Francis Ford Coppola

• 1. Introduction

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  Francis Ford Coppola illegally hired a grave robber to supply real human corpses as props, and oversaw the ritualistic killing of a water buffalo. This was the production of Apocalypse Now, a film so plagued by delays it earned the mocking nickname Apocalypse When? The man behind it was born on the 7th of April 1939, in Detroit, Michigan. He would win five Academy Awards and two Palmes d'Or, joining a small group of only ten filmmakers to take that Cannes prize twice. But before any of that, he edited erotic films and dubbed a Soviet science fiction picture into a monster movie. How does a bedridden boy who built puppet theaters become one of the most influential filmmakers in cinema? What did it cost him to make the films that revolutionized the gangster genre? And why, after all that acclaim, did he walk away to make wine?

• 2. The Bedridden Boy

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  Polio kept young Coppola bedridden for long stretches of his childhood, and he filled the time with homemade puppet theater. His middle name, Ford, came from a double connection to Henry Ford. He was born at Henry Ford Hospital, and his father Carmine worked as an arranger for The Ford Sunday Evening Hour, a concert radio series sponsored by the Ford Motor Company. At age 15, reading A Streetcar Named Desire sparked his interest in theater. He shot 8 mm features edited from home movies, with titles like The Rich Millionaire and The Lost Wallet. A mediocre student, his fascination with technology earned him the childhood nickname Science. He trained first for a career in music, becoming proficient on the tuba and winning a music scholarship to the New York Military Academy. In all, Coppola attended 23 schools before graduating from Great Neck North High School. At Hofstra University, which he entered in 1955 as a theater arts major, he ran the drama group and the musical comedy club, merging them into The Spectrum Players. The group staged a new production every week. He won three D. H. Lawrence Awards and studied under professor Dorothy Arzner, whose encouragement he later called pivotal to his career.

• 3. Skin Flicks And Cult Horror

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  In the early 1960s, Coppola made $10 per week and went looking for extra money in the same place his film-school colleagues did: erotic productions known as nudie-cuties. At 21, he wrote The Peeper, a short comedy about a voyeur, and a producer handed him $3,000 to shoot it. He cast a Playboy Bunny named Marli Renfro as the model. When the 12-minute short proved too cartoonish for adult theaters, he was paid $500 to splice it together with another shelved erotic western, and the result became Tonight for Sure in 1962. He performed similar surgery on a German film and a Soviet science fiction picture, the latter reborn as the monster movie Battle Beyond the Sun. Roger Corman, impressed by his perseverance, hired him for a string of jobs. While in Ireland for The Young Racers, Corman urged Coppola to spend the leftover funds on a cheap horror film. Coppola wrote a draft in one night, borrowing from Hitchcock's Psycho. On a budget of $40,000 he shot Dementia 13 over nine days, his first feature, which became a cult favorite among horror buffs. On that set he met the woman he would marry, Eleanor Jessie Neil. By 1969, with equipment arriving and no mansion yet found, his new studio Zoetrope settled into a warehouse in San Francisco on Folsom Street.

• 4. A Metaphor For Capitalism

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  Marlon Brando will never appear in this motion picture, the president of Paramount told Coppola. The studio wanted Ernest Borgnine or Danny Thomas to play Vito Corleone; Coppola won the part for Brando only after the actor agreed to a screen test, a reduced fee, and a bond against causing delays. Coppola had not been Paramount's first choice either. Sergio Leone declined the job, and Robert Evans wanted an Italian American director who would work cheaply. Coppola initially turned the work down, finding Mario Puzo's novel sleazy and calling it pretty cheap stuff. His studio American Zoetrope owed Warner Bros. over $400,000, and that debt changed his mind. Announced as director on the 28th of September 1970, he took $125,000 and six percent of the gross rentals. He decided the story should be a family saga and a metaphor for capitalism in America. The shoot was a nightmare; he felt always on the verge of being fired, and his third child was born during it. The Godfather set a box office record. Pauline Kael praised its broad historical perspective, noting the span ran only from 1945 to the mid-fifties. Brando won Best Actor and refused the award. The film won Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, though Coppola lost Best Director to Bob Fosse for Cabaret. On the American Film Institute's 1997 list of the 100 greatest movies, it ranked third, behind Citizen Kane and Casablanca.

• 5. Two Films, One Title

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  You have two films, George Lucas told Coppola after a five-hour preview. Take one away, it doesn't work. The film was The Godfather Part II, both prequel and sequel, contrasting the young Vito played by Robert De Niro with the falling Michael played by Al Pacino. Coppola claims it was the first major motion picture to use Part II in its title, an idea he drew from Sergei Eisenstein's two-part Ivan the Terrible. Paramount objected, fearing audiences would see no reason to watch an addition to a film they had already seen. Its success instead began the Hollywood tradition of numbered sequels. Many critics judged it superior to the first. Kael wrote that it enlarges the scope and deepens the meaning of the original, spanning almost seventy years where the first covered 1945 to the mid-fifties. The film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won six, including Best Picture and Best Director. De Niro won Best Supporting Actor, making him and Brando the first actors to win Oscars for the same character. Between the two Godfathers came The Conversation, influenced by Antonioni's Blowup and starring Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, the best bugger on the West Coast. Released amid the Watergate scandal, it featured the same wire-tapping equipment used by the Nixon administration, a coincidence Coppola insisted was real since the script dated to the mid-1960s. It won him his first Palme d'Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival.

• 6. Too Much Money, Too Much Equipment

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  We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment and little by little, we went insane. That was Coppola on Apocalypse Now, his adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with Martin Sheen as Willard journeying upriver to kill the rogue Kurtz, played by Brando. The Philippine production endured typhoons, the firing of Harvey Keitel, and Sheen's heart attack. Brando arrived overweight and unprepared. Military extras and supplied helicopters left mid-scene to fight rebels. At the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, Coppola declared, My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam. It shared the Palme d'Or with Volker Schlondorff's The Tin Drum and won Oscars for Best Cinematography and Best Sound. Roger Ebert called the helicopter assault led by Robert Duvall the best movie battle scene ever filmed, set to Wagner's music. His wife Eleanor, present throughout, shot behind-the-scenes footage later used in the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. The film marked the end of his golden phase. His next picture, the musical fantasy One from the Heart, grossed only $636,796 against a $26-million budget, forcing him to sell the 23-acre Zoetrope Studio in 1983 and spend the decade paying off debts.

• 7. Vintner And Family

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  In 1975, using proceeds from The Godfather, Coppola bought the former home and vineyard of Gustave Niebaum in Rutherford, California. The first vintage came in 1977, made with his father, wife, and children stomping grapes barefoot, a harvest tradition the family still keeps. On the 11th of April 2011, he acquired the Inglenook trademark, paying more for the name, he said, than he had for the entire estate. His winery between Healdsburg and Geyserville displays his Oscars beside Vito Corleone's desk and a restored 1948 Tucker Sedan. The family runs deep in film. His father Carmine, a flautist with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, scored several of his films, including the song Stay Gold for The Outsiders, based on a Robert Frost poem and performed by Stevie Wonder. His sister Talia Shire is an actress, his daughter Sofia a director, his son Roman a screenwriter. His nephews Jason Schwartzman and Nicolas Cage are actors. Tragedy struck during the production of Gardens of Stone, when his eldest son Gian-Carlo died in 1986 at age 22 in a speedboating accident. Coppola also had an affair with Melissa Mathison, who later wrote E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, beginning when she was his assistant on The Godfather Part II. Eleanor Coppola died on the 12th of April 2024, at the age of 87.

• 8. Leaving The Factory

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  That's why I ended my career, Coppola said in 2015. I decided I didn't want to make what you could call factory movies anymore. He had grown dissatisfied with a film industry that, in his words, went into the superhero business with budgets so big they planned films in series of two or three parts. After The Rainmaker in 1997, he said he stopped working as a professional director and began behaving more like a student, self-financing very small, low-budget movies to learn what making films really was. He returned to directing in 2007 with Youth Without Youth, made for about $19 million but managing only $2,624,759 at the box office. Tetro followed in 2009, set in Argentina, then Twixt in 2011. His longtime ambition arrived as Megalopolis, a story about the reconstruction of New York City after a mega-disaster, premiering in competition at the 77th Cannes Film Festival. Coppola told Rolling Stone in 2024 that he would not retire, pointing instead to two projects. One is an adaptation of The Glimpses of the Moon with strong dance and musical elements. The other is Distant Vision, a live cinema project he has worked on since 2015, telling the story of three generations of an Italian American family during the invention of television.