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?”
Principal photography added up to a staggering 238 days in total. Eleanor, who has died aged 87, was there for every one of them. As well as documenting the chaos as it unfolded, she secretly recorded conversations with Francis for the purposes of her diary.
He can be heard confiding gravely: “The film will not be good … This film is a $20m disaster. Why won’t anyone believe me? I’m thinking of shooting myself … This is one crisis I can’t pull myself out of.” He nicknamed the project “The Idiodyssey”.
The material Eleanor gathered – amounting to 60 hours of film and 40 hours of audio – was put into storage after squabbles over the point of view that her film (originally shot for promotional purposes) should take. Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper’s documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991) later drew heavily on her extraordinary footage and tape recordings. Highlights included Francis frantically typing new scenes moments before shooting; arguing with Dennis Hopper, who had not learned his lines; and conferring at length with Marlon Brando, who arrived on set hugely overweight, not having read Heart of Darkness and seemingly intent on dragging his heels in the hope of reaping multimillion-dollar overtime bonuses.
Hearts of Darkness showed belatedly that Eleanor was not merely an observer on set, but also a facilitator. It was she, for instance, who convinced Francis to watch the sacrificial culling of a carabao, a water buffalo, by the Ifugao tribespeople, a gruesome spectacle that he eventually incorporated into his film’s climax.
The documentary was also narrated by Eleanor, incorporating parts of her book Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now (1979; updated in 1995). She is heard reflecting that “it’s scary to watch someone you love go into the centre of himself and confront his fears – fear of failure, fear of death, fear of going insane. You have to fail a little, die a little, go insane a little, to come out the other side.”
She was invested in Apocalypse Now in more ways than one: Francis had put up their home as collateral. A fortnight into production, he sacked his lead actor, Harvey Keitel, replacing him with Martin Sheen, who later suffered a near-fatal heart attack.
Actors would turn up to set with no idea what they were shooting; the phrase “scenes unknown” was a regular fixture on the daily call-sheets. Helicopters loaned to the production by Ferdinand Marcos, the country’s strongman president, were abruptly recalled for his war on communism. During a typhoon that destroyed sets and halted filming, Francis cooked pasta and played Puccini’s La Bohème at high volume.
He took what Eleanor later called “an Italian approach” to life: “Very theatrical, throwing stuff up in the air and screaming.” Through it all, she was undaunted, even sanguine, no matter how high the stakes. “What’s the worst that can happen?” she asks in Hearts of Darkness, looking back on the mounting threats to the family’s home and finances. “They take away your big house, they take away your car, so what? … I really wasn’t frightened by it.”
Born in Los Angeles, California, she was raised in Huntington Beach by her mother, Delphine (nee Lougheed); her father, Clifford Neil, a political cartoonist for the Los Angeles Examiner, died when Eleanor was 10. She was educated at Huntington Beach high school, and graduated from UCLA in 1959 with a degree in applied design, going on to do freelance work at architectural installations.
Eleanor and Francis met in Ireland in 1962 on the set of the Roger Corman-produced horror film Dementia 13, which Francis directed; Eleanor was the assistant art director. They married a year later and had three children: Gian-Carlo, who died in a speedboat accident in 1986 at the age of 22; and Roman and Sofia, who both became film-makers.
In 1971, Francis rushed from the set of The Godfather to film Eleanor giving birth to Sofia. Eleanor later used the footage as part of an art installation. She also created an artwork in response to Gian-Carlo’s death, Circle of Memory, a chamber of straw bales that she installed in several sites over the years.
Even after the children were born, it was rare for the family not to leave its Napa Valley estate (which the Coppolas had bought after the success in 1972 of The Godfather) to accompany Francis wherever he happened to be working. After the Philippines, Eleanor and the children moved to Los Angeles to be with him during production on his musical One from the Heart (1982). They then decamped to Tulsa, Oklahoma, while he directed his back-to-back teen movies The Outsiders and Rumble Fish (both 1983). On the set of The Godfather Part III (1990), Eleanor recalled how Francis claimed to “[hate] the process of making movies … he talked about his family and complained about me. I sat there while he ran it all out, not agreeing, and not yielding to the temptation to give my point of view. I just tried to be present and listen.”
Nevertheless, Eleanor confessed in her 2008 memoir Notes on a Life that she sometimes regretted not having pursued fully her own artistic ambitions. In 2023, she told the New Yorker that Francis “made it very clear that my role was to be the wife and mother”.
The Coppolas’ wine and hotel businesses occupied some of her time in later life. She also returned to textiles, one of her great passions, as well as designing costumes for the dance company ODC San Francisco.
She directed two narrative films – Paris Can Wait (2016), starring Diane Lane and Alec Baldwin, and Love is Love is Love (2020), with Rosanna Arquette and Cybill Shepherd – and filmed documentary footage on the set of some of Sofia’s movies, including the irreverent costume drama Marie Antoinette (2006). Sofia dedicated her most recent film, Priscilla (2023), to her mother.
Eleanor is survived by Francis, Roman and Sofia, six grandchildren, Gia, Romy, Cosima, Alessandro, Marcello and Pascal, and a brother, William.
• Eleanor Jessie Coppola, writer and film-maker, born 4 May 1936; died 12 April 2024
