Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse is a 1991 American documentary film about the production of "Apocalypse Now," the 1979 Vietnam War epic directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The title is derived from the Joseph Conrad novella "Heart of Darkness", the source material for "Apocalypse Now". Using behind-the-scenes footage, and narrated by Eleanor Coppola, the documentary chronicles how production problems—among them bad weather, actors' poor health, and other issues—delayed the film, increasing costs and nearly destroying the life and career of its director, her husband, Francis Ford Coppola. In 1990, Coppola turned her material
Heart of Darkness referred to "Heart of Darkness" as a "minor work" and criticised its "adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery". Conrad himself did not consider it to be particularly notable. By the 1960s, though, it was a standard assignment in many college and high school English courses. In "King Leopold's Ghost" (1998), Adam Hochschild wrote that literary scholars have made too much of the psychological aspects of "Heart of Darkness", while paying scant attention to Conrad's accurate recounting of the horror arising from the methods and effects of colonialism in the Congo Free State. ""Heart of Darkness" is experience ... pushed