Francis Ford Coppola: The art of funding your own films
One of Francis Ford Coppola’s contemporaries, Werner Herzog, dramatically proclaimed: “I would travel down to Hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.” It would seem that Coppola already had Satan’s address and was a regular in his grappling ring. You might not think that his films were farces if you based your assumption on the polished finished products alone, but if you dig into the backstories, you are met with a whole world of horrors.
His troubled path began with his first film, an act of creative whoredom that Coppola embarked upon purely to get a leg-up in the industry. It was a 1962 softcore comedy film called Tonight for Sure. This crass beginning was a necessary evil at the time. In a reverse of the current climate, amid the artistic boom of the era, you had to graduate from commercially inclined small-budget indie films if you wanted the chance to be an artistic auteur with a bottomless pit of cash-making art.
Roger Corman, the man dubbed ‘The Pope of Pop Cinema’, was a director and producer who doled out ultra-cheap flix that featured sex or violence every ten minutes as a golden rule of thumb. He would frequently hire promising first-time directors like Coppola, Jonathan Demme and more and give them the chance to showcase their skills. He once told Ron Howard: “If you do a good job on this movie, you’ll never have to work for me again.” This was everything Coppola wanted, so he was happy to hang up his own creative beliefs for a payday and a start in the industry with a remake of the nudie film Wide Open Spaces.
The problem was that his first projects were stuttering after his indie graduation. He had gained a level of esteem, but he wasn’t off the ground. Ambition was growing, but funds weren’t matching. He set his sights on his opus, The Godfather. Coming in off the back of a relative failure with The Rain People, Coppola agreed to take the film on for a low sum and a small budget.
The following quotes pretty much surmise his experiences making the movie. After filming, he offered up the advice, “You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise, you’ll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost.” He did, indeed, trust his backbone, but that didn’t stop it from being stressful. As he adds: “You ought to love what you’re doing because – especially in a movie – over time you really will start to hate it.”
The Godfather hell began with an argument with Paramount when the production company wanted it to be shot in Kansas City to cut down on production costs. With the novel’s popularity rising as arguments continued, the studio finally acquiesced and agreed to shoot on location in New York City and Sicily.
However, he may have won this argument because of the rising popularity of the novel, but that almost became a petard that hoisted him. The disagreement had not only disgruntled executives, but now that the budget was rising, they were unsure whether Coppola could handle it. The experienced Elia Kazan was tapped up as a replacement. As these rumours swirled, Coppola’s stress skyrocketed. After all, he had already argued with them over pretty much every single casting decision.
He became convinced that the editor Aram Avakian and his AD, Steve Kestner, were conspiring to get him fired. It would seem that they were. Avakian had complained to producer Robert Evans the filming was so slow that there was nothing for him to edit. However, Evans was happy with the dailies, so he backed Coppola. Coppola fired both of them. Now Evans had made his bed, and his stress was set to skyrocket too.
“Like the godfather,” Coppola later explained, “I fired people as a pre-emptory strike. The people who were angling the most to have me fired, I had fired.” The key phrase here being “the most” – in most jobs you hope that nobody is gunning to get you sacked, but when it came to Coppola and The Godfather, he was having to snuff out threats who were most likely to push for him to be sacked with a studio that was thinking about sacking him.
Other skirmishes continued, and the whole thing was a production horror show. Thus, when it was wrestled from hell to reach heavenly heights and was hailed as a triumph, Coppola vowed to never be in the hands of producers ever again. So, he bankrolled his money from the follow-ups and The Conversation, so that by the time Apocalypse Now came around, he had a hefty swing of capital.
To fund the war film, he staked the value of his Napa Valley wine ranch to raise money for the project. He offered up $30 million of his own wealth as collateral to bolster the film’s budget, risking financial ruin if it tanked. However, as he puts it himself, “If you don’t take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn’t been seen before?”. Essentially, his deal with to back the project to make more than $30 million profit for investors, or he would end up paying them with the wine ranch that his previous projects had afforded him. The project continues to make him money to this day and fewer hands take a cut to boot.
In essence, that wine ranch had saved his ass. Apocalypse Now was hell enough without the pressure of producers, with them meddling, the film would undoubtedly have been pulled amid the tumultuous making that almost drove him to suicide. So, he continued to make movies and wine that would hopefully make him money. Firstly, so that he could have full artistic dominion over his projects, but also, you can’t help but suspect purely because he didn’t want to work with the bastards that continually angled against him ever again.
Now, the director is 83 years old and he’s plunging $120million of his own money into a new project called Megalopolis. It is an idea he has been working on since the 1980s, and now he is about to throw the bank at it. His reason: “There’s a certain way everyone thinks a film should be, and it rubs against the grain if you have another idea. People can be very unaccepting, but sometimes the other idea represents what’s coming in the future. That is worthy of being considered.” He’s considered this idea for half a lifetime, and with his own backing, his sister Shire says he is making “something great and important.” Here’s hoping.
