H
e was one of the defining voices of the auteur ’70s, having made some of the greatest and most ambitious films ever attempted; The Godfather trilogy,
It was 40 years ago that you emerged from the jungle with a work-in-progress print of Apocalypse Now, and you won the Palme d’Or, sharing the prize with The Tin Drum. What did that mean to you?
Apocalypse Now and The Conversation.
Well, it was a little unusual in that we entered the
His penchant for risking himself
film at Cannes before it was really quite finished. We
personally to make those films, as well as the fortunes he won and lost along the way, makes him the quintessential
disruptor’s disruptor. Now, Francis Ford Coppola is back at it. Days before he turned 80—when he would be fêted by family and friends like George Lucas and Martin Scorsese on the picturesque grounds of the Inglenook winery in Rutherford, CA that made him impossibly wealthy—a dramatically slimmeddown Coppola has found his second wind. With news that will hit the palate of cinephiles like one of his fine Cabernets, Coppola is again ready to make big-scale films.
called it a work-in-progress. Why would you put a movie you hadn’t completed at such a high-profile global film festival? The reason for that very unusual situation was, there was so much very negative publicity coming out every day about the problems we were having, and [people were saying] that the film might never be released. In fact, even in Cannes there were articles in the local press—or maybe it was a British publication—that totally debunked the idea that the film would ever be finished, and that the problems were so extraordinary it wouldn’t cut together.
Actually, what he’s planning comes closer to the conclusion of The Godfather, when Michael Corleone settled scores with the heads of the rival five mob families and plotted the family’s future in Las Vegas. Coppola is not only looking forward. He’s also settling scores by recutting past films that didn’t sit right with him at the time. Coppola has recut versions of two films that didn’t quite please him, with another on the way. A most expansive version of the Harlem-set period epic The Cotton Club is coming in the fall, as is his third and final version of the classic Apocalypse Now, the Vietnam War exploration inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that exhausted and almost financially ruined Coppola the first time around. And while Coppola need not touch the first two of his collaborations with the late author Mario Puzo—The Godfather and The Godfather Part II—the third film in that trilogy never measured up, in the director's mind, to that high bar. He aims to remedy that, too. Meanwhile, he has resurrected, is casting and putting together the financing of his decades-long obsession with the epic Megalopolis—a drama about an attempt to create utopia in a city like New York. Here, he explains why the time is ripe to return to Godfather III and these other films, what it was about his vineyard home that turned his chance viewing into a must-have
THE FAMILY BUSINESS
Coppola with, from left, son Roman, wife Eleanor, and daughter Sofia, all filmmakers.
I was put in a position where I adopted the very strange idea of just bringing it and showing it, to try to stop this publicity which had been going on for over a year. We made the film in a far off, distant place, in the Philippines. There were many news stories coming out to do with the incredibly extreme weather and hurricanes.
property, and how Megalopolis might mark the culmination
And your star, Martin Sheen, suffered a heart
of the career of one of America’s most important directors.
attack mid-shoot... That, and other illnesses. I basically was at my wits’ end on how to stop this prejudgment. I came up with the very crazy idea of just bringing the film and showing it. To do so, we had to enter as an unfinished film. The film was in better shape than anyone knew, including me. So this gambit, if you could call it that, not only did it work but we won the
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D E A D L I N E .C O M / AWA R D S L I N E