Why Francis Ford Coppola spent decades distancing himself from ‘The Godfather Part III’
Movie trilogies are notoriously hard to pull off. The Matrix started with a bang only to end with a confounding, CGI-laden whimper and then sputter back to life with a fourth instalment. The Lord of the Rings is nearly perfect, except that the third movie refuses to end. And it’s somehow not surprising that perhaps the greatest trilogy of all time, Sergio Leone’s Dollars movies, wasn’t actually meant to be a trilogy at all.
If you asked a film buff which trilogies are close to perfect, they might well mention Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, which began with one of the greatest movies ever made and ended with a slightly above-average one that feels pretty redundant given the satisfying conclusion of The Godfather Part II. Still, compared to other trilogies that either cratered after their first instalment or morphed into a never-ending franchise, it’s an innocuous conclusion to a landmark pair of movies that could never really be improved upon.
For Coppola, Part III was a longstanding source of discomfort. The Apocalypse Now director has based his career on wild flurries of ambition, disastrous productions, rapturous successes, and financial ruin. Through it all, his commitment to filmmaking has remained unassailable, the constant that holds his career together even when he has to sell off significant portions of his personal assets to keep his vision alive.
The Godfather Part III came during a downturn in his personal and professional life, and it’s likely that if it wasn’t for these circumstances, it never would have happened. Having recently lost his 22-year-old son in a boating accident and coming as close to destitute as an Oscar-winning mogul can be after the financially catastrophic release of his 1981 musical One From the Heart, Coppola leapt at the opportunity to cash in on another Godfather movie. From the beginning, however, he and the studio had major creative differences. Coppola and Mario Puzo, his screenwriting collaborator and the author of the original novel, wanted it to be a psychological character study of Michael Corleone, not a straightforward continuation of the second film.
“Mario and I had always wanted to call the film The Death of Michael Corleone rather than a numbered sequel, and it bugged me that we hadn’t been allowed,” Coppola revealed in 2020. “The point of the movie was to illuminate our original story, rather than continue it.”
Paramount was more interested in repeating the formula of a young member of the Corleone family forging his blood-soaked path to the head of the Family, this time in the form of Andy Garcia’s Vincent Corleone. The result is a mismatch of these competing visions, a tonally and narratively convoluted film that nevertheless bears the visual style of the previous two instalments.
Coppola was resigned to the conflict and seemed to have preferred an uneven movie with elements of his vision rather than a cohesive movie devoid of it. When talking about his refusal to deviate from Michael Corleone’s story, he said, “What I was really doing was saying the picture was going to resist the easiest route another Godfather movie could have taken. I was never going to be a consistently successful director because I was never willing to repeat myself.”
After decades of nagging regret about the movie, Coppola did what he had already done on several of his previous films – he re-edited it. The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone was released in 2020 and features a different opening scene (a deal between Michael Corleone and the head of the Vatican Bank), a different final shot, different music cues, and a handful of different shot choices. It’s also three minutes shorter, but with a running time of more than two and a half hours, it hardly counts.
Although some reviewers pointed out that the Coda cut was basically the same as the original, Coppola seemed satisfied with the results and was finally able to put his full attention toward a film that had been gestating for three decades, Megalopolis. For better or for worse.
