Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM — built from footage Eleanor Coppola secretly shot during the notoriously troubled Philippines production of Apocalypse Now. Directors George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr stitched together that raw material with new interviews to produce what amounts to a disaster film about making a disaster film.

Francis Ford Coppola went to the Philippines with a three-month schedule and came back sixteen months later, $30 million in debt and openly questioning his sanity. A typhoon demolished the sets. Martin Sheen had a heart attack on location. Marlon Brando showed up vastly overweight, having skipped the script. John Milius, George Lucas, Laurence Fishburne, Robert Duvall, and Dennis Hopper all sit down to describe what they witnessed.

What sets this apart from standard making-of material is that Coppola offers no polished retrospective spin — he admits on tape, in real time, that he had no idea what he was doing. It is one of the most candid documents about creative breakdown in cinema history. Stream Hearts of Darkness (1991) online on iFILM.