On 1 March 1976, I went to the Philippines with my husband, Francis Coppola, our three children, Gio, Roman and Sofia, Francis’s nephew, Marc, our housekeeper, babysitter and Francis’s projectionist. We rented a large house in Manila for all of us to live in during the five-month scheduled shooting of Francis’s film Apocalypse Now, an adventure set in Vietnam … The story concerns a Captain Willard who is given an assignment to go on classified mission up a river in Vietnam … The script deals with Willard’s journey and the events along the way. When Willard finally arrives at his destination, he has been changed by the experience of making the journey. Many of the people who worked on the film were also changed.

Eleanor Coppola, Notes, Pocket Books, New York 1979

In February 1976, Francis Coppola begins filming in the Philippines on Apocalypse Now, adapted by John Milius from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. His wife Eleanor shoots documentary footage for the releasing company, United Artists, and also records conversations with her husband for use in her own diary … Before Hearts of Darkness there was Burden of Dreams, Les Blank’s film about the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, which documented similar phenomena: the “progressive” filmmaker recreating a colonialist exploit and himself becoming a mini-colonial force in the process; the heroic auteur who not only shuns the studio for the real world but subjects himself to the same physical challenges and dangers that his film is about. On this score, the subject of Hearts of Darkness is rather more selfaware than that of Burden of Dreams: where Herzog plays the romantic-obsessive artist to the hilt, Coppola is conscious of all the Hollywood baggage he brings with him into the jungle … He has succeeded in making the whole world his studio, in a way undreamt of by any old-time mogul, but where in the end product is its meaning for him as an auteur-artist-hero? What really is Apocalypse Now about?, is the question that is pursued with desperate, flailing energy through Hearts of Darkness.

Richard Combs, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, “Sight and Sound”, n. 1, January 1992