The making of Apocalypse Now, which premiered 33 years ago today, is a story nearly as legendary as the film itself. “The way we made it,” Coppola said, “was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment. And little by little we went insane.”
Those remarks appear near the beginning of “Heart of Coppola,” a brilliant short fillm by Brian Carroll that combines scenes from Apocalypse Now and Hearts of Darkness (the acclaimed making-of documentary, from 1991) with interviews of Coppola and some background narration courtesy of Orson Welles (doing a reading of the source material, Heart of Darkness, which Welles, too, thought of adapting). It manages to capture something essential about the movie and Coppola in just over four minutes. (If its last line, from a later Coppola interview, sounds familiar, by the way, you may have read it here at Slate.)
Enjoy. (Via Open Culture.)
