Eleanor Coppola, filmmaker and writer, 1936-2024

The making of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam war epic, was a hellish experience for everyone involved: the cast, the crew and the director’s wife, Eleanor, who had accompanied him on the trip to the Philippines in 1976 for the shoot.

Work on the film was delayed by typhoons, actor Martin Sheen had a heart attack, drug use was rampant on the set and the photography stretched to 238 days, bringing Coppola to the brink of bankruptcy and madness.

But when it was over, both Francis and Eleanor had shot footage that would produce a great film.

Ellie, as she was known, had been filming the whole chaotic ordeal in the Philippines, ostensibly for the studio’s publicity department. “I was just trying to keep myself occupied with something to do because we were out there for so long,” she told CNN.

Later she worked with directors Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper to turn 60 hours of raw footage into Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, perhaps the best film ever made about the making of a film, released in 1991. She also narrated the documentary.

Ellie did not sugarcoat the experience. Hearts of Darkness reveals her husband as having, in the words of a Washington Post reviewer, “a self-dramatising, tragic grandeur that verges on the Shakespearean . . . capable, it seems, of nearly anything, from childish fits of temper to egomania and grandiose self-pity”.

The experience had pushed their marriage to the limits, in large part due to Francis’s infidelity. “There is part of me that has been waiting for Francis to leave me, or die, so that I can get my life the way I want it,” she wrote in her book Notes: On the Making of ‘Apocalypse Now’.  

But the couple remained together until Ellie’s death on April 12, aged 87. Their three children would also work in the movie business. The eldest, Gian-Carlo, was an actor who died in a boating accident in 1986; Roman is a director and frequent collaborator with Wes Anderson; and Sofia a director and screenwriter whose work includes The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. Her most recent film, Priscilla, released in 2023, was dedicated to her mother.

Ellie was a visual artist, author and documentarian. But she sometimes struggled to forge her own identity given her driven, famous husband and children. “I can see my deep imponderable love for my husband and my children,” she wrote in a memoir, Notes on a Life. “I also see conflict in my devotion to my remarkable family and longing to be immersed as a working artist myself.” 

Eleanor Jessie Neil grew up in southern California and studied design at UCLA. She and Francis met in 1962 on the set of Dementia 13, a horror movie he wrote and directed for the cult filmmaker Roger Corman. She was three years older than Francis, who hired her on the spot to be an art director. At the time she was wearing beads and parted her long brown hair in the middle. She was “a bit of a hippie”, according to Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

They were married in 1963, and soon had Gian-Carlo, who grew up visiting his father’s movie sets, as did his siblings later. But Ellie did not want to raise her growing family in Hollywood, and Francis did not want to operate in the shadow of the LA studios. Instead, he set up his own production company, American Zoetrope, in San Francisco.

Ellie was pregnant with Sofia as Francis began work on The Godfather in 1970. After the film’s commercial and critical success, the Coppolas bought a 28-room house in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighbourhood. 

In the early 1970s, the couple went to Napa Valley to find a house where the children could play outside during the cold San Francisco summers. What they found was part of the 19th-century Inglenook wine estate, and over the years they bought up the adjacent vineyards. Ellie managed one of the wineries, and the Coppola family established itself as a force in the industry.  

Later in life Ellie made more documentaries about her family’s films, including Sofia’s Marie Antoinette. In 2016, she directed a narrative film, Paris Can Wait, a romantic comedy starring Diane Lane, followed by another Love Is Love Is Love, in 2020.  

By then, she had long been confident of her own skills as a filmmaker. Not long after Hearts of Darkness was released, she went to a party in Hollywood — the type of event that had often filled her with dread — and received compliments for her work on the documentary. “It was the first time I thought anyone in the film community could see me as a person other than ‘Francis’ wife,” she wrote. 

christopher.grimes@ft.com