Kurtz (Heart of Darkness) circumstances and remote settings to assert power over others. It is widely believed that Conrad drew influence from these characters, as well as Stevenson's plot lines, when writing "Heart of Darkness". In the 1958 loose adaptation for the CBS television anthology series "Playhouse 90" Kurtz was played by Boris Karloff. This version uses the encounter between Marlow and Kurtz as its final act, and adds a backstory in which Marlow had been Kurtz's adopted son. Francis Ford Coppola's acclaimed Vietnam War film "Apocalypse Now" (1979) centers on the protagonist's mission to find and kill the renegade Colonel Kurtz (played by
Heart of Darkness Congo River from one station to another, the captain became ill and Conrad assumed command. He guided the ship up the tributary Lualaba River to the trading company's innermost station, Kindu, in Eastern Kongo. The story's main narrator, Charles Marlow, has similar experiences to the author himself. When Conrad began to write the novella, eight years after returning from Africa, he drew inspiration from his travel journals. He described "Heart of Darkness" as "a wild story" of a journalist who becomes manager of a station in the (African) interior and makes himself worshipped by a tribe of savages. Thus described,