Jacques Tati: the “penniless” French auteur Francis Ford Coppola identifies with the most
Francis Ford Coppola helped reshape cinema in the 1970s, and even though his filmmaking hasn’t had quite the consistency of Martin Scorsese’s, there is no denying that his influence on future directors is at least as profound.
The Godfather alone changed the game: Its editing, pacing, cinematography, and Shakespearean approach to the gangster genre transformed how films were made, and it created a blueprint for future generations of filmmakers.
However, Coppola’s career has had spectacular lows as well as highs. He’s won five Oscars but also had to file for bankruptcy after putting all of his money into a film that crashed and burned at the box office. Over the years, he has repeatedly poured his personal wealth into projects, from One from the Heart to Megalopolis. Through it all, he maintained his unwavering passion for filmmaking, even when the box office returns suggested that the love wasn’t mutual.
It’s no surprise that Coppola has sought solace in the legacies of directors who walked a similar path. During a conversation with Criterion in which the Apocalypse Now auteur went through the distributor’s legendary closet of classic films, he singled out one particular movie from one particular director and made it clear why he loves it so much.
“Jacques Tati was a wonderful filmmaker who believed in a film he wanted to make and used his entire fortune because the financing system of the time wouldn’t finance it,” Coppola said. “And it came out, and it was a big flop, and he died sort of penniless, not realising that this film he put everything up for, which was called Playtime, was going to be considered today the masterpiece that we consider it.”
Coppola said this about six months after the disastrous release of Megalopolis. He had put at least $120million of his own wealth into the film after spending 40 years developing it. It was an ambitious, experimental venture featuring futuristic sets and grandiose dialogue, and it flopped hard, barely scraping together $14million at the box office.
“I think [Tati is] the only filmmaker, other than present company, who took a big hunk of what wealth he had earned in his life and put it up to make a film that nobody else would make,” Coppola continued, adding, “And usually, when you do that, usually it withstands the test of time.”
This might sound like wishful thinking, but Coppola did have a point. Playtime was even more ambitious and experimental than Megalopolis. Released in 1967, Tati’s film is a political satire about the modernisation of Paris. The director created his sprawling set, an extreme version of the stark, lifeless architecture that was springing up around the city.
Tati was a master of visual gags and used dialogue more as background noise than anything else. When it was released, it fared poorly at the box office, which wasn’t helped by the director’s defensiveness and outright hostility in the press. He made a handful of films afterwards, but it wasn’t until after his death in 1982 that Playtime would be hailed as a masterpiece.
Although some critics have defended Coppola’s Megalopolis, it seems unlikely that it will enjoy the same fate, no matter how firmly the director believes it will. Ambitious and experimental, though it may be, its characters and dialogue, in particular, are surprisingly two-dimensional and lifeless rather than layered and cryptic. Still, maybe Coppola is right, and we’ll all be listening to Brady Corbet sing the film’s praises in the Criterion closet 60 years from now.
