The director who made “eight masterpieces”, according to Francis Ford Coppola
Not every director is either talented or fortunate enough to helm a movie that goes down in the history books as a masterpiece of cinema, but the very best have a habit of doing it more than once, and Francis Ford Coppola is very much among that number.
With five Academy Award wins split across four different categories and a reputation as one of the greatest to ever pick up a megaphone, the multi-talented filmmaker had secured his status before the 1970s had even drawn to a close.
Coppola has directed at least three inarguable masterpieces in The Godfather, its sequel The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now, and it may well be more depending on how any given cinephile feels about The Conversation, and Bram Stroker’s Dracula might be worth a shout for those who think lavish gothic fantasy is worthy of being enshrined in the all-timer conversation.
That puts him in very rarefied air as somebody with multiple masterpieces under their filmic belt, and yet it remains a drop in the ocean compared to the titan he believes made almost three times as many. Ask any of the industry’s most notable directors to name some of the best to ever do it, and if the name Akira Kurosawa doesn’t come up, then they’re wrong.
One of the most important and influential figures in the history of celluloid, the Japanese legend threw out masterpiece after masterpiece like it was nobody’s business, of which Coppola was all too aware. “One thing that distinguishes Akira Kurosawa is that he didn’t just make a masterpiece or two masterpieces,” he said. “He made eight masterpieces.”
The Megalopolis architect named loose Hamlet interpretation and top-tier mystery thriller The Bad Sleep Well as one of his personal favourites alongside the seminal samurai epic Yojimbo, but such is the mastery of Kurosawa, it’s hardly straightforward selecting a measly six further contenders from his filmography that fit the bill.
Seven Samurai, High and Low, Ikiru, Ran, Throne of Blood, Red Beard, Rashomon, and The Hidden Fortress are just some of his works that reasonably fit the bill, so if anything, Coppola is underselling it a little bit by suggesting Kurosawa made eight masterpieces and no more.
The mutual respect between the pair was reciprocated, too, with Kurosawa naming The Godfather as one of his own favourites, and they even shared the screen together under rather bizarre circumstances when the two icons of the moving image starred in a series of commercials advertising Suntory whiskey.
Presumably, there would have been quite the love-in between them when cameras weren’t rolling, which is completely understandable when each recognised the other as one of cinema’s leading lights, and Coppola is still going strong to this day.
