Hell is other people. The shooting of Apocalypse Now was supposed to take 16 weeks. Coppola – one of the most acclaimed directors of his generation – 37 years old at the time, got stuck in the Philippine jungle for two years with his film crew and family. Martin Sheen, the lead actor, suffered a heart attack, logistical issues flared up, a typhoon struck, actor Harvey Keitel was fired. Meanwhile, Marlon Brando arrived unprepared and overweight. Everyone involved was drained of energy. As the budget was melting away and Coppola himself suffered a nervous breakdown, his wife Eleanor documented the making of the film, saying: “It is a metaphor for a journey into self.” This is a journey to the beginning of one’s own end.

In one scene of the documentary, a sweat-drenched Coppola is heard stating – not devoid of irony – that “the film will not be good”. Grappling with psychological spiralling and the towering success of The Godfather and The Conversation – each of his previous pieces both a critical and box office success up to then – on the set of his eighth film he ended up in a duel with himself. Apocalypse Now, as an odyssey within the context of the Vietnam War, has acquired layers and layers of mythology – it has inspired films, articles, books, and even parodies – and remains the quintessential diary of a filmmaker’s creative agony. This record of human exhaustion finds eerily precise parallels with the film’s structure and its protagonist, Willard: a return to self as an existential inescapability. Coppola himself once remarked that “There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.”