Hearts of Darkness restored in cinemas and on 4K UHD in July
21 May 2025
StudioCanal has announced that the seminal documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. A 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 return to UK cinemas on 4 July. The 4K restoration will have its world premiere at the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy in late June.
An exclusive 4K UHD Collector’s Edition will be released later in July. This special three-disc edition includes a wealth of extras, including a 64-page booklet containing new essays about the film and two posters showcasing both the original and new artwork. Eleanor Coppola’s Notes - On the Making of Apocalypse Now, has been re-printed exclusively. New extras include The Making of Hearts of Darkness which features exclusive interviews with Roman Coppola, Sofia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola and Fax Bahr. The final package is a beautiful tribute to Eleanor Coppola (1936-2024), as well as to the film itself. StudioCanal has commissioned the multi-award-winning artist Akiko Stehrenberger to create the stunning new artwork that accompanies this new release.
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 Colour) 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 lead to Apocalypse Now becoming a worldwide classic film and a constant favourite with film critics.
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse will be released as a three-disc 4K UHD Collector Edition by StudioCanal on 28 July 2025 at the pre-order price of £50.
4K UHD COLLECTOR’S EDITION CONTENTS:
Feature UHD + Feature BD [Disc 1 + Disc 2]
NEW – The Making of Hearts of Darkness
NEW – Eleanor Coppola: Art is All Around Us
Eleanor & Francis Coppola Audio Commentary
Eleanor Coppola’s Notes – On the Making of Apocalypse Now, reprinted exclusively for this edition
2 x posters (original and new artwork)
Bonus BD [Disc 3]
Peeling a Potato is a Work of Art (1976, Eleanor Coppola short)
