IS BASED ON…
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, the director of The Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse now earned 8 Academy awards including Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture and Best Director. It however won for two technical awards – Best Sound and Best Cinematography. The film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”.
The source of the film is a novella from 1899 by Joseph Conrad called Heart of Darkness which is set in Congo instead of Vietnam.
Although screenwriter John Milius changed the setting of Heart of Darkness from late 19th century Congo to the Vietnam War and the main characters are changed to soldiers, the story and the themes involved remain intact.
Heart of Darkness was initially first published as a 3-part serial in a magazine before it was published as a novella with two other stories in Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories and later, due to it’s popularity, published as a novel.
