I loved that movie. Way back when I taught software project management, I used “Hearts of Darkness” as a way to help educate some of the neophytes about what it really means to work on a long term software implementation, Heats of Darkness is a perfect analog to that experience.
Hearts of Darkness is very good at showing why moving making is an art and not a science. Its not just a matter of reading lines and turning on the camera, there is a tremendous amount of luck and timing involved in getting the final product out the door without looking like its from “the Ed Wood Jr. Film Studio”.
If you haven’t already ( I assume you probably have but I just gotta mention it anyway) get a copy of the Final directors cut( called “the complete dossier” ) DVD of Apocalypse Now. Its fantastic, full of lots of details on the making of and construction of that movie.
As a study in the process of making a movie, there is few better examples than Apocalypse Now. The editing choices between the two versions, the original release and the Redux really tell the tale about how a movie is composed and constructed. I have very strong feelings for both versions but at the same time I absolutely love both of the two movies.
Apocalypse Now is an example of a movie that simply could not be made today. For one thing, theres no CGI, what you see is what was actually made to happen. Napalm across a line of palm trees? Today they would fake that up in post edit and it would look like it was straight from Pixar, the emotional punch you get in the bridge scene could not be created with CGI. In Apocalypse, Coppolla made a bridge and with the creative use of lighting created a haunting scene straight from the pages of Dantes Inferno. Today if you want to show an explosion, you just get a few computers together and make some CGI, but no matter how good the CGI, you just don’t feel it the same way you do in a film like Apocalypse. In Apocalypse, Coppola just had the Phillippine air force fly over the set in North American F-5′s which dropped their tanks while the grips set off a stack of explosives and he just let the cameras roll.
That boys and girls, is how you make movies.
