Francis Ford Coppola on Art, Music and the Future of Cinema
The Talks has a nice convo with Francis Ford Coppola – and in reading this it hit me what a drag it must be to release movies now. We bloggers and critics have become, I think, a huge part of the problem. Just saying that the guy who made arguably the three greatest films ever made is now being written off almost completely. It’s a bizarre state of things:
What is the reason for this disinterest in art?
It happened a long time ago. When modern cinema and storytelling really became sophisticated in the silent era in Berlin and these Germans were learning how to tell a story with images, sound came in and stopped everything and movies became plays. Murnau once said sound was inevitable but that it came too soon because we were really learning how to make cinema. He died very young but he made many beautiful films.
What is your definition of success if you don’t care much about the commercial aspect of the film business anymore?
When you make a dinner and you invite ten people over and they eat the dinner, you want them to say, “Oh, what a nice dinner.” You don’t want them to say, “I hated the dinner, it was awful.” But in the movie business you can work a year and they say, “That’s stupid, it’s a mess, it’s horrible.” You would be heart broken if they reacted to your dinner that way. So you want people to enjoy it and you want to feel good that you were able to do it, but success is very illusory and it depends who’s interpreting it. Money is, of course, tangible which is why everybody wants it. I have the luck that I made a lot of money.
Enough to stay absolutely calm if your work fails at the box office?
I said to my wife once, “We own so much wine that we could drink day and night and when we die there will still be enough for a hundred years.” And money is like that, too. I could probably make a movie every year and a half and lose it. I could do that for a while.
And I love this bit:
What did you learn by doing Apocalypse Now?
That a guy, having been blessed with the success of Godfather at 32 years old, could go off and make a film about Vietnam and no one would touch it – no studio would help him and none of his actors would join him – and then put up his own money, make a movie, and then be damned by Variety for having done this. It’s absurd. And then everyone applauds Superman – a man in a silly suit flying around. So that’s Apocalypse Now, that’s what it was about. That’s what I learned, that we live in a world of incredible contradictions that everyone accepts. Look at the movie industry: what is allowed to be made into a movie? It’s only a certain kind of thing. When someone goes and tries to make a movie that is personal and different there is barely any interest.
Today you seem to be very calm but sources say that you were much different years ago. Apparently after The Godfather and throughout the shooting of Apocalypse Now you became an eccentric version of Don Corleone yourself.
I was trained as a young person in theater and theater is very much like a family. You go to rehearsal and coffee after the rehearsal, you fall in love with the girl who’s there. It’s nice; you are all together and have lots of affection for the other members of the troupe. When I went to cinema school everyone was alone, they were editing, it was much more separate. So when I was successful after The Godfather I was much more like a theater and I had my own crazy friends like George Lucas or Martin Scorsese. I was very admired. Maybe it came from that.
13 Comments
Leave a Comment
Tracker Pages
Recently on AD
Follow Us!
Tags
Gallery
1970′s: Coppola, Scorsese, Allen, Spielberg and Altman. What a decade for American film!
The man is a genius — even if he never had directed another film after Apocalypse Now (1979) he still would have been the master who gave us The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), in my opinion the finest American film ever made and greatest sequel, his low budget The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979). That they have written him off or attemtp to do so is the sorry state of cinema at this moment — God I miss the seventies, when the films were vital, when films were allowed to build an audience, or the attention to box office was minimal — it was a thrilling to time to be a movie junkie — ironic is it not that the very best films of today have such a profound seventies influence??
when you look at the films made in the 70′s it seems that they could do anything,any kind of the movie could have been made.today film makers are so limited.and the funny thing is that those people that were making movies back then are those old people that vote for Academy Awards now.they seem much more conservative.
I really hope he has one more great movie in him.
If there is disinterest in Coppola it’s because all the studios want to make is fanboy crap. Cinema, by and large, died when Star Wars was born.
I keep getting tempted to blind buy The Conversation on bluray because it’s been on sale for $8. Just how good is it? PS, I love Apocalypse Now but am not a big fan of The Godfather series. Is that weird?
Oh please Byron.
He has complete control over his films now, and they’re not good. So explain that?
He needs to stop using digital, or get a better cinematographer.
Not sure if many of those movies could be made today the same way they were made in the ’70′s. I recently watched ‘The Graduate’ for the first time on a big screen, and realized it is a total ‘art film’ (by modern standards). If it were released today it would play in 150 theaters nationwide max, mainly in arthouse theaters–Cinema Village in NYC or The Music Box in Chicago–really, 500 Days Of Summer is 10 times more commercial than The Graduate. Would a big budget film like The Godfather even be made in the present American market?
If you are interested in 1970′s cinema I highly recommend Peter Biskind’s ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls’.
In my humble opinion, no greater films have been made than The Godfather’s I and II.
Oh please, Rashad. There isn’t anyone of stature in the business who doesn’t believe that the infatilization of the movies began with Star Wars. That one film changed Hollywood – and not for the better. It’s incredible what hoops serious filmmakers such as Coppola have to jump through to get a serious, adult film made these days.
And yet Coppola has complete autonomy over his films, and they aren’t as good as the studio controlled films. Why?
Great movies come out all the time. Who gives a shit where they come from? “Cinema” is more alive than ever.
^Agreed
He makes crap now. The guy went from making a few of the most epic, groundbreaking films in cinema history to these faux-artistic experiments that have failed again and again.
@Dane – The Conversation is one of those movies that you will either really like or really hate. It’s hard to say if you’d like it, but I can tell you that it was one of the most haunting movies I’ve ever seen. It stayed with me for days after I watched it. It’s basically like watching a man slowly drive himself to the point of insanity for an hour and a half, all because he was just doing his job – a job he loved and was very good at.
For $8, you really can’t miss. Coppola will always be a cinematic genius in my book, no matter how many films he continues to make that don’t live up to his past work.