How did Francis Ford Coppola adapt Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for Apocalypse Now?

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now is a loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. Coppola adapted the source material by transposing the setting from late 19th-century Africa to the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s.12

In this reimagining, the narrative follows a U.S. Army captain, Benjamin Willard, who is tasked with traveling up a river into Cambodia to assassinate a rogue Special Forces colonel named Walter Kurtz, whom the military believes has gone insane.12

Like the original novella, the film explores the fragility of the human mind and the human capacity for evil. Both works examine how encountering a profoundly unfamiliar environment can cause an individual's sense of morality, order, and normalcy to break down. Despite its acclaim, the film has faced criticism for reproducing the racist perspective found in Conrad’s work, specifically regarding the treatment of indigenous characters who serve primarily to frame the interior journeys of the white protagonists.12