Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse is a textual doppelgänger, a work that stands to Apocalypse Now (1979) as Peter Pan's shadow stands to his body: inseparable, but with a life of its own, dark and twisted. Directed by Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper, and Eleanor Coppola, this documentary does not merely chronicle the disasters of a legendary production; it performs a psychological vivisection of the creative act, demonstrating that the “Hearts of Darkness” was not only that of Captain Willard, but also the much more real and infinitely more costly one of its director, Francis Ford Coppola. It is Werner Herzog's Burden of Dreams for the New Hollywood generation, an epic of obsession where the “jungle” is not just a place, but a state of mind.

The genius of the film lies in its source. This is not an objective, retrospective analysis. The beating heart of the documentary is the footage shot at the time in the Philippines by Eleanor Coppola herself. She wasn't there as a filmmaker; she was there as “the filmmaker's wife,” armed with a 16mm camera and, even more lethal, an audio recorder. The result is that this film is not a reportage; it is a confession. The images show the logistical chaos—the destroyed sets, the actors in crisis—but it is the audio that provides the horror. Eleanor's secret recordings of Francis's nighttime nervous breakdowns, his monologues about bankruptcy, his growing paranoia, are the real “heart of darkness.”

The documentary immediately establishes its meta-textual thesis: Francis Ford Coppola is not directing a film about a man going mad in the jungle; Francis Ford Coppola is a man going mad in the jungle. His famous proclamation at the Cannes press conference—“My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam”—was not hyperbole. It was a diagnosis. The film shows us an auteur at the height of his power (fresh from the triumphs of The Godfather and The Conversation) who decides to bet everything—his fortune, his sanity, his home—on a project that has no script, no ending, and no limits. Coppola is not Willard. He is Kurtz. He is the mad general who builds a kingdom in the mud, demanding absolute obedience as he sinks into delusions of omnipotence. The production becomes a metaphor for war itself: illogical, out of control, wasteful in terms of (almost) lives and money, and morally ambiguous.

The documentary orchestrates disasters not as accidents, but as acts of an inevitable, almost cosmic drama. Nature (Typhoon Olga sweeping away sets worth millions of dollars) and politics (Ferdinand Marcos' Philippine army withdrawing the helicopters hired—in the middle of filming—because it has to go and fight a real guerrilla war) are not obstacles: they are reality invading fiction, forcing Coppola into a hyper-reality he had not anticipated. But the real horror comes from human beings. The film documents the near-death of its protagonist, Martin Sheen, who suffered a heart attack in the middle of the jungle. He wasn't playing Willard's disintegration; he was living it. His physical crisis becomes a mirror of the director's spiritual crisis.

And then there is the arrival of the monster. The heart of darkness has a name: Marlon Brando. The entire second half of the documentary is a psychological thriller about Kurtz's arrival. Coppola paid millions (in advance) for an actor who shows up on set almost unrecognizable: massively overweight (no small problem for a “jungle warrior”), completely unprepared (he hasn't read Conrad's book, he hasn't read the script), and philosophically opposed to any idea of “acting.” The sequences in which we see a terrified Coppola literally trying to extract a performance from a Brando who mumbles, improvises, and asks to be filmed in the shadows are not “behind the scenes.” They are the chronicle of an exorcism. Coppola sailed down the river to find his oracle, and found a black hole of charisma that threatens to swallow the entire film.

It is creative panic in its purest form. Hearts of Darkness is, ultimately, an essay on the necessary megalomania of art. Francis Ford Coppola appears as a modern King Lear, wandering in the (literal) storm of his own ambition. The film forces us to ask ourselves: is it possible to create a masterpiece without this madness?

Is it necessary to risk bankruptcy and heart attack to touch the truth? The documentary does not judge Coppola; it observes him with the precision of an entomologist and the empathy of a wife. It is the story of a man who went “too far” and who, miraculously, managed to come back with a film. Hearts od Darkness is not an accessory to Apocalypse Now; it is its necessary counterpart, a diptych in which creation and destruction, madness and genius, are reflected in each other until they become indistinguishable. You cannot understand Apocalypse Now without seeing this.