Apocalypse Now began with one man: Joseph Conrad. Born in 1857, he died 15 years before Francis Ford Coppola was even born, and is buried in Canterbury Cemetery.

Yet Conrad’s legacy was such that it echoed right through the ages, until his most famous novella, Heart Of Darkness, ended up busting into the 20th century as a full-blown blood-and-guts movie blockbuster.

Before that, though, Darkness was a three-part series published in Blackwood’s Magazine. The story detailed the travails of Charles Marlow, an Englishman who becomes a ferry-boat captain in Africa and is ordered to take mysterious ivory trader Kurtz downriver.

Conrad’s novel is chiefly concerned with exposing the horror of European colonisation (which he witnessed as a Congo steamboat captain), doing so by peering into the dark heart of the Congo while simultaneously laying bare the evil in the colonising man and his mistreatment of natives.

Published in book form in 1902, Conrad’s work is now widely taught in the US curriculum, and has been commended for its realistic portrayal of colonisation. Almost 60 years later, screenwriter John Milius thought it might make a good movie...