Battlegrounds: "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse"

The death of Eleanor Coppola and the release of her husband Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis last year have collectively triggered a reissue for 1991's Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. Originally assembled by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper for US cable network Showtime yet subsequently shown in cinemas to critical acclaim, this was the making-of documentary that notarised the legend of an earlier Coppola opus - 1979's famously troubled Conrad adaptation Apocalypse Now - while also perhaps contextualising the safe path the director would tread over the following decade. (The unhappy Godfather threequel would be followed by John Grisham adaptations and PG-rated Robin Williams vehicles.) The bulk of the doc was drawn from footage Eleanor shot during Apocalypse's attenuated eight-month shoot in the Philippines, initially to provide the foundation of a United Artists press kit. Yet Bahr and Hickenlooper open with footage of Coppola at the movie's Cannes premiere, insisting the film wasn't about Vietnam, it was Vietnam; over the doc's brisk 95 minutes, the inherent madness of this project seems to redouble with every passing frame. Much of it has long been a matter of public record. The shoot had barely begun when Francis elected to replace leading man Harvey Keitel with Martin Sheen, only for a spiritually unmoored Sheen to suffer his own on-camera breakdown; Eleanor films the 14-year-old Laurence Fishburne, cast as young gunner Mr. Clean after lying about his age, speaking about an associate who claimed he found his time in Vietnam "fun and groovy"; a passing typhoon lays waste to the sets and schedule. Coppola found himself obliged to pump in more and more of his own money and rewrite John Milius's script as he went, and while Bahr and Hickenlooper work in a parallel with Orson Welles, who'd attempted his own Heart of Darkness adaptation in the late 1930s, the figure the director most closely resembles may actually be Gromit in the climactic setpiece of The Wrong Trousers, having to put down track as he goes along so as to prevent some terrible derailment. This Coppola presents as heroic in many ways, committed to his task, refusing to abandon his post and continually fighting for his film's forward progress; yet Eleanor's access-all-areas documentation keeps alighting upon images that could have equally served as evidence in a strong case for prosecution, sectioning or simply more draconian health-and-safety legislation.

The cinephiles in Bahr and Hickenlooper exercise their own judgement, and Hearts of Darkness includes enough of what Coppola did get filmed for the pair to make their own case for Apocalypse Now. No madness, no craziness, no shoulder-dislocating big swings, and you don't get the Ride of the Valkyries sequence, you don't get Robert Duvall as Kilgore, and you don't get whatever the hell Brando and Dennis Hopper were doing in the movie's final reel. George Lucas, who was briefly attached to direct Milius's script at an early stage, notes the insanity of the initial plan to film in Vietnam while the war was ongoing, but no madness, and you get more George Lucas films than you do John Milius films; you end up with a war movie like Revenge of the Sith, shot against green screens on entirely sterile sets, detached from gravity and reality alike. I'd forgotten how much fun the documentary is: this shoot yielded great, one-of-a-kind war stories (retold here by born storytellers), and it's amusing to see how sober Coppola, Sheen and Duvall appear in contemporary interviews shot long after the dust had settled and their ears had stopped ringing. The now-adult Fishburne, presumably doorstopped at the moment between School Daze and Boyz N The Hood, reflects that he was cast to represent all those draftees who didn't know what they were getting into; Sam Bottoms, the film's surf-dude gunner, reveals he matched his on-set drug consumption to the mood of individual scenes. The Hollywood these chastened and battle-scarred warriors came home to was one of childproofed franchises and PG-13 ratings; the old grindhouses and drive-ins were being pulled down and replaced with gleaming multiplexes. Everything now had to make commercial sense. Yet Hearts of Darkness sent viewers back to its source, even if just to goggle at it, and revisiting the plantation sequence in Bahr and Hickenlooper's company seemed to remind Coppola to finish what he started. No Hearts of Darkness, no Apocalypse Now Redux, nor Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut - and you could argue those rejigs were central to Coppola restarting on Megalopolis. By all accounts, Mike Figgis has been tasked with overseeing the making-of that grand folly: heaven knows what will come out of that.

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse is now showing in selected cinemas; a new Blu-Ray edition will be available through StudioCanal from July 28.