Has Francis Ford Coppola experienced his career in reverse?
Francis Ford Coppola directed The Godfather when he was just 30 years old. As if that wasn’t astounding enough, he rattled off The Conversation, The Godfather: Part II, and Apocalypse Now before hitting 40. For most directors, this run of stone-cold classics at such a young age would be the vindication of the talent they always believed they possessed. Fascinatingly, though, Coppola wound up feeling like he’d hit the pinnacle of mainstream Hollywood success too early and eventually needed to reverse his career.
In 2007, Coppola released Youth Without Youth – his first picture since 1997’s The Rainmaker. A fantasy drama with a small $1million budget, it was a far cry from a $40m John Grisham adaptation starring a host of Hollywood A-listers. However, it wasn’t like Coppola had been reduced to working on low-budget indies against his will – he simply wanted to re-do his early career.
The legendary director told DGA Quarterly Magazine: “I feel as though I’ve made a deliberate choice to reapproach filmmaking with the same attitudes and ignorance that I had as a young person. Obviously, I’m not a kid, but we all have a kid in us, and I approached this movie with the willingness to do whatever came into my mind.”
Coppola had been inspired by his daughter Sofia’s film Lost in Translation, which she made outside the confines of a major Hollywood studio. He explained: “I just realised that maybe I should go off on my own and make a movie. I could finance myself and not tell anyone about it and not show anyone the script, not announce it, not anything. And ultimately, that’s what I did.”
He admitted, “That gave me a new life, really. In a sense, I was reinvigorated, which is exactly what Youth Without Youth is about.”
In truth, Coppola had always struggled with his career exploding into the stratosphere at a young age – because it put him at the top of the Hollywood mountain and dictated the kinds of films he could make. In 2007, he told The Hollywood Interview, “I felt that when I was young, I was catapulted into an old man’s career with The Godfather, which I made when I was about 30. I wanted to be a young filmmaker, but here I was, a big Hollywood filmmaker.”
As bizarre as it may sound, Coppola often felt like The Godfather interrupted his career. He didn’t particularly want to turn crime novels into blockbuster movies – that was the kind of thing a career should build to. He felt it was, effectively, an old man’s game. While he was still young and full of creative piss and vinegar, he wanted to make his own films from scratch. He wanted to express his artistic vision in small, personal projects.
The Megalopolis director admitted to DGA, “I’d always wanted to make a series of films from original screenplays, more in the spirit of the European pictures of the ’50s, but also of the great writers, like Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. I wanted to be someone who, when a new movie of mine came out, it would be something no one had ever seen before because it would have just been written and created.”
This is why, when he finally made Youth Without Youth and followed it up with Tetro and Twixt, he was finally experiencing the career he’d wanted when he was young – but as an old man.
