Hearts of Darkness

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 spiralled 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 Colour) and George Hickenlooper (Dogtown) revisited the footage in 1991 and filmed new interviews with cast and crew, resulting in HEARTS OF DARKNESS, a groundbreaking and intimate portrait of what went into making one of the best films ever made. HEARTS OF DARKNESS is the ultimate feature-length documentary, capturing the explosive events that lead to APOCALYPSE NOW becoming a worldwide classic film and a constant favourite with film critics. 

“As the portrait of an artist in crisis, Hearts of Darkness is unparalleled.” Washington Post