4. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991)
Rarely is a movie's production process movie interesting than the movie that came out of it. To my mind, there are two exceptions. The documentary
Hearts of Darkness, about the making of Francis Ford Coppola's
Apocalypse Now, is just as engrossing as the final product. Those two movies are bound together like no making of and its feature ever before: both movies are about men going insane. Coppola and his crew lived Vietnam to get it up on the screen: they went insane to do it.
Hearts of Darkness is the probably the ultimate "making of" feature, because it so thoroughly gets instead the heads of the people at the helm of the movie: watching this is bound to make any screenwriter feel ill, and I think that's a good thing. Moments into watching
Darkness I'm always struck by a feeling of sickness, especially as Coppola confesses to his wife that he's thinking about suicide. For scripties, the real insight is in seeing how adaptation is managed and in discussing that with Coppola and his writer John Millus (
Apocalypse Now is a loose adaption of Joseph Conrad's novel
Heart of Darkness). That aside, this documentary stands pretty much alone in just how revealing and truthful it is. Everything is laid out on the table, and there's a real sense of access that we don't usually get from a documentary associated with Hollywood. The fact that
Apocalypse Now was such a critical hit properly helped that. Still, the honesty is refreshing, and the movie is a treasure trove of tips and revelations for anybody who has ever though up picking up a pen and writing an epic. Which brings us nicely to...