Eleanor Coppola obituary

Chronicler of the making of her husband’s Apocalypse Now whose footage and recordings were the basis for a documentary and book

In March 1976, Eleanor Coppola arrived in the Philippines, her three young children in tow, to film behind-the-scenes footage on the set of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s new movie Apocalypse Now, which transposed the plot of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness to late-1960s Vietnam.

No one could have known then that production on this war epic would stretch on for more than a year, delayed by catastrophic weather, medical emergencies, military conflict, an incomplete script and plain old creative differences, making it one of the most infamously turbulent shoots in cinema history. As it rumbled on, newspaper headlines plaintively asked: “Apocalypse When?”