Author: Newsroom
NEW YORK (June 6, 2025) New York-based specialty distributor Rialto Pictures announced today that the Emmy® award-winning documentary HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER’S APOCALYPSE (1991), the critically acclaimed behind-the-scenes look from the lens of Eleanor Coppola at the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW has undergone a magnificent 4K restoration and will have a two-week run at the Film Forum in NYC starting July 4, 2025, followed by a national roll-out.
In the late 1970s, celebrated director Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, The Conversation) and his cast, crew and family ventured into the dense jungles of the Philippines to begin work on what would eventually become his masterpiece, APOCALYPSE NOW. But the journey from page to screen soon spiralled into a hellish, life-threatening nightmare that echoed the film’s narrative. Plagued with adversity, one of the most influential films ever made had one of the most notorious shoots in cinema history that few survived unscathed.
Meticulously documented at the time by Eleanor Coppola (Paris Can Wait), Fax Bahr (In Living Color) and George Hickenlooper (Dogtown) revisited the footage in 1991 and filmed new interviews with cast and crew, resulting in HEARTS OF DARKNESS, a ground-breaking and intimate portrait of what went into making one of the best films ever made. HEARTS OF DARKNESS is the ultimate feature-length documentary, capturing the explosive events that led to APOCALYPSE NOW becoming a worldwide classic film and a constant favorite with film critics.
The film was restored by James Mockoski Film Archivist and Restoration Supervisor at American Zoetrope and graded at Roundabout Entertainment in Burbank, California. “For the past 30 years, Eleanor Coppola’s behind-the-scenes footage in Hearts of Darkness has been three to four generations removed from the original elements” says Mockoski. “For this new release and restoration of the documentary, Francis decided to scan the original sources in 4K. The 2019 restoration of Apocalypse Now was also utilized in the doc, so that the extensive excerpts from the feature are now presented in their original 2.39:1aspect ratio, rather than being letterboxed into a 4×3 frame. The soundtrack has been remixed in 5.1. Co-director Fax Bahr came in to approve the grade, with the final seal of approval given by Francis Ford Coppola.”
For more information on Rialto Pictures’ re-release of HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER’S APOCALYPSE, please visit: https://www.rialtopictures.com/catalogue/hearts-of-darkness-a-filmmakers-apocalypse
Founded in 1998 by Bruce Goldstein and joined by partner Adrienne Halpern a year later, Rialto Pictures is a pioneer in distributing restored classics. The company has been honored with retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, Film at Lincoln Center, and the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles. Most recently, Rialto Pictures received the 2020 Film Heritage Award from the National Society of Film Critics for distributing restorations of classic pictures. Rialto’s catalogue includes films by Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Luis Buñuel, Carol Reed, Alain Resnais, Federico Fellini – and now Francis Ford Coppola.
For more information about Rialto Pictures, please visit www.rialtopictures.com or follow on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook: @RialtoPictures.