The director Francis Ford Coppola tried to nominate for the Nobel Prize: “We don’t accept suggestions”
Generally speaking, people from within the film industry don’t tend to become Nobel Prize winners, no matter how hard a certain star of Home Alone 2, The Little Rascals, and Zoolander tries to convince the committee that they’re worthy of the honour.
Roger Ebert won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, though, which came in handy for the vaunted critic more than a quarter of a century later when he used those credentials to inform Rob Schneider, of all people, that he was eminently qualified to tell Adam Sandler’s hanger-on that his movies were, by and large, awful.
There have been exceptions, but not many. Peter Handke has directed several films and penned a handful of screenplays, but won the Nobel Prize in 2019 for his literary work. Similarly, László Krasznahorkai has written half a dozen scripts, but he also claimed the literary gong in 2025, while George Bernard Shaw won an Academy Award for writing 1938’s Pygmalion, 13 years after he too scooped the literary honours.
Francis Ford Coppola couldn’t have cared less about the criteria, and was so adamant that one of his favourite directors, and one of cinema’s most influential and imitated auteurs, deserved to be recognised for the sheer emotional and thematic heft of their scripts that they deserved to have a Nobel Prize of their own.
The obvious flaw in the filmmaker’s master plan, which he didn’t understand at the time, was that’s not how it works. If the accolade could be handed out based on write-in submissions, then you can bet your life that Donald Trump would have spammed the shit out of the proceedings to guarantee victory, so thank fuck that’s not how these things are decided.
Technically, the Nobel Prize is decided by nomination, but those nominations are by invitation and restricted to experts in their respective fields. Even though he’s the director of The Godfather, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, and more, Coppola didn’t fit the bill to make his dream a reality.
Who was he so enthralled by that he felt compelled to pen an unprompted submission to the Nobel Prize committee, urging them to give someone the flowers he felt they were richly deserved? The legendary figure he’s adamant has helmed more masterpieces than any other director in cinema history; Akira Kurosawa.
“I once wrote a letter to the Nobel committee suggesting that Akira Kurosawa should be given the Nobel Prize for literature,” Coppola confirmed during a 2003 Q&A at the Museum of the Moving Image after a screening of the film that nearly ruined him, One from the Heart. “And they wrote a letter back, saying, ‘We don’t accept suggestions.'”
It was a doomed errand, but you can’t knock him for trying. There’s being a fan of a director, and then there’s being such a fan that you take it upon yourself to make a Nobel Prize submission. If it had to be anyone, at least it was Kurosawa, and we can only hope that nobody’s done the same thing for Uwe Boll.
