One of the best-ever documentaries about the making of a movie returns in a fresh 4K restoration, with its feature film clips rendered in full widescreen resolution. New interviews and featurettes are provided by Francis Coppola, and the late Eleanor Coppola is represented with a new documentary piece and encodings of several of her short films. It’s a 3-disc set, and its two Blu-rays are Region B.

Hearts of Darkness 4K
4K Ultra HD + Region B Blu-ray
Studiocanal
1991 / Color / 1:37 Academy + 2:35 widescreen / 96 min. / Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse / Street Date July 28, 2025 / Available from Amazon UK / £41.66
Starring: Eleanor Coppola, John Milius, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Tom Sternberg, Dean Tavoularis, Fred Roos, Martin Sheen, Vittorio Storaro, Robert Duvall, Laurence Fishburne, Rona Barrett, Tom Snyder, Sam Bottoms, Monty Cox, Frederic Forrest, Doug Claybourne, Albert Hall, Dennis Hopper, Marlon Brando
Film Editors: Michael Greer, Jay Miracle
Composer: Tom Boekelheide
Executive Producers Fred Roos, Doug Claybourne
Produced by Les Mayfield, George Zaloom
Director documentary footage Eleanor Coppola
Written and Directed by Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper

Documentaries about movies being made are most often bankrolled by the film companies themselves, entities that only want to see and hear positive things about their commercial product. They’re also usually made by outsiders without access to the interior issues that are really at work on a film set, the problems that professional show people take pains to hide. Another prime factor is that the making of most movies just isn’t all that interesting. When the work is done, even if the camaraderie was good, collaborators just drift away. There’s no story arc and no ‘meaningful’ resolution, so the filmmaker must impose one.

Francis Coppola wanted his artist wife Eleanor to have a purpose on the set of  Apocalypse Now, and so put her in charge of filming a making-of documentary. His epic movie would have action, an interesting cast and an exotic location, so filming what happened on the set might be an ideal way to spend the 16 planned weeks on location in the Philippines. Eleanor Coppola says that she locked herself in a dark room to learn how to load her new 16mm camera. With total access to the production she was soon filming everything of interest that she saw. She witnessed and recorded privileged events and could personally monitor the director as he endured crises that would cause an ordinary artist to blow his brains out. Even better for the film is the fact that Francis Coppola is an unusually articulate talker. Eleanor recorded his thoughts, which became a candid running commentary. Her work eventually ended in a book, plus this documentary produced and edited by others, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.

Apocalypse Now began as a John Milius script from USC. The writer-director is on camera reading from some of it. He revels in his fantasies of bloody bayonets and carnage, something he really does only when a camera is turned on him. The day I talked to Milius on  “1941”, he was particularly happy because Francis Coppola had asked him to write some new voiceover for Apocalypse. Back at UCLA there circulated a draft of his script that read like a comic book. Most every paragraph tilted in the direction of gunpowder overkill, with Col. Kurtz going into battle dressed in a costume suitable for a super-hero. We believe Coppola when he says that the script inspired him because it connected Vietnam with Conrad’s book Heart of Darkness — interpreting a modern political quagmire through a literary classic.

Coppola is a grand artist with respect for other artists. At some point the making-of documentary passed from Eleanor Coppola’s hands to others, with its filmic gold mine of 16mm on-the-set footage. Coppola’s audio recordings and Eleanor’s own recorded thoughts work well with the fascinating BTS material. We see the casting and some of the set construction; we hear Coppola theorize on the subject of money and why he sinks his entire fortune into his personal projects. The only subject avoided is that of actor Harvey Keitel, who was replaced after two weeks in favor of Martin Sheen. We never see or hear Keitel.

The testimony is excellent. Eleanor Coppola is always 100% convincing. We don’t see any reason for Francis to dissemble or ‘spin’ his speeches, because he says too many unflattering things about himself. His ‘respect for other artists’ is in evidence, when Coppola says (in a new interview) that he didn’t want to step on the work of directors Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, even if he disagreed with some of their characterizations of what was happening.

Coppola does talk as if he were looking for some kind of production ordeal to stimulate his creative fires. But the real-life drama on the set went beyond that, swelling to apocalyptic proportions. After losing two weeks to the recasting of Captain Willard, we see Coppola’s rented helicopters vanish because Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos needs them to fight rebel insurgents. After months of work, a typhoon destroys the sets, forcing a two-month halt in filming. In the midst of the production chaos, Coppola is forced to invent the movie as he goes along. We get the notorious film shoot of Martin Sheen getting drunk and practically giving himself a nervous breakdown … and then suffering a heart attack that might doom the picture.

Then comes an existential crisis in the form of Marlon Brando, who shows up to play the supposed rugged warrior Col. Kurtz looking a hundred pounds overweight. Brando’s fame is the movie’s main box office draw, but the actor had a bad habit of interfering with his directors during production. His unpredictable ‘artistic’ demands all but scuttled Arthur Penn’s  The Missouri Breaks (although we still like it). Although Francis paid Brando millions to perform, the actor showed up to the set without a clue of what the movie was about, and insisting that he and Francis together ‘work out’ how to go forward.

By this point Francis was in such deep financial peril that any normal director would have had a nervous collapse. With his entire company standing by and no ending on paper he had to come up with a miraculous finale to turn his disaster into a brilliant work of art. Just getting Marlon Brando to cooperate was a daunting prospect. Coppola had only a few days to get something out of Brando that would make his show come together.

Every piece of Hearts of Darkness does come together. George Lucas was the proposed director for an earlier effort to film Apocalypse in 16mm; he comes on camera for an ‘I told you so’ enumeration of reasons why taking a giant production to the Philippines is a very bad idea. Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater recording of Heart of Darkness is heard now and then, with baleful Conrad speeches about doomed efforts and intentions lost to the jungle. It of course provided an apt commentary on Coppola’s worsening situation. Milius makes his now classic speech: “We don’t need gasoline!” to explain how Coppola’s enthusiasm could bind creative collaborators behind his shakiest creative dream.

Nothing on this remote movie set seems stable, reliable. Francis hires Dennis Hopper to play a drug-addled combat photographer, giving the hyperactive actor-director the role of his life. Hopper could be impossible to work with as well, although he seems to have knuckled down to help Francis when performing with Brando. The 16mm take of Hopper giving his director a hard time makes us marvel at Coppola’s stamina and patience.

The 16-week shoot of course drags out forever, with newspaper articles wondering about Coppola’s chances of keeping his sanity. A paper banner proclaims “100 days of shooting,” and much later, a fireworks display marks a party for “200 days of shooting.”

Eleanor and Francis discover that the native tribe they hired to play Kurtz’s army conduct strange rituals that include animal sacrifice. Perhaps to add another level of savagery to his movie’s Conradian “the horror,” Coppola includes the graphic slaughter of an ox, on camera. The docu goes further, showing the ritual killing of three pigs, which isn’t pretty. The film is preceded by a disclaimer, that doesn’t let viewers know that the (brief) killing reaches  Blood of the Beasts proportions. Just saying, for those concerned.

The docu presented big pieces of sequences that had been cut out of the movie, but were reinstated for Coppola’s ‘redux’ re-edit ten years later.

Hearts of Darkness finds an elegant out when Brando finishes filming, and doesn’t elaborate on the success that Apocalypse Now eventually enjoyed. We end on scenes of the Coppola family emerging from limousines to see a screening at Westwood’s Bruin Theater. Judging by what’s playing across the street at the Village Theater, the event could be the famous public pre-screening of parts of the movie, for Coppola to gauge audience reactions and ask questions to help him go forward in the cutting room.

The actual coda is the noted Francis Coppola sound bite, the gem about a teenage girl who might be the one to revolutionize cinema. This is before 1991, and Coppola is already talking about camcorders and other new technology democratizing filmmaking, which is exactly what has happened. But the giant distribution-exhibition mechanism that made possible extravagant independent artistic movies like Apocalypse is no more.

The full title of Studiocanal’s 4K Ultra HD + Region B Blu-ray is Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. A show that was expected to see a few festival and TV runs became a good-selling DVD and Blu-ray. Its reputation hasn’t dimmed.

This new disc has been given the subheading ‘4K Collector’s Edition.’  The new Zoetrope remaster completely rejuvenates the show. Eleanor Coppola’s 16mm footage was well exposed, but the final 35mm blowups were not particularly attractive.

Zoetrope’s concise publicity statement spells out the restoration clearly:

“In 1976, Eleanor Coppola shot behind-the-scenes footage of Apocalypse Now on 16mm. For the first time, we decided to return to all original sources and scan elements in 4K for this new release. What everyone has seen over the last 30 years has been three to four generations removed from the source elements. Additionally, we utilized the 2019 4K restoration of Apocalypse Now for this release, incorporating those elements into the documentary. Any clips pulled from Apocalypse Now and used in the documentary, we maintained the original aspect ratio 2.40 instead of letterboxing it in a 4×3 frame. Lastly, we remastered the soundtrack and created a new 5.1 mix.”

“The film was restored at American Zoetrope and graded at Roundabout Entertainment in Burbank, California. The director, Fax Bahr, came in and approved the grade.”  James T. Mockoski, Film Archivist/Restoration Supervisor for American Zoetrope.

That would seem a fair assessment of the process. The 16mm footage looks marvelous; we wonder how much digital work was done on it, for the 16mm grain is now much finer and other factors are no longer an issue. The 1980s interview material looks excellent too. As Mr. Mockoski explains, the clips from the film no longer look like weak dupes. When they appear, the 4×3 image pops up to full widescreen, reminding us of the giant 70mm experience back at the Cinerama Dome.

The older extras are here accompanied by a new talk with Coppola, who has recently weathered another massive ‘go for broke’ project that didn’t find a committed distributor. If the director is playing word games or hiding his real feelings, he’s doing an amazing job … we believe every word he says about his war movie, and how he feels about it now. The new film about Eleanor Coppola is a handsome tribute to her activities as an artist.

Studiocanal generously sent a 4K check disc for review, plus the 2nd Blu-ray with a number of short subjects, some by and most related to Eleanor Coppola. The 4K disc has no region coding, but the Blu-rays are Region B, something buyers should be aware of.

We cannot remark on the full contents of Studiocanal’s disc package, as we did not get the poster reproductions, the insert booklet or the second booklet that reprints Eleanor Coppola’s notes on the making of the movie. A new promotional video was produced for the disc release:   New Studiocanal trailer.

Co-director George Hickenlooper passed away in 2010. He was a close associate of CineSavant’s host site Trailers from Hell, and one of the page’s proud lineup of movie ‘gurus.’

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Hearts of Darkness
4K Ultra HD + Region B Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements Feature discs 4K & Blu-ray
New interview docus
The Making of Hearts of Darkness with Francis Coppola
Art is All Around Us with Eleanor Coppola
Eleanor & Francis Coppola Audio Commentary with Eleanor and Francis
Supplement short subjects Blu-ray disc 3:
Peeling a Potato is a Work of Art (1976, by Eleanor Coppola)
Victorian House (1976, by Eleanor Coppola)
Joyce Goldstein (1976, by Eleanor Coppola)
Refrigerator (1976, by Eleanor Coppola)
Coda – introduction by Eleanor Coppola)
Coda: Thirty Years Later (2007)
Making of Marie Antoinette (2007)
FFC directs The Rainmaker (2007)
On the set of CQ (2002)
Making of The Virgin Suicides (1998)
A Visit to China’s Miao Country (1996)
2025 Trailer
Eleanor Coppola’s Notes – On the Making of Apocalypse Now, reprinted exclusively for this edition
2 x posters (original and new artwork).
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + two Region B Blu-rays in card box
Reviewed: August 10, 2025
(7374dark)

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