Francis Ford Coppola details his ideal death
As one of the leading figures in the ‘New Hollywood’ filmmaking epoch of the 1960s and ’70s, Francis Ford Coppola joined the likes of Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg in a quest to revive the American film industry to the glory of its ‘Golden Age’. After winning the ‘Best Original Screenplay’ Academy Award for his writing contributions to Franklin J. Schaffner’s Patton, Coppola launched into a decade of seminal excellence that crowned him among the finest auteurs of all time.
Coppola’s 1970s filmography boasted a run of all-time classics, including the first two instalments of the seminal Godfather trilogy, 1974’s The Conversation and 1979’s Vietnam war essential, Apocalypse Now. Over this prolific period in his career, Coppola worked with notable actors like Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Harrison Ford, Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall and helped to revolutionise filmmaking.
After his potent spell of the ‘70s, Coppola’s career entered a commercial downturn. In a 2003 interview with Today, the filmmaker cited his tangential miscalculation of 1982, One from the Heart, as a central factor in his nadir. As a romantic comedy, the movie was a far cry from the mobster and wartime violence audiences had grown to expect from Coppola. However, the filmmaker maintains that he had initially intended the project as a stage production.
“I should have said, ‘Fellas, I love you, but if you don’t want to do it as a live production, I have to tell you that I’m gonna get people who do.’” The project was one of Coppola’s deepest regrets, as it gutted him financially and corroded his status.
“I was anxious to look into another area of my background, which was as someone who directed musicals in college,” Coppola reflected. “Sometimes you can fail as easily by having your ambition too great as to have it be too small. I think I’ve done that many times in my life. I go for the whole shining dream and then very often fall short of it because you sort of have to.”
“So often, I make my decisions not on the basis of total logic but sort of a kind of intuition,” he continued. “Now, as I’m older, I realise one thing that makes me different is that I sort of go to the finished vision, finished — then back up and figure out how to do it. Like building castles in the air but then putting the foundation afterward.”
Coppola also regrets that the ‘New Hollywood’ generation – to which he was party – failed to leave the film industry in a prime position for the future. “My generation, me and my colleagues, didn’t leave the film industry in a better place for the young people coming now,” he told Today. “It was terrible then, but it’s worse now.”
Coppola attributes much of this failure to the financial greed rife in Hollywood, which often values quick cash over artistic merit. He recalled working with notable Hollywood magnates such as Jack Warner, Daryl Zanuck and Sam Goldwyn, “who were certainly concerned about business, but they were showmen.”
“They were more like Harvey Weinstein, in truth,” he continued. “Harvey Weinstein is, you know, a controversial figure. But you gotta say that besides the fact that he’s bright, and he’s vulgar — but they were vulgar — he loves movies. He loves movies. But I don’t know that Rupert Murdoch loves movies or that Viacom [owner of Paramount] loves movies. Any of them! They don’t. They’re building empires.”
In a poignant conclusion, Coppola took issue with the devaluing obsession with sequels and remakes in modern cinema. “Look, I’ve been blessed by the film business. I’m not saying this with any rancour,” he asserted. “My idea of the perfect studio was: You make one film that has a real shot to make a lot of money, and then you make another one that has no shot to make a lot of money, but one protects the other. That’s why you have them both. You have the vitality of new areas of experimentation, and you have the security — you have a horror film made each year or something. But they don’t do that. Now they just want to make money.”
Coppola is still active today, aged 83, and has recently announced a wrap on production for his highly anticipated forthcoming movie, Megalopolis. Although the Today interview was conducted two decades ago, the filmmaker employed a particularly reflective tone.
Elsewhere in the interview, in a morbid escalation of this tone, Coppola discussed his vision of a “happy death” while pondering his career regrets. “To me, a happy death is the end of a happy life, when you sit there, wherever you are when you’re about to die and you say, ‘I got to have a nice wife and beautiful children … and I got to be in the wine business, and I got to be in the movie business, and I got to see my father work with me,’ and by the time you’re thinking of all these things, you die — you don’t even notice it,” Coppola sagely illustrated.
