Summary
- Eleanor Coppola, wife of Francis Ford Coppola, directed an acclaimed making-of documentary for Apocalypse Now.
- The couple endured challenges during the 14-month production of the film, but Eleanor’s documentary became a film history essential.
- Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse won Eleanor an Emmy Award and is considered one of the best documentaries ever made.
Francis Ford Coppola has been in the news a lot recently, with speculation and anticipation swirling around his long-anticipated epic Megalopolis, but sadly, he’s in the news for a different reason today. His wife of 61 years, Eleanor Coppola, passed away at age 87 on April 12 at their home in Rutherford, California.
Born Eleanor Jessie Neil in 1936, Eleanor met Francis on the set of the latter’s legitimate directorial debut, the Roger Corman horror film, Dementia 13. She was an assistant art director, and he was a budding filmmaker just getting his start; she was 26, and he was 23. They would go on to birth a cinematic empire, parenting Roman Coppola (CQ, A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III) and Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, Priscilla).
“I never expected Francis to be a celebrity when we got married. He was making this black-and-white film, very low budget. I thought we were going to live in the [San Fernando] Valley,” said Eleanor Coppola in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2008. “I was just as startled and unprepared for how our lives evolved.”
Eleanor and Francis Ford Coppola would endure perhaps the greatest test of their marriage and their careers during the production of Apocalypse Now, the Oscar-winning masterpiece about the Vietnam War starring Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando. What began as a five-month shoot turned into a 14-month-long nightmare in which seemingly everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
Eleanor directed a making-of documentary (as she also did with several other films), not realizing that it would become an essential study of film history, Murphy’s Law, and utter madness. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse became one of the best documentaries of all time, and won her an Emmy Award.
