Adapting Heart of Darkness to the Film, Apocalypse Now I chose to do this essay on the idea of ​​adapting a story and why changes are made to a story. I initially wanted to just look at it in terms of Apocalypse Now and how the Heart of Darkness story had been updated to fit a different setting and time period, while still staying true to many of the events, characters, ideas and themes presented in the story . I was curious as to what changes had been made and what this indicated how the director, and perhaps society as a whole, felt about concepts that were perhaps no longer acceptable or satisfying. However, when I started looking at biographical information on Conrad as well, it became clear that the story itself is something of an adaptation. Even though I already knew that Conrad had a similar journey to Marlow, I was unaware of the "adaptation distortions" that occurred in the story. In 1890 Conrad obtained the position of captain of a steamboat on the Congo, due to the influence of a relative. He traveled along the coast and up the river and walked 200 miles overland to reach his boat, which was sunk. But from that moment on the story takes a turn. Conrad, instead of waiting and repairing the boat, signed on to another steamboat and sailed upriver, becoming seriously ill along the way. On the way back down the river, the captain was sicker than he was, so he had to captain the boat. When he finally reached the station where the boat for which he had a commission was supposed to be waiting for him, he found that his job had been given to someone else, so he returned to England. autobiographical story, and then halfway through the story it starts to be totally made up? The major change he makes seems to be that he is in command of the boat, and therefore in control of his own journey into the heart of darkness. The other is the meaning of Kurtz's character. Professor Abel mentioned that Kurtz was loosely based on someone named Klein, but presumably Kurtz's meaning is much more symbolic than biographical. Perhaps Conrad creates Kurtz to embody the issues he thought about during his trip to the Congo, but which were never embodied so concretely.