Francis Ford Coppola
Quotes I did something terrible to my father. When I was twelve or thirteen, I had a job at Western Union. And when the telegram came over on a long strip, you would cut it and glue it on the paper and deliver it on a bicycle. And I knew the name of the head of Paramount Pictures' music department — Louis Lipstone. So I wrote, "Dear Mr. Coppola: We have selected you to write a score. Please return to L. A. immediately to begin the assignment. Sincerely, Louis Lipstone." And I glued it and I delivered it. And my father was so happy. And then I had to tell him that it was fake. He was totally furious. In those days, kids got hit. With the belt. I know why I did it: I wanted him to get that telegram. We do things for good reasons that are bad.
People feel the worst film I made was Jack. But to this day, when I get checks from old movies I've made, Jack is one of the biggest ones. No one knows that. If people hate the movie, they hate the movie. I just wanted to work with Robin Williams.
I was never sloppy with other people's money. Only my own. Because I figure, well, you can be.
Ten or fifteen years after Apocalypse Now, I was in England in a hotel, and I watched the beginning of it and ultimately ended up watching the whole movie. And it wasn't as weird as I thought. It had, in a way, widened what people would tolerate in a movie.
I saw this bin full of, basically, garbage film. We had shot five cameras when the jets came and dropped the napalm. You had to roll them all at the same time, so there was a lot of this leader, which was just footage. So I picked something out of this barrel and put it in the Moviola and it was very abstract, and every once in a while you saw this helicopter skid. And then over in sound there was all this Doors music, and in it was something called "The End." And I said, "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if we started the movie with 'The End'?"
I have more of a vivid imagination than I have talent. I cook up ideas. It's just a characteristic.
I just admire people like Woody Allen, who every year writes an original screenplay. It's astonishing. I always wished that I could do that.
To do good is to be abundant — that's my tendency. If I cook a meal, I cook too much and have too many things. I was just watching a Cecil B. DeMille picture last night based on Cleopatra, and I realized how many parts of the real story he left out. So much of the art of film is to do less. To aspire to do less.
When I was starting out, I got a job writing a script for Bill Cosby. He used to have the very best wine for his friends. He didn't drink wine himself, but he had this wine called Romanée-Conti, which is considered one of the greatest wines in the world. I never knew wine could taste like that. He also taught me how to play baccarat. And one night I had $400, and I won $30,000. So I bought $30,000 worth of Romanée wines.
You have to view things in the context of your life expectancy.
The ending was clear and Michael has corrupted himself — it was over. So I didn't understand why they wanted to make another Godfather.
I said, "What I will do is help you develop a story. And I'll find a director and produce it." They said, "Well, who's the director?" And I said, "Young guy, Martin Scorsese." They said, "Absolutely not!" He was just starting out.
The only thing they really argued with me about was calling it Godfather Part II. It was always Son of the Wolfman or The Wolfman Returns or something. They thought that audiences would find it confusing. It was ironic, because that started the whole numbers thing. I started a lot of things.
I was in my trailer, working on Godfather II or III in New York, and there was a knock on the door. The guy working with me said that John Gotti would like to meet Mr. Coppola. And I said, "It's not possible, I'm in the middle of something." There's an old wives' tale about vampires — that you have to invite them in, but once they cross the threshold, then they're in. But if you say you don't want to meet them, then they can't come in. They can't know you.
I never saw The Sopranos. I'm not interested in the mob.
What greater snub can you get than that absolutely nobody went to see Youth Without Youth? Anything better than that is a success.
Some audiences love to sit there and see all the names in the credits. Are they looking for a relative?
What should I do now? I could do something a little more ambitious. Or less. Better less. For me, less ambitious is more ambitious.
I've had wine at the table all my life. Even kids were allowed to have it. We used to put ginger ale or lemon soda in it.
A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually.
Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos.
Art depends on luck and talent.
Even my last year or two of college I was always trying to start a cinema workshop, or make a little film.
Film students were junkies for equipment.
Frank Capra was a prop man, I think. John Ford was a prop man. It was a little bit of a father and son thing, and you kind of worked your way up.
George Lucas doesn't have the most physical stamina. He was so unhappy making Star Wars that he just vowed he'd never do it again.
I always found the film world unpleasant. It's all about the schedule, and never really flew for me.
I associate my motion picture career more with being unhappy and scared, or being under the gun, than with anything pleasant.
I became quite successful very young, and it was mainly because I was so enthusiastic and I just worked so hard at it.
I don't know how brilliant we were, but we were very enthusiastic about movies and the chance to make them.
I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing.
I had a heartbreaking experience when I was 9. I always wanted to be a guard. The most wonderful girl in the world was a guard. When I got polio and then went back to school, they made me a guard. A teacher took away my guard button.
I had a number of teachers who hated me. I didn't do well in school.
I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini.
I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.
I had been a kid that moved so much, I didn't have a lot of friends. Theater really represented camaraderie.
I had no idea that I'd really get to direct feature films, or to be successful at it.
I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.
I liked to work in a shop down in the basement and invent things and build gadgets.
I remember growing up with television, from the time it was just a test pattern, with maybe a little bit of programming once in a while.
I remember teachers who really singled me out for their discouragement.
I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.
I think I preferred reading plays to novels or other kinds of books.
I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.
I wanted to work all the time, and UCLA wasn't like that. Students would work on their project, and then they'd be in their room editing for six months.
I was an extremely energetic and enthusiastic person. Movie making was almost like my private passion, because it wasn't as widespread then.
I was good with technology, but I had never done the sound. So I took the recorder home and read the instructions.
I was interested in two things, always. One was science, and the stories of the scientists and scientific experimentation. At the same time I was interested in stories.
I was the kind of kid that had some talents or ability, but it never came out in school.
I was very good in geometry. It was amazing, I had one of the highest grades in geometry in the school.
I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten.
In kindergarten that used to be my job, to tell them fairy tales. I liked Hans Christian Andersen, and the Grimm fairy tales, all the classic fairy tales.
It was a wonderful night when we won all those Oscars for Godfather II, because people really didn't like that picture too much at first.
It's ironic that at age 32, at probably the greatest moment of my career, with The Godfather having such an enormous success, I wasn't even aware of it, because I was somewhere else under the deadline again.
Life for me at age 5 and 6 was pretty wonderful and perfect. But then I went through that whole New York school system. I found them very frightening.
Listen, if there's one sure-fire rule that I have learned in this business, it's that I don't know anything about human nature.
Most Italians who came to this country are very patriotic. There was this exciting possibility that if you worked real hard, and you loved something, you could become successful.
Musical comedy was something that I had been raised in with my family and I thought my father would be impressed if I were directing a Hollywood musical comedy.
My class didn't think we would ever get to make feature films. We thought we would end up making industrial films, or be on the fringe or get involved in television.
My father was a musician. He was always interested in new things. He did bring a television home around 1945, right at the end of the Second World War. I was about 6.
My film is not a movie; it's not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.
One of the aspects of it was the idea of an illusion, a magical illusion, in the early days of movies.
One summer I actually tried to make a film. Then when I was graduated in 1960, I went to UCLA, to the graduate film school program.
Our generation represented a major transition. It was the first time that film students were given the chance to make films.
Roger Corman exploited all of the young people who worked for him, but he really gave you responsibility and opportunity. So it was kind of a fair deal.
Ten Days That Shook The World, by Eisenstein, I went to see it, and I was so impressed with this film, so impressed with what cinema could do.
The company I was with, Seven Arts, had bought Warner Brothers. For a while, no one knew who was running it, so I was the first one to break in.
The essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy.
The professional world was much more unpleasant than I thought. I was always wishing I could get back that enthusiasm I had when I was doing shows at college.
The stuff that I got in trouble for, the casting for The Godfather or the flag scene in Patton, was the stuff that was remembered, and was considered the good work.
There was a whole crowd of young actors who used to be in a lot of those early, inexpensive films. Jack Nicholson is the really well-known one.
They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family.
This kind of work is really grueling. You're in a lot of uncomfortable situations for many, many hours.
To use technology to create magic is what appealed to me.
Usually, the stuff that's your best idea or work is going to be attacked the most.
Warner Bros. did not in any way make us a loan.
We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.
We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn't speak Italian in the house. We were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music, ate Italian food.
When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.
When I was about 9, I had polio, and people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while, so I watched television.
When I was going for my graduate degree, I decided I was going to make a feature film as my thesis. That's what I was famous for-that I had my thesis film be a feature film, which was You're a Big Boy Now.
When I was little, my mother would say to me, America is the greatest country in the world. And there was a sense, as Italian-Americans, that it was a great privilege to live in America.
When I was young and it was new to me, it just seemed like so much fun. You didn't want to go home at night.
You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you'll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost.
You ought to love what you're doing because, especially in a movie, over time you really will start to hate it.
You're in a profession in which absolutely everybody is telling you their opinion, which is different. That's one of the reasons George Lucas never directed again.
My father was a musician. He was always interested in the new things, for that reason. He would come home from New York, and he did bring a television home, around 1945, right at the end of the Second World War. I was about 6. So I remember growing up with television, from the time it was just a test pattern, with maybe a little bit of programming once in a while.
When I was about nine, I had polio, and one of the conditions of polio was -- of course, it was -- people were very frightened for their children, so you tended, if you had it, to be isolated. So there was about a year and a half when I stayed at home. I was paralyzed for a while. And so I basically watched television, and listened to the radio, and played with a tape recorder, and puppets, and my day was made up of those kinds of things.
I was interested in two things, always. One was science, and the stories of the scientists and scientific experimentation. I liked very much to work in a shop down in the basement, and try to invent things and build gadgets. And at the same time I was interested in stories. And I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, and so I had an early exposure to literature, and what have you, and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies, so I would have the opportunity to see musical comedies. Ultimately, those different technical, and sort of story interests -- around high school, or early high school -- I started to do the lighting, work on the lighting of the drama productions, and be around the shows. And so I started to become interested in theater, and I thought I wanted to be a playwright, because I was interested in stories and telling stories.
When I was a college student. I had enrolled in the drama department, and my father was not very pleased with that. He wanted me to study some more practical profession, engineering, or something, because I did have ability in science. But I won a play writing scholarship to what was then Hofstra College, now Hofstra University. I was immersed in theater production, and started to direct theater.
One afternoon, I remember, around four o'clock in a building called the Little Theater, I noticed a notice that they were going to show a film called Ten Days That Shook The World, by Eisenstein. And I went in to see it, it was pretty long, and there were only two or three other people. But I was so impressed with this film -- and it was a silent film -- but so impressed with what cinema could do. And, of course, having quite a bit of experience in theater -- but that afternoon, I think, was when I decided that I would not go into theater.
For me the specific decision was whether I was going to go to the Yale Drama School, or UCLA. At that point, I decided I was going into movies. Even my last year or two of college I was always trying to start a cinema workshop, or make a little film. One summer I actually tried to make a film. Then when I was graduated in 1960, I went to UCLA, to the graduate film school program.
It combines so many other art forms, as do theater and opera, but the essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images, images of people during emotional moments, or just images in a general sense, but put together in a kind of alchemy. A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually.
This, of course, was one of the elements of the Eisenstein film that was so exciting. How the editing was able to take -- that's always fascinating -- take this, and this, and put it together, and have something come out that was neither of those two things. Of course, the sense of rhythm that editing can do! I was struck, I remember, on Ten Days That Shook The World, how although it was a silent film, there were sequences where you actually almost could hear the machine guns firing, because of the way it was edited. So it's a form of alchemy, of magic, that is very appealing. I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. Because the very earliest people who made film were magicians. One of the aspects of it was the idea of an illusion, a magical illusion, in the early days of movies.
A lot of early magicians began experimenting, using basically what is cinema to do their illusions. And of course we know that some of the early pioneers, like Meliès and what have you, were magicians who used cinema to create illusions. So I think cinema always had -- as did theater for me -- this ability to create some kind of magic, either through lighting -- but to use technology to create magic is what appealed to me, I think.
A book I would put in that category that I read when I was quite young -- it was around the house and I picked it up and read it -- was a play actually, A Streetcar Named Desire. I read it when I was like 15, or so. I'm not sure I understood it, I just thought it was so beautiful and moving -- just the pictures that the language painted when you read it. I think I preferred reading plays, to novels or other kinds of books. I also like reading biography of scientists, that was a favorite thing of mine. I think I could read quite young, because I remember reading the fairy tales. I remember being in kindergarten and that used to be my job, to tell them to the other kids. I liked Hans Christian Andersen, and the Grimm fairy tales, all the classic fairy tales.
I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini. That was an unusual profession for a kid to have as his father. He would dress up in a tuxedo. A concert musician has to practice a lot, and my earliest memories are of that. He was a great musician, very knowledgeable, and he used to tell us the stories of the operas, and all about the composers. He had a lot of knowledge, and he would make a point of telling us about it.
I had an older brother who was five years older than me. He was a very successful student, a very handsome kid. Having an older brother by that many years, was really an edge that I had. I had an older brother who would protect me. He was a very sensitive and talented boy, and he became interested in literature. So at the same time that I had all this information from my father, I also had a brother who was giving me books at a young age that I would not normally have run into. Brave New World, of course, which was fun, because it was sort of science fiction. As a kid, he was showing me books by James Joyce, and André Gide. So I was really stimulated at a younger age than I normally would have been exposed to that kind of thing.
I had a number of teachers who hated me, at least I felt. I didn't do well in school. I did very well in school my first year and a half, and we left that school. I really quite liked that first school I went to. Life for me at age five and six was pretty wonderful and perfect. But then I went to a number of other schools. I went to many schools and went through that whole New York school system, P.S. this and P.S. that. I found them very frightening, like penitentiaries, and I didn't do well in those schools. Maybe partly because I was always moving from school to school. But nonetheless I do remember teachers who really singled me out for their discouragement. In fact, I had a sort of heartbreaking experience, because as I said, when I was nine, I always wanted to be a guard, because I was a new kid in the school. A guard in the school wore a yellow button that said "Guard." And they would be a hall guard, or a stair guard, or whatever they were. And the girl that I thought was the most wonderful girl in the world was a guard, I remember. When I got polio, of course, I was taken out of school. Then, about a year and a half later, I went back to school. They had a little ceremony and kind of welcomed me back, and they made me a guard, as part of -- I guess -- my being taken back into school. And my teacher, Mrs. Hemeshandra, who really was -- I think she was a very bright woman, but I remember her as an oppressor. I remember, like a week later she said, "Well, why should you be a guard just because you were sick?" And she took away my guard button.
I didn't have any teachers who were especially encouraging to me until much later. In high school, there was a science teacher who thought I had a lot of ability, because I had a natural talent with scientific things. For some reason, I was bad in all my other subjects, but I was very good in geometry. It was amazing, I had one of the highest grades in geometry in the school.
I didn't realize it then, but I was the kind of kid that had some talents or ability, but it never came out in any school. In my senior year of high school, I had a creative writing teacher who was very encouraging, and there was a writing teacher in college who encouraged me to write.
When I was a graduate student, I had a wonderful teacher I admired -- a woman director, in fact, the only Hollywood woman director. Her name was Dorothy Arzner. She was very encouraging to me at a time when I needed encouragement. So I remember her very favorably.
In those days I was an extremely energetic and enthusiastic person. I just loved to be involved in it all. Moving making was almost like my private passion, because it wasn't as widespread then. When I started the Hofstra Cinema Club, I think two people came. People weren't as fascinated with cinema as they are now.
Being a theater student, I was a little frustrated at UCLA. Theater students are very gregarious. You all work together, and stay up all night and making sets and doing shows. At UCLA in those days, the cinema department was in a kind of army barracks, and pretty much all guys. I think there was maybe one girl in the entire department, which was very discouraging. It wasn't as nice to be in a place where there were no girls going to school with you. I wanted to work all the time, and UCLA wasn't like that. Students there would work on their project, and then they'd be in their room editing for six months.
I landed a job with Roger Corman. Originally the job was to take a Russian science fiction picture that he had bought and he wanted me to write the English dialogue for. Of course, I didn't speak any Russian. Then I realized he didn't care whether I could understand what they were really saying; he just wanted me to make up dialogue. The movie was really a very idealistic science fiction picture. He wanted to add some monsters and have the story be related to that. So I got that job, and I worked very hard on that. Ultimately, I became Roger's assistant. That meant I had to wash his car, and he had me work as a dialogue director in the morning on a Vincent Price movie. Of course, they would pay my salary. But then I would leave at one and go work on his stuff. So he would basically get me for half the day, for free. Roger exploited all of the young people who worked for him to the fullest, but at the same time, he really gave you responsibility and opportunity. So it was kind of a fair deal.
It was the only place that you could really get to work on movies. There was a whole crowd of young actors who used to be in a lot of those early, inexpensive films. Jack Nicholson is the really well-known one. In later years, after I had gone through there, Roger gave similar opportunities to Peter Bogdanovich, Marty Scorsese, Jonathan Demme. He basically was always looking for the very energetic person who would work for next to nothing, and had some talent.
About Roger Corman
Roger had a technique. He would make a film, usually paid for by AIP, American International Pictures. He would put together the team and the equipment to make the film, and then, after it was over, he would make a second film, because all of those expenses were already paid. You'd get a real bargain on it. About three-quarters through that film, which was called, The Young Racers Roger was called back home to direct The Raven with Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff. I knew he couldn't pass up a bargain to make another film while were in Europe. So I said, "Roger, you know, I have a script that could be made. It's kind of like Psycho. He always wanted a film that was like some hit film. Hitchcock's Psycho was a big deal at the time. I said, "I have this script..." and he said, "Show me some of it."
I showed him the three pages I wrote that night, which was of course, the most garish kind of action scene I could come up with. And he said, "Okay." And I went off. He gave me a check for $20,000. He sent me with a young woman who had worked on the production who was going to be the co-signer -- and I went to Ireland. When I was in Ireland, I met another producer and I said I was making a film for Roger, and this guy offered to buy the English rights for another $20,000. So I had now $40,000. Roger, of course, expected to get his $20,000 back, still make the movie for the 20 with the English rights, and get the film for free. But I sort of just duped him. I took both checks and I put it in the bank. And I had this young woman sign the check, and I just kind of made the amount to the whole amount, so she basically was out of the check signing. Then I made the movie for $40,000, which was this little black-and-white horror film called Dementia 13, which we made in about nine days.
I wrote it that first week in Ireland. I had this one scene that I had showed Roger, and then I came up with the rest. I stayed up all night or something.
The professional world was much more unpleasant than I thought. I was always wishing I could get back that enthusiasm I had when I was doing shows at college. When I was young and it was new to me, it just seemed like so much fun. You didn't want to go home at night, or you'd come back late at night and do some more work on it.
I always found the film world unpleasant. It's all about the schedule, and never really flew for me in the way that my very happy college career did. I would have to say that the happiest days that I can remember were when The Godfather was over and I didn't have to go there anymore, or when Apocalypse was over. So I took a job right away when it was done. They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family.
The Godfather was a very unappreciated movie when we were making it. They were very unhappy with it. They didn't like the cast. They didn't like the way I was shooting it. I was always on the verge of getting fired. So it was an extremely nightmarish experience. I had two little kids, and the third one was born during that. We lived in a little apartment, and I was basically frightened that they didn't like it. They had as much as said that, so when it was all over I wasn't at all confident that it was going to be successful, and that I'd ever get another job.
I went off, and I don't know why I was in Paris, but I was in Paris, staying up all night writing this Gatsby script, and that's when The Godfather opened. And it was this enormous success! So I would just get a phone call and they'd say, "Oh yeah, it's going great! Everyone loved it!" I'd say, "Oh, yeah, really? I can't get this script done." It's ironic that probably the greatest moment of my career, certainly at age 32 or so, making The Godfather, having such enormous success, wasn't even one that I was aware of, because I was somewhere else and I was, again, under the deadline. Certainly, it was a wonderful night when we won all those Oscars for Godfather II, because at first, that picture came out, and people, they really didn't like it too much. But to I have to be honest, that I associate my motion picture career more with being unhappy, and being scared, or being troubled, or being under the gun, and not at al with anything pleasant.
I wrote the script of Patton. And the script was very controversial when I wrote it, because they thought it was so stylized. It was supposed to be like, sort of, you know, The Longest Day. And my script of Patton was -- I was sort of interested in the reincarnation. And I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I wasn't fired, but I was fired, meaning that when the script was done, they said, "Okay, thank you very much," and they went and hired another writer and that script was forgotten. And I remember very vividly this long, kind of being raked over the coals for this opening scene. My point is that what I've learned is that the stuff that I got in trouble for, the casting for The Godfather or the flag scene in Patton, was the stuff that was remembered, and was considered really the good work.
(important characteristics for success)
Courage, I think, because I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing. That's what I would say in looking back at my life, at the things that I got in the most trouble for, or that I was fired for. So, what that tells you is that... You need other things, obviously, a lot of energy and enthusiasm, because this kind of work is really grueling. You're in a lot of uncomfortable situations for many, many hours. You to stick to whatever your idea was, in a profession in which absolutely everybody is telling you their opinion, which is different.
In your own time, usually, the stuff that's your best idea or work is going to be attacked the most. Firstly, probably because it's new, or because they'd never seen an opening of a movie like that, or seen a gangster movie done in this style. So you have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas, because otherwise you'll just knuckle under and change it. And then things that might have been memorable will be lost.
The grips will tell you that you don't know what you're doing, or the camera operator, or the camera man. Everybody. I mean, when you go on a set -- that's one of the reasons George Lucas never directed again. No one knows this, but when he made Star Wars over there in England -- George is sort of a little, skinny version of me, you know, and he's doesn't have the most physical kind of stamina. And he was so ridiculed -- you know that kind of jock-like attitude that crews can have -- putting him down for what he was doing and stuff. He was so unhappy making Star Wars that he just vowed he'd never do it again. Plus, he was like diabetic, so he was a little sick. That's why someone today said, you ought to love what you're doing because -- especially in a movie -- you really have to love the project and love the story, because over time you really will start to hate it. And the fact that you say, "Gee, but I really like what this is about," is a very valuable asset.
(What the American Dream means to him)
We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn't speak Italian in the house. My father was a musician, so we were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music. We ate Italian food, and pizza, when no one knew what pizza was really. But I remember very vividly, when I was a little boy, my mother would say to me, "America is the greatest country in the world." And there was a sense, as Italian-Americans, that it was a great privilege to live in America and be Americans.
Most Italians who came to this country are, you know, very patriotic. And what that meant was just that there was this exciting possibility that if you worked real hard, and you loved something, that you could become successful, and wouldn't be held down, due to who your family was and what have you. And certainly, in my case, I found that to be true. I became quite successful very young, and it was mainly because I was -- I would have to say -- because I was so enthusiastic and I just worked so hard at it.
Our generation represented a major transition. It was the first time certainly that film students were given the chance to make films. Film, in the past, was a profession that you worked your way up. Frank Capra was a prop man, I think John Ford was a prop man. It was a little bit of a father and son thing, and you kind of worked your way up. When we all went to film school, my class, and my comrades there, we didn't think we were ever going to really get to make feature films. We thought we would end up making industrial films, or possibly be on the fringe, or maybe get involved in television. My aspirations when I went -- I had no idea. I just wanted to be part of the film business. I had no idea that I'd really get to direct feature films, or to be successful at it. And of course, my story is that when I was going for my graduate degree, I decided I was going to make a feature film as my thesis. That's what I was famous for, was that I was not only the first film student to kind of become a professional director, but I also had my thesis film be a feature film, which was You're a Big Boy Now.
I always loved the theater-like feeling of working together. That's ultimately what I was trying to achieve in my life, because I had been a kid that moved so much, I didn't have a lot of friends. Theater really represented that kind of camaraderie.
A lot of younger would-be film directors started to come and hang out, because I had an office at Warner Brothers. I had directed Finian's Rainbow when I was like 23 or something, and pretty soon all these kids -- some of them my age, some of them a little younger -- started hanging out with me. I had a little money, and I had a lot of ambition to set up a group, a company. So that's when I met George Lucas, of course, who was younger, and then he had all his friends. Ultimately, it became kind of this gang of young film makers who really were friends and hung around together. The key thing about film students at that point is we all wanted to work in 35 millimeter. Film students were junkies for equipment. So suddenly I had penetrated the Hollywood studio, and due to very funny circumstances, which is that the company I was with, which was Seven Arts, had bought Warner Brothers. So for a while, no one knew who was running it, so I sort of had the keys of the whole studio, as though we suddenly had Warner Brothers. And we walked around and talked about, "We're going to get animation going again." Before I know it, there were all these guys coming there, and we'd talk about it, and that's when I met people like Carol Ballard, and George Lucas, and John Milius, and Phil Kaufman I remember, and Brian Da Palma, and later, Marty Scorsese. They were all like a few years younger. Then we really decided we were going to be independent, we were all going to move to San Francisco, and we did. And that company produced some of those people's first films, George's films and what have you. I had always wanted to be part of that type of artistic scene like you hear about in Paris. What might have it been like to be there? There's Hemingway in the Ritz Bar, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Sartre, and these wonderful people. When we were there (in San Francisco), broke, trying to figure out how to pay for anything, little did I realize that in effect, that's what that was. That all those people were to go on and become wonderful artists and stuff. But then, it seemed like we were just a bunch of young people who wanted to take over the movie business. And in a way we did, but in a way we didn't, because we really wanted better things for it.
"If I ever got the bucks that, say, George Lucas got from Star Wars, I'd put every penny into changing the rules."
My films make my life. If you are a serious artist, your work will be about you. There's no other way. When I did The Godfather, people said, "Oh, you're like Michael Corleone - determined to make things come out your way." When I did Apocalypse Now, they said, "You're just like Kurtz - out in the jungle, at the threshold of your sanity." When I made Tucker: The Man and His Dream, a film based on the true story of a guy who tried to build his own car company, they said, "You're like Preston Tucker - and the big guys won't let you build your own studio." There's something to all of that. Those connections aren't just coincidences. Those films grew out of my own passions and feelings. Passions are wired into the real world more directly than our workaday routines are. If you love something, you'll bring so much of yourself to it that it will create your future.
I also made a film about a soldier who begins to care for a boy. Later in the film, the boy dies. On the first day of shooting, my son died. I asked myself, "Is this 'The Twilight Zone'?" The film, Gardens of Stone, was about the loss of a boy: I was going to a funeral on the set every day. Then I had to go to a funeral off the set - and in my life. Last year, I made The Rainmaker, in which David-type people take on a Goliath-type corporation in a lawsuit - which is what happened when I took on Warner Bros. My next film, the one I'm writing the script for now, is about a man who tries to affect the way the future will evolve. The hero dies while the city of the future is being created. Now I'm saying, "I don't want my life to turn out like the film that I'm making." I want to be around to see the realm of the future. That's why I'm writing this story. I know that film has the power to show the future, to make it seem real.
If Hollywood can make a movie showing the Titanic sink or spaceships battling giant bugs, then I can make a movie showing what the world of the future could be like - not just an artist's sketch, but a precise social and architectural rendering. Then, if people like what they see, maybe they will build it.
Get into situations in which failure isn't an option. Be an adventurer. I based Apocalypse Now on the novel Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. That book defied even the great Orson Welles, who tried to film it but had to abort the project (he then went on to make Citizen Kane). My script, written with John Milius, told the story of an American soldier who travels into the jungles of Southeast Asia to bring to justice a man named Kurtz, who had stepped beyond the accepted limits of morality.
Filming that story was perhaps the biggest risk I've ever taken. To get United Artists to finance the movie, I offered to put up my wine estate and my home as collateral. I lived in the Philippine jungle for 238 days, through guerrilla uprisings and through typhoons in which the rain came down so hard that it hurt. We had too much money and too much film; little by little, we went insane. The stakes were so high that I simply had to succeed.
It's important to be interested in everything. You have your life - experience it to the fullest. You're eventually going to lose it anyway. I am a very restless personality. If I take time off, I'm likely to do something like build a resort. I can't help myself. That's why I try to make businesses out of all of the things that I enjoy: food, wine, films. My company, FFC Brands, sells my taste. I want to set a precedent for my children. They won't hear me say on my deathbed that I wish I had lived my life differently. I am one big yes.
Children think that they can jump from here to the moon. That's a useful point of view. I've never been a superconfident person. I don't court danger - if it comes, fine. But I am childlike. I try to see things in a very open way. The childlike point of view has great power. Business is a natural outgrowth of play. My greatest gift is my enthusiasm. I get excited about whatever I'm interested in. I'm like a six-year-old.
People are shocked to hear that I think of The Godfather series with sadness. I see those films almost as a personal failure. They changed my life detrimentally, even though the world treated them as big artistic and commercial successes. Their success led me to make big commercial films - when what I really wanted was to do original films, like those that Woody Allen is able to focus on.
My company is based on the belief that business should be conducted as if it were an art. The wine business is our most successful operation. We have what is probably the most-visited winery in Napa Valley. Visitors feel like part of my family. We've turned the camera on ourselves. That's what artists always do. Everything I love has in one way or another become a business for me.
I'm expanding the company right now: I'm taking what I've learned from our wine business and applying that knowledge to the entertainment portions of the company. Once you start thinking about brands, you realize that there is no film company that really counts as a brand. A Fox film, a Warner Bros. film, and a Paramount film are all interchangeable. Branding films is not done today - unlike in the past, when each studio had its own individual personality.
I want our film brand to give people a certain promise of quality, and I want to keep that promise by emphasizing the two most important aspects of the cinema: writing and directing. We're going to focus on making films at a certain budgetary level - films costing $12 million or less. Such films can have all of the production quality, all of the finesse, of the $40 million films that open every Friday.
Being spartan not only greatly reduces overhead but also destroys the hierarchy that affects a company when its people care only about their bonuses. In that kind of company, people start to play the game safe: "Let's make another Mission: Impossible." I don't hire people who play it safe, and I destroy systems that encourage the instinct for security.
Success means living the life of your heart.
People ask me, What would you do if you had Bill Gates's fortune? What if you had $50 billion dollars? My answer is, I would use it to borrow $500 billion, and I would build the city of the future. That city would be a beautiful place for people to live. It would support creativity, education, ritual, and athletic perfection. In the future, what will occupy people won't be work; it'll be study, art, sport, and festival. We ought to start gearing people toward those priorities. If people can see something attractive, then they'll want it. And if they can see it and want it, then they can have it.
Always work on an epic scale.
Henry Ford wasn't just designing cars; in effect, he was designing cities as well. Early in my career, I discovered the art of treating money outrageously. If you spend $1,000 recklessly, it will feel like $10,000. Everything will seem bigger and more exciting. In that spirit, I don't deny myself anything. And I don't say no to anything. Whenever you get into trouble, keep going.
Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos: You go over budget; you wear people out. In the middle of filming Apocalypse Now, Marty Sheen had a heart attack. For the first time during the making of that picture, I became scared. But we improvised: We used a double and shot a lot of the material from behind. When I couldn't build a satellite network in Belize, I built a resort instead - another double, so to speak. To keep going in a crisis, do a 180-degree turn. Turn the situation halfway around. Don't look for the secure solution. Don't pull back from the passion. Turn it on full force.
While making Apocalypse Now, we had banished screenwriter John Milius from the set. Then we invited him back - to the great relief of the cast and crew, who thought I had gone mad - and he came to see me. About that visit, Milius later said, "I felt like a general going to see Hitler in 1944 to tell him that there was no gasoline." But I turned the situation around. I said to Milius, "This will be the first film to win the Nobel Prize." I got him all excited. When he left that meeting, he was saying, "We're going to win the war! We don't need gasoline!" He would have done anything.My company is based on the belief that business should be conducted as if it were an art. The wine business is our most successful operation. We have what is probably the most-visited winery in Napa Valley. Visitors feel like part of my family. We've turned the camera on ourselves. That's what artists always do. Everything I love has in one way or another become a business for me.
I'm expanding the company right now: I'm taking what I've learned from our wine business and applying that knowledge to the entertainment portions of the company. Once you start thinking about brands, you realize that there is no film company that really counts as a brand. A Fox film, a Warner Bros. film, and a Paramount film are all interchangeable. Branding films is not done today - unlike in the past, when each studio had its own individual personality.
I want our film brand to give people a certain promise of quality, and I want to keep that promise by emphasizing the two most important aspects of the cinema: writing and directing. We're going to focus on making films at a certain budgetary level - films costing $12 million or less. Such films can have all of the production quality, all of the finesse, of the $40 million films that open every Friday.
Being spartan not only greatly reduces overhead but also destroys the hierarchy that affects a company when its people care only about their bonuses. In that kind of company, people start to play the game safe: "Let's make another Mission: Impossible." I don't hire people who play it safe, and I destroy systems that encourage the instinct for security.
Success means living the life of your heart.
People ask me, What would you do if you had Bill Gates's fortune? What if you had $50 billion dollars? My answer is, I would use it to borrow $500 billion, and I would build the city of the future. That city would be a beautiful place for people to live. It would support creativity, education, ritual, and athletic perfection. In the future, what will occupy people won't be work; it'll be study, art, sport, and festival. We ought to start gearing people toward those priorities. If people can see something attractive, then they'll want it. And if they can see it and want it, then they can have it.
Always work on an epic scale.
Henry Ford wasn't just designing cars; in effect, he was designing cities as well. Early in my career, I discovered the art of treating money outrageously. If you spend $1,000 recklessly, it will feel like $10,000. Everything will seem bigger and more exciting. In that spirit, I don't deny myself anything. And I don't say no to anything.
Whenever you get into trouble, keep going.
Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos: You go over budget; you wear people out. In the middle of filming Apocalypse Now, Marty Sheen had a heart attack. For the first time during the making of that picture, I became scared. But we improvised: We used a double and shot a lot of the material from behind. When I couldn't build a satellite network in Belize, I built a resort instead - another double, so to speak. To keep going in a crisis, do a 180-degree turn. Turn the situation halfway around. Don't look for the secure solution. Don't pull back from the passion. Turn it on full force.
While making Apocalypse Now, we had banished screenwriter John Milius from the set. Then we invited him back - to the great relief of the cast and crew, who thought I had gone mad - and he came to see me. About that visit, Milius later said, "I felt like a general going to see Hitler in 1944 to tell him that there was no gasoline." But I turned the situation around. I said to Milius, "This will be the first film to win the Nobel Prize." I got him all excited. When he left that meeting, he was saying, "We're going to win the war! We don't need gasoline!" He would have done anything.
I was given some quotes from (Eliade), who I didn't know very well. And it turned out he was this professor of religious philosophy who used to entertain himself by writing these Borges-like short stories that were kind of like "Twilight Zones." And I read this one story, and every two or three pages something that I didn't expect happened. And it had a love story, and it had all sorts of things that I found intriguing, and all sorts of things that I wanted to learn about, like the origins of language and the nature of human consciousness and the concept of time. And I was getting richer as this was going on -- my companies were successful -- and I thought, well, why don't I just finance this myself and run off and make it?
In the old days, the studios were owned by people who were businessmen, and commercial potential was important, but they were also showmen and they would accept risk. Sam Goldwyn would make "The Best Years of Our Lives," or Harry Cohn would make "From Here to Eternity," and they were proud to have a picture that won an Oscar for quality. So I guess there was a chance to take a risk. It all comes down to risk. What business today will easily accept risk in their product line? You can't make a new toothbrush that might not go over; you can't afford it.
Well, for under $10,000 you can buy everything you need. So now we have to undo the brainwashing of the past 50 years about what a movie can be: that it must be commercial, it must go down easy, it must be structured so that it appeals to the widest possible audience. Even people who read sophisticated books expect that when they go to see a movie, it won't involve any thinking. They're willing to give more to a work of literature. A movie is supposed to be something light that you go to, and you have a good time, and you don't think too much, and you laugh, or you get scared, or you're in awe of the violence, and you go home, and you forget it. And that has to be broken.
I know this is gonna sound funny, but the one young director I really admire is Woody Allen, because he writes 'em, and he makes 'em, and he goes on undaunted and just does it, and every film he makes has something wonderful in it, even if one is great and another is less great. But there's a whole list of talented younger filmmakers -- there's Paul Thomas Anderson and David Russell and Wes Anderson and Tamara Jenkins and Todd Solondz. We are rich with talent.
I mean as, you know, you look at any important director and when they go out… certainly in the commercial film world, they go out with a script that has been evolved in a long process of… well there are scripts being developed for them and then when the floor get rewritten and they put other writers on it, like the best writers available… they’ll take the best one and make that, then the other three will be shopped around for other directors and then they are sure to have the best cast that money can buy, the best photographer that money can buy… so they’re going out pretty protected whereas I was going to go and take myself and go to a place that no one can really get near me and get a cast and crew that may not, today be the best that money can buy, but who knows, it might evolve to be the best that money can buy - and with a script that I wrote myself, but I started off in my younger days wanting to be a playwright in the tradition of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neil.
(How he came about the material for Youth Without Youth)
I had been working for a year that period, when I was working on MEGALOPOLIS, during the so-called 10 years when I wasn’t doing anything, I was a little preoccupied on this script I wrote that I had made into an extremely ambitious project, that it was very difficult even to get feedback on it, given the fact that the sort of notes I would get would be related to the projects’ financial or pop-value.
I didn’t want that kind of narrow movie feedback, because I was trying to write a script that was even more ambitious than that. it’ll grow up after a while… I sent it to a friend that I had known in high school who was a young woman who became a great at the University of Chicago and she read my script and gave me some notes, from a broader literary or intellectual perspective, which is what I wanted. That’s what I was trying to do and in the course of it, she sent me a lot of quotes from Mercea Eliade, who was this professor and thinker from which I learned a lot of stuff. And she had a lot of quotes relative to a couple of the themes I was playing with related to the consciousness of MEGALOPOLIS and I became curious of the story that these quotes had come from and I managed to get it. It wasn’t easy to get. When I read it, I just said “well, here I go. I’ll just retell everybody and I’ll just write this and go off on my own and use my own dough and just make a film.” …instead of being you know, stuck with this MEGALOPOLIS project which after the events of September 11th, 2001, I just didn’t know how to continue with it.
When I was in a position to finance my own movie, my goal was to start shooting the first day without anyone evening knowing I was making the movie and I only got busted really by Variety…who said “tell us about it or we’re going to announce it,” and I mean what, we were about three weeks away from shooting and I said, “well, you know, ok here it is.” But ideally, I’d love to make films without people looking at what I was doing, or second guessing the process. To just go from film to film and be making the next one before anyone caught on to what I was doing.
It’s like, what would happen if a woman had conceived and she had to like half her belly in this glass thing and then everybody going like “well, I don’t know about the nose. It’s not going good… what do you think about that… I don’t think this is working…” There are things you want to do in privacy when you are creating and I think because you’re so secure, because nobody can be secure and you don’t want to hear all of those opinions, because you are trying to hang on to it all.
I think those days were still, in a way, run by either the great showmen of the past, the Jack Warners and Louis B Mayers… It had, at that time, jus recently lost them. But they were real showmen, kind of like Harvey (Weinstein) is these years, you know, he’s vulgar and he’s this showman. And the studios in those days they didn’t know what to do. The business was changing, THE SOUND OF MUSIC and had been the number one picture.
Then Arthur Penn makes BONNIE & CLYDE with Warren Beatty and suddenly were in there talking a big storm saying “let us do this and let us do that,” Then MIDNIGHT COWBOY got made with the great John Schlesinger and so there was suddenly now something to shoot for and Kubrick jumped in and started talking fast and you know, after them, there were accidents, like I made THE GODFATHER. That was supposed to be a regular studio picture, but I sort of took it my own way despite the fact that they didn’t want me to and I only got to make THE CONVERSATION because of the success of THE GODFATHER. So, there was just an opportunity that opened up, because the studios thought that they did not know what to do. Now the studios know what to do, so they make SPIDER-MAN and they want to make PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN and that’s their formula that they have. That’s why they won’t make a drama anymore, they’re only interested in franchises. So that’s the business they are in now, and the big money of this year and this summer is going to come from three movies – SPIDERMAN, and the PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN and SHREK…so they have what they want… they know what to do. In the seventies, they didn’t know what to do.
Sofia has had such success with LOST IN TRANSLATION which gave her the opportunity to turn her MARIE ANTIONETTE idea into something larger, which she wanted to do with that mainly because the style dictated that level of production. Roman hasn’t quite had the success yet, that Sofia has, but you take both of them, and you ask what I taught them, well, I taught them to make personal films. They’re already rich from wine you know, so they don’t need to make much… Sofia is rich and so is Roman.
(About making movies)
It’s what I really love to do and I must say that having total control of a production, because it was dough and having the privacy that I want. And just how many more I can make at my age.
I mean, enthusiasm certainly is an ingredient that gets you up in the morning and gets you to walk up that hill, which normally you’d go “Oh, you know, what do I want to go to that hill for?” But if that’s where the shot is, you kind of do it without thinking about it. I feel very blessed and am very excited and I hope I make a sort of film right after TETRO, because now I feel I have what I’ve always wanted, which is the freedom I’ve always wanted.
I’ve always been interested in just that: the idea that if you make a film or painting or symphony, it’s really something that’s separate from you. You could be a nice person or you could be an awful person, it has no bearing on what you create, but somehow the way we live, our whole value is in this work. I mean, you go to a party and you want to meet a girl, she says, “What do you do?” Our value and our status comes from something that’s so apart from us. I always think of Picasso, who was this wonderful painter but he was mean to his kids and he was mean to his wives. I maybe wouldn’t have liked him had I gotten the chance to meet him. The dilemma of that really struck me in what I saw firsthand in my family.
The Coppola family is thought of having all these people who are either famous or successful. It’s so odd, because then there are some cousins and things who are not yet successful. Nicolas Cage is buying all these yachts and jet planes and doing all this crazy stuff, but his brother, maybe, is struggling. You begin to see that as a question, and I think I wanted to digest it a little bit in this film.
The father in Tetro is a world-famous conductor, so famous that people would know his name and ask him for an autograph. In my family, that’s more like me in a way, because my father struggled. He was a man who wasn’t getting the attention. He wanted to be another George Gershwin, he wanted that. Of course, when he was older he was working on The Godfather and stuff, so he did get a little taste of it. People think, “Oh, your father was a very successful man,” but my father was a frustrated man.
When I was a kid, my father was not even the conductor — he was the assistant conductor of musicals that would go on the road. He would be playing in the pit on the flute, and I would be sitting there watching the show, and then at the end of the show, the conductor would take his bow and leave and my father would get up and conduct the exit music. And of course, he was so serious about it! He would conduct it in such a real way, and the musicians were tired — this was just the music to go out of the theater during! They’d say, “Who does he think he is, Toscanini?” And I, as a kid, was heartbroken because the ushers were just folding up the seats while he conducted, but he saw that as his chance.
My father yearned for that type of recognition, and I guess he got it as an old man, when he was about sixty. But he was always a little egotistical. Swimming your way through our family with all these types and talented people, all the friction that caused, was very interesting for me…Have you ever had a friend or someone you like who got a break, and there was a bad reaction to it, and secretly you were satisfied?
There’s a famous quote: “It’s not enough that I succeed—my best friend must also fail.” Humans are funny. You know, I had a very talented older brother, and I sort of modeled myself on him. It’s not that he was competitive — he was just older, so he was better at everything than I was. And I always thought, “Oh, someday we could be Julian and Aldous Huxley!” In history, there are any number of brothers or sisters who were both acclaimed poets or stuff like that, and I always thought that would be really great.
I think the young brother in Tetro, he wants his brother to be successful. What he’s really doing when he gets in and works on the play is he’s trying to make his brother be the successful older brother so he can copy him. I don’t know how I personally feel about those themes, although I know more than I did before I made the movie, which is why I made this movie. It’s tricky. I have some very successful kids and nephews and in my family they all love each other, so it’s easy to hate each other.
I’m a very interesting figure, because arguably, I got more famous as I got older. I became more like an icon — partly, because people need to have some old guys as icons. We don’t have Ernest Hemingway around anymore, so whoever’s old more or less could qualify! So I realize that on one hand, I’m considered this great old director, and on the other hand, it’s like, “What’s he done lately? He’s washed up, I don’t even care what movies he makes anymore.” But in truth, my films were not successful in their time. I mean, The Godfather was, but people say a lot of the time, “You could never compete with those successes…Apocalypse Now, and this and that.” And I say, “Those movies weren’t successes! They were failures, read the reviews!” So I’m used to films being slammed and then, twenty years later, turning out differently. It’s all vague, nothing is definite. Criticism is often wrong, as we know through history. Carmen, which is now the most popular opera in the repertoire, was a tremendous flop when it premiered. Why did they hate it?
What I look for with critics is more that they’re going to write about something I did and I’m gonna read it and not make those mistakes again, I’m gonna learn something from it. Often, though, they don’t do that: they say, “It’s a muddled mess.” “It’s pretentious.” I can’t learn a lot from someone saying “It’s pretentious.”
I feel pleased to have written something, and then I’m done with it and I want to go on and write something else. Someday, I’ll read what I had on Megalopolis and maybe I’ll think different of it, but it’s also a movie that costs a lot of money to make and there’s not a patron out there. You see what the studios are making right now.
The movies that are coming out now on a Friday night, they’re basically copying what was set up by Star Wars and Jaws, you know? Except now, they have digital effects. They’re just this nonstop roller coaster ride. I went to see Night at the Museum 2 the other night. It was enjoyable. There were a couple of laughs. But basically, now every movie is the same thing. Transformers, and all that…it’s nonstop action, but it’s not even action you never saw before. Even with digital effects, everyone knows that they’re digital so they’re not impressed.
I don’t think Godfather ever should have had more than one movie, actually. It was not a serial, it was a drama. The first movie wrapped up everything. To make more than one Godfather was just greed. Basically, making a movie costs so much money that they want it to be like Coca-Cola: you just make the same thing over and over again to make money, which is what they’re doing now. But Godfather was not really a serial, you know? I mean, how would you spin off Hamlet?
Some things lend themselves to being serialized, but there’s also a law of diminishing returns. I mean, even as demonstrated with Godfather, once it shows you its stuff and has all these things you’ve never seen before, then each time you make it again, it’s gotta be less interesting.
I saw the coming attractions for Sherlock Holmes, and at first I thought, “What the hell is that? Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey Jr.?” And then I watched it, and I thought it was really interesting.
Of all the coming attractions I saw…a lot of those movies have already been made, like Public Enemies with Johnny Depp, that was already a pretty good Dillinger movie with Warren Oates. But I was intrigued by Sherlock Holmes, it seemed to put a new perspective on it that seemed like it could be fun. Robert Downey Jr…he’s really a talented guy.
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NovusVinum.com:
NV:What was your earliest experience with wine?
Francis Ford Coppola: Growing up in Long Island, wine was always at the table and they let us drink it with water, though we preferred it with ginger ale. We called wine at that level rosso and bianco.
NV: When did you begin to make wine?
FFC: 1977. My father, my kids, my wife helped stomp the grapes barefoot. We made about four barrels.
NV: Do you still stomp your grapes with bare feet?
FFC: We do it every year at a harvest party, invite the neighbors, do a special batch that way, and then drink the wine.
NV: What was your segue from the movie business to the wine business?
FFC: It was just after the first Godfather, and I wanted a place that would be a home for my family. I found the Niebaum Estate and bid on it at auction. I was amazed that a big company like Seagrams, or the established winemakers like Mondavi, didn't buy that property. That they let a filmmaker come in and take a jewel of Napa Valley was a miracle!
NV: How did it develop from there?
FFC: Growing up I was always conscious of the fact that many of my friends couldn't afford expensive wine, so we made the Black Label Claret, and then we introduced the Rosso and Bianco, in the $10 range. We produce a family of wine that touches all uses and occasions. The business doubles every year.
NV: What was your most hair-raising moment in the wine business?
FFC: When I put the winery up to secure a loan to make Apocalypse Now.
NV: You almost lost the ranch on that one, didn't you?
FFC: Almost! Godfather III helped me save it. Then, directing Bram Stoker's Dracula allowed me to buy the second half of the estate. We now have 2,000 acres and the vineyards are certified organic, farmed almost as they were at the turn of the century.
NV: All this expansion in your wine and food business sounds like a full-time job. Is it taking precedence over your movie-making?
FFC: Oddly enough, I don't put that much time into the business now. I'm the artistic director and I help sell it ... I've used all this to make a transition in my film career. The wine business is giving me the time to write, so one day I'll be able to make another film that's more my film.
NV: And what's your goal in the wine business?
FFC: To perfect the Rubicon. We know we have the earth and the fruit to make the ultimate wine of its kind.
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The Director's Chair Interviews
Francis Ford Coppola Interview
by Christopher Frayling
BBC Online
You served your apprenticeship originally with Roger Corman working on horror movies. Was that a good apprenticeship?
Oh yeah. Aside from the fact that it was the only apprenticeship possible, the only way to gain that experience. Nowadays there are many people like Roger making so-called exploitation films. But in those days there was nothing other than Roger, and I was lucky to become his personal assistant, and he assigned me many many different jobs, from editing and writing to being a sound recordist, cameraman - you name it, I did it for him. And although the pay was, of course, very very poor, what you gained in experience and confidence more than made up for it.
And then he gave you the chance to write and direct your own picture, Dementia 13
Making that was a great experience for me. It was really my first feature film, and for the very modest means, it looks like a movie. I had the pleasure of working with some wonderful actors - Patrick McGee, now passed away, was a good character...
Would you count it as one of your movies?
Oh, definitely. Dementia is my first movie. Your next film, You're a Big Boy Now, was your masters thesis at UCLA.
How did that come about?
I was very impressed by things like The Knack and all of those films. I loved the Beatles films when I saw them, and was very interested in the idea of using contemporary music in a dramatic film rather than just in a musical film in the Richard Lester style. I wanted to use some of the energy and cinematic style I saw in The Knack in my story of coming of age. It's a story of a young man going to the big city. Did you feel it was autobiographical in any way?
Yeah, I had gone to military school when I was fifteen, and I became very frustrated. I ran away from school and went to New York and wandered around for a good ten days, sleeping where I could and having certain crazy adventures, frightened that my parents were really going to be mad. A lot of the textures in that film were out of experiences that I had then.
Did you feel it was a mature work?
Well, it was obviously not a mature work, but it was certainly well put together, and had some imagination and was a good indication that I had worked with actors before in theatre and could stage real scenes with actors. And it had some funny moments. I don't think it was a world-shattering movie, but it had some good things in it.
What did the examiners say when you submitted it as your thesis?
At that point, I had won several awards at UCLA for my writing and was already known for my brash attempt to leap outside of the school confines and really make a feature film. I wanted to make one very badly, and it was very hard to make a feature film in those days. Everyone was pleased that I had done it, and for a few years it set a dramatic precedent at the school.
You then moved on to a really big studio production, Finian's Rainbow, probably the last of the big Warner Brothers big studio musicals.
Well, there are some interesting things to know about Finian's Rainbow. One was that I had made a private resolve that from that moment on I would only direct original screenplays, original writing of my own. That was really always my desire and my dream, and in my career I have violated it many more times than I have kept to it. Of course I knew all about Finian's Rainbow and all the Broadway musicals of that era. I can still sing every song from all of those musicals, and do whenever asked! What happened was that it was too thrilling to consider being a director of a big Warner Brothers musical, so I violated my rule and accepted what I thought was this job. In fact, the big musical that year was Camelot, and the idea was that we would make our movie on Camelot's sets.
The show dealt with a lot of racial inequality and sharecroppers from the late forties, and it was very hard for me to imagine doing this stuff on phoney sets at Warner Brothers. I requested that we take the company to Kentucky and find a way to do the old forties Finian's Rainbow in a way that would be relevant in this new sixties that was beginning to have race consciousness in a new way. But of course we ended up doing it for not very much money in the Camelot sets in the way the studio wanted to do it.
I was very unhappy during the production because you didn't get to cast, you didn't get to pick the art director, you didn't really get to edit it exactly the way you chose and you didn't get to do the final post production. Out of my frustration one of the highlights of the picture was when this skinny kid, who was more or less my contemporary, became a friend of mine, and that was George Lucas. We conspired to leave the studio stuff and get little truck and put our cameras in it and drive across the country and make movies in a more personal, artistic way. And so I left the Finian's Rainbow experience and went right into The Rain People with George there.
It seems very ahead of its time now, as a road movie that almost makes itself up as it goes along. Did you have a script to start with?
There was quite a specific script. It was the first of two films that I got to write and make as I had hoped all my films would be. One of the criteria was that it would have a serious subject matter, something about people. One of our heroes in drama school was Tennessee Williams, and we thought of serious drama in that way, so Rain People was written a little with his influence. And yet we took it on the road with a very elastic type of crew that could function anywhere, and as we went across the country we were free to go anywhere - we had no pre-picked locations.
Does the central character learn anything as she goes along?
She was a woman trying to leave any and all responsibility, and finding in the form of this pathetic football player who needed her so much that she couldn't shed the responsibility. It was as though the unborn child she carried inside her could talk to her, saying "don't leave me". And at the end she says to the fellow "Come with us & we'll go back and live as a family." I think I was trying to express some ideas about what basically became women's liberation five years later - trying at once to be sensitive to those issues in a woman that would cause her to want her own freedom and yet at the same time trying to collide them with a sense of family.
It was startling to just see a movie in those days about a woman who gets up and leaves her husband. In Spain, where it won an award at San Sebastian, you should have heard these guys going on - "What kind of woman would do thisÉ?!" So on one hand it was ahead of its time, and in my opinion it's still ahead of its time because ultimately we will always come to realise that we have to find a way to create families.
When you were offered The Godfather after The Rain People, it must really have seemed like an offer you couldn't refuse
Well, it's maybe hard for people to realise now, but in those days The Godfather was in the very early period of its success as a book. It wasn't quite the mammoth book that it became after I had already been given the job, and to me it had a lot of sleazy aspects to it that were cut out for the movie. I didn't like it very much for those reasons, and I was very frightened of getting once again co-opted into another low-budget project. There wasn't much money, and in those days they wanted young directors because they were cheap. So I did turn it down once or twice.
How did you respond to criticism that The Godfather was overly sympathetic in its portrayal of this mafia family?
For the purposes of The Godfather, we took this family and we played by the rules. For example, it was very important to know that Vito Corleone would not deal in drugs. He was a good bad guy. On that level of genre movie-making, there are the good bad guys and the bad bad guys, and it's all right if the good bad guys kill the bad bad guys. So when people talked to me at that time about the movie, I thought that it wasn't different from many genre pictures that on that level dealt with characters that were killers.
I've always tried to make my films be beautifully acted, and part of making films be beautifully acted is to give it the illusion that it's been worked out on the set, when in fact everything may not have been. And the big success I had on The Godfather in creating all those on-screen relationships came from one dinner I arranged. It was an Italian dinner with a real table and with all the boys - Marlon at the head of the table, Sonny, Al PacinoÉ..they had never met each other before really, and my sister who played the sister in the film served the spaghetti and the wine. And it was just like playing at being together as a family - that kind of sensual opportunity, sense memory, if you like, gave them a way to relate to each other. How to make Hollywood megastars into a happy family.
I was known as an actors' director from many many years further back than I was even known in film. I think I try to give my actors a certain sense of life that comes by using what the actor can contribute. But very often the text is written, it's just that I have the skill and experience to work with actors whereas many directors don't have any experience of that. They sort of give them a script and they say their lines and they stage it somewhat and that's it.
Where did you get the idea for The Conversation?
It started with a conversation, ironically, with Irving Kershner. We were talking about eavesdropping and bugging, and he told me about these long distance microphones that could be used to overhear what people were saying.
A film like The Conversation was only made because I made The Godfather. Nobody would let me make a film like that - that is not the kind of film that seduces an audience. My film, which I don't consider a film about crime, is not the kind of picture that panders to an audience. It's a difficult film.
Your next big film was Apocalypse Now. What image of the Vietnam war were you trying to put over?
What I most hoped for was to take the audience through an unprecedented experience of war and have them react much as the people who went through the war did - come out being saying "I understand what it is. I don't know if I can say what it is, but I feel I know what it is."
There was an idea from George Lucas and John Milius to do it in 16mm, all very documentary-like, but I would have done it in Cinerama (wide-screen process) if I could. As long as you're going to stage this war, why not get it with all the power and beauty that film is capable of?
And when you left for the Philippines, you didn't have an ending?
We did have an ending. At the point you could almost say "Enter the press." The press in a new dimension that I never understood before. I always thought that they were the people who were reporting on what's going on. I never knew that they were part of the phenomenon itself, and they were a participant trying to make their own careers out of it. With Apocalypse Now begins a long and probably never resolved disrespect that I have for the American entertainment press. They haunted us on that picture - they were constantly coming though not invited, they gave the impression back home that it was sort of "Apple Records" out there without any organisation. In fact you couldn't do what we did without being organised. It was like being an army out in the Philippines, and this notion of the film not having an ending was and wasn't true, to the extent that something that dealt with those ideas and those themes is difficult to end. It was a film about morality, and of course morality doesn't have any place in the middle of a rough war like that.
Did Brando's arrival affect the way you thought of the ending?
Well, as you've probably heard, he arrived extremely overweight, much more so than our agreement with him. He had said he would come at a weight that would let him at some level be believable as a military officer. When he did arrive so overweight, I went to him with suggestions to rewrite the ending so that Colonel Kurtz's sickness, moral sickness as it were, was related to it. I really was in an incredibly tough situation - here I was financing the film myself. After a few days what I finally did was by dressing him only in black and photographing only his face, and by using another actor who was quite tall, try to give him the impression of being almost a mythic giant. And then by using his face - he has a wonderful face and incredible intelligence - to try to have this ending of the movie relate philosophically to certain things that the character had seen. Of course the man was also partly insane.
Can we talk about American Zoetrope and One from the Heart? What were you trying to achieve by starting that studio?
I did sincerely believe that the medium was about to undergo a big transition, that it was about to become electronic. And I thought that possibly, if you had a studio of the future that enabled you take advantage of the great illusion making quality of television, we would be able to make serious writing and shows of all types with dimensions that really you had never done before. I wanted to begin to prepare for a future cinema that would basically be a mega television with studio capability. Something that would enable you to do Lawrence of Arabia right in your own back yard if you wanted to.
One From the Heart was of course the beginning experiment to tune up the studio as a whole. My dream was to do hundreds of movies in those studios, and so it was in a way a sampler. It was a simple story, but a story told entirely in song - I wanted to try a story all by song in this very unreal yet pleasant way.
It feels to me now like an exercise in style - I thought it should have been called One From the Machine. There's not a lot of heart in it.
Well, there's not a lot of machinery in it. It's basically stagecraft and a kind of musical parable about a couple. It was no more complex than that - it was a little musical valentine.
Why did the experiment fail at that time?
It was a big studio and there were a lot of people and a lot of assistants, and they had assistants, and everybody wanted to make normal Hollywood competitive wages. And the failure of One From the Heart to bring that kind of money in, and the ongoing attack by the entertainment press of the films just made it impossible. At any rate, the place was destroyed financially.
You then went on to make two films based on books from the sixties - The Outsiders and Rumblefish. Why did you decide that the time was right for those films, the mid-eighties?
One day I got a letter from some little kids, kids maybe eleven, twelve. Forty of them signed a letter asking that we buy and make into a film this book by Susan Hinton, The Outsiders. They loved that book, and they wanted someone who would make it exactly the way the book was, and not ruin it the way a lot of film companies do. So we did buy the book, and when the crisis had hit at Zoetrope, there were really two ways for me to go. One was to just shed it all and let go and quit the film business, and the other was to try to fight back by being as productive as possible and making one film after another. I like kids very much and I get along with them, and I thought it would be a real tonic to go off somewhere more Rain People style with a bunch of kids, young boys and a girl, and make the story just for those kids. And that movie was very very successful, it made a lot of money and it saved this company.
Which brings us around to The Cotton Club...
For me, the most interesting part of The Cotton Club was the theme of the black and white, in so far as the club had the most talented black performers of its day and yet it was segregated and black people couldn't go see the show. It was the hoi polloi, the real high society people who went and I wanted to try something with two worlds, a black world and a white world interweaving between each other and of course meeting at the Cotton Club with the numbers and the shows. There was a kind of Wild West temperament in New York in those days, the twenties, and specifically the gangsters were German-American gangsters, and also of Jewish and Irish descent and historically, they were about to be part of turning over the power to the Italian gangsters in the thirties.
How interested were you in historical accuracy?
I have worked on several films that have used historical information, learning from the master, Mario Puzo. His technique generally is to take from the press archives and records and court records the real facts of these people, but to fudge a little sometimes in the area of combining two characters into one or sometimes moving things that were really happening in 1936 to 1934. I heard people who had actually been there saying "Is that Lulubellle? That's not her! Oh, that didn't happen that way!" But I feel this really is the tenor of the Cotton Club. Maybe it was a little sleazier than I portrayed it, maybe certain people were treated a little more poorly than I showed it, but the themes that are there - of servitude and a desire to use your talent to break out of that servitude into some sort of white world - certainly, that was the truth.
What about the future?
Well, I have great concern and personal feeling about the fact that I have not been able to pursue being a writer and writing original dramatic material. Now that the film industry in our country has been pretty much entirely won over by the interests of the TV mind and the profit syndrome, my dream to write original material and to make it in an inexpensive, and therefore possible, way, got eclipsed.
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Francis Ford Coppola |
