Eleanor Coppola recorded how a cinematic triumph almost came unstuck

The downdraught of the helicopter’s rotor blades, as it landed, blew her and her tripod sheer off the ground. Smoke from earth-shaking explosions shut down her view entirely. A trek through a rice paddy ended with the camera almost being sucked under. The firing of four thatched huts by the special-effects department destroyed the prop store where she kept her gear; her camera cases lay in the doorway, melted. Yet Eleanor Coppola took it all in her stride. She was so elated to be usefully working, recording the disaster-every-minute making of her husband Francis’s “Apocalypse Now”, that this was a small price to pay.

It was his film of course, one he had mortgaged their house to pay for. But it was also hers. He, with hundreds of extras, tons of explosives and military hardware loaned, then snatched back, by the Philippines government, was shooting the story of Captain Ben Willard, sent during the Vietnam war to close down an operation run from Cambodia by Colonel Kurtz, a rogue Green Beret. She, with her simple single-lens camera, filmed behind the scenes to show the logistical emergencies, winds and floods, personality clashes and script rehashes that went on day by day. His film, released in 1979, was nominated for eight Oscars and won two. Hers, when it appeared 12 years later (part-edited by her, with her narration and the title “Hearts of Darkness”) won six nominations and an Emmy. It was the best piece of art she ever made.

And it was high time, for her previous attempts had come to nothing. She still had the equipment in her cupboards somewhere. A machine saw for carving plastic statues. A sewing machine for her fabric-collage phase. An airbrush for a series of drawings. She had a fine eye for detail, noticing the way light eased through fronds and textiles, or the delicate lines of fish traps in a river, or the inner geometry of flowers. Patterns of beauty caught her attention everywhere, and she longed to make something of them.

But at the same time she felt keenly that her focus belonged elsewhere: on Francis and her three children, Gian-Carlo (Gio to her), Roman and Sofia. Francis came from generations of Italian men who expected as much. She and he were opposites in all kinds of ways, he theatrical, she calm, he typing up scripts in a storm of papers, tapes and frustration while she, in her octagonal room in a turret of their house in Napa Valley, laid out a little altar of precious objects and tied up her prayers in scrolls. But on the fundamental duty of a wife, she agreed with him.

Her upbringing, on the coast of Orange County, had trained her to be traditional. Her mother was a hopeless housekeeper, so she took over, making perfect lemon-meringue pies and sewing all night. When Francis went on location, she and the children followed him and she would set up home again from scratch. While he was creating masterpieces, she would hunt down the nearest general store and buy, again, mops and mats and pans. She kept everything going, including Easter-egg hunts, trick-or-treating and the tooth fairy. The fact that she had not produced a body of notable work depressed her, but she stowed the thought away. Then, in 1976-77, came the shooting of “Apocalypse Now”.

They needed a promotional film, and Francis asked her. The children were still small, but she did not think twice. The job suited her perfectly, melding the artist with the wife. Besides, she was by nature an observer. People expected Francis’s wife to be a young, sexy model, but she was older than him, a low-key wearer of plain skirts and sweaters and comfortable shoes. She was not surprised to be ignored; she just recorded what she saw. Diary notes could fill in the gaps, and later made a book. Both on paper and film she pinned down dire encounters between her husband and his barely controllable cast. Marlon Brando, playing Kurtz, had neither read the Conrad novel on which the film was based, nor lost weight to play the part; his fee was $2m for a month’s work, and a week of that was spent arguing with Francis in his trailer. Dennis Hopper, playing a paparazzo, was so stoned that he simply made up his lines. Martin Sheen as Willard was sweetly co-operative, but was floored by a heart attack.

Most of all she focused on Francis, bare-chested and sweating in the disabling heat. She was both fascinated and frightened by the creative process and his violent descents into despair. During casting he had thrown his five previous Oscars out of a window, breaking four of them. The shoot overran by 11 months, and the budget tripled. Left alone with her he repeatedly cried that he couldn’t go on, but couldn’t quit either, because he was too far in. His film was no good and going nowhere, because he couldn’t clarify what the themes were. For almost a year he agonised over the script. At times he turned on her, furiously, for not supporting him. She let him vent as she always did, simply listening, remembering the Zen teaching to let his dark words drain out of her. Like Willard, he had to find himself through this quest. She defied him only when she thought he was turning into Kurtz, exhilarated nearly to madness by danger and power.

Nonetheless, she loved him. “Apocalypse Now” drove them to the point of divorce, but they stayed together, largely happily. Roman and Sofia became film-makers in turn, and she made behind-the-scenes documentaries of Sofia’s movies, too. They fared better than her own attempts at directing in old age, in “Paris Can Wait” and “Love is Love is Love”. Her most successful piece of creativity after “Hearts of Darkness” was an installation, “Circle of Memory”, dedicated to Gio, who had been killed at 22 in a speedboat accident. It was a passage-tomb made of 1,200 straw bales, with a circular room at the centre where visitors could reflect and tuck notes in the straw. On the vast wine-growing estate where she and Francis lived she had built a prototype, a retreat known as “Ellie’s Barn”. Straw bales were humble and, in general, not much noticed. But she could still leave searing notes in the cracks. ■