Heart of Darkness Karloff) as its final act, and adds a backstory in which Marlow had been Kurtz's adopted son. The cast includes Inga Swenson and Eartha Kitt. The most famous adaptation is Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 motion picture "Apocalypse Now" based on the screenplay by John Milius, which moves the story from the Congo to Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam War. In "Apocalypse Now", Martin Sheen plays Captain Benjamin L. Willard, a US Army Captain assigned to "terminate the command" of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz. Marlon Brando played Kurtz, in one of his most famous roles. A production documentary of the
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,