrounded by people in small boats or standing in water, many covered in white paint; an ancient stone structure with vegetation is in the background

In the late 1970s, celebrated director Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, The Conversation) and his cast, crew, and family ventured into the dense jungles of the Philippines to begin work on what would eventually become his masterpiece, Apocalypse Now. But the journey from page to screen soon spiraled into a hellish, life-threatening nightmare that echoed the film’s narrative. Plagued with adversity, one of the most influential films ever made had one of the most notorious shoots in cinema history that few survived unscathed.

Meticulously documented at the time by Eleanor Coppola (Paris Can Wait), Fax Bahr (In Living Color), and George Hickenlooper (Dogtown) revisited the footage in 1991 and filmed new interviews with the cast and crew, resulting in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, a groundbreaking and intimate portrait of what went into making one of the best films ever made.

Presented by Rialto Pictures, this new 4K restoration was undertake at American Zoetrope and graded at Roundabout Entertainment in Burbank, California.

Part of our "Restorations & Rediscoveries" and "Doc Spots" series. Courtesy of Rialto Pictures.