How Francis Ford Coppola inadvertently shaped the future of ‘Star Wars’
Francis Ford Coppola is synonymous with the gritty realism of The Godfather, the chaotic brilliance of Apocalypse Now, and the quiet tension of Gene Hackman’s performance in The Conversation. What doesn’t come to mind are spaceships zipping through the stars or duels with glowing sticks and supernatural powers.
As improbable as it seems, there have been many connections between Coppola and Star Wars over the years. Harrison Ford appeared in the aforementioned Conversation three years before he donned the mantle of Han Solo. Coppola and George Lucas are long-time friends. The younger director served as a production assistant on Coppola’s film The Rain People and even made a documentary about the experience called Filmmaker. More recently, Coppola directed Giancarlo Esposito in Megalopolis. Esposito is known for, among other things, playing Moff Gideon in the Star Wars spin-off, The Mandalorian.
While promoting the director’s ill-fated passion project, Esposito recalled one of his earliest film roles: The Cotton Club, another Coppola project. “Everything was green,” the actor told IndieWire. “All the furniture was green, and we were in a studio with nothing but cables coming in from Francis’ trailer.” The actor was referring to the movie’s experimental production process, where backgrounds were almost entirely digitally created and projected onto the green-screened set. It was deemed insane at the time, but nowadays, this is common practice.
“It was the precursor to the modern volume,” Esposito stated, referring to his experiences on The Mandalorian. The Disney series made use of real-time VFX and VR-inspired sets, which allowed work on them to continue even when the pandemic shut down production. “I saw him to be an innovator,” Esposito continued. “He always had this very interesting new way of filmmaking. That was in his consciousness then, and it certainly exemplifies his consciousness now.”
The Breaking Bad star played an absolutely tiny role in The Cotton Club. He appeared as a henchman for the criminal Bumpy Rhodes, played by his future Megalopolis co-star Laurence Fishburne. The film focuses on the titular jazz venue and features the likes of Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Bob Hoskins, and Nicolas Cage. It notoriously went hideously over-budget, not helped by Coppola’s habit of erratically firing people. Financial backers included a Saudi Arabian arms dealer and a vaudeville promoter called Roy Radin, who was murdered by a hitman during the movie’s production. It was long rumoured that producer Robert Evans was involved in the killing, but he always denied those allegations.
Megalopolis reunited Coppola and Esposito after 40 years. The actor was very complimentary of the movie during the promotion process. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before,” he raved, calling Coppola “a director who can say, ‘I don’t know,’ and that’s a beautiful thing.” He said that the veteran filmmaker “has a lot of space for exploration, and it’s quite spontaneous and quite playful at times, while still having a really clear vision about what he wants to do. One of the cool things about this process was not knowing what we were going to get on any given day. He created an environment where questions can be asked and figured out together.”
Esposito’s Moff Gideon served as the main villain of the first two seasons of The Mandalorian. He returned for the end of season three, revealing a plan to create an army of clones in his likeness. He is believed to have perished in a fiery blaze at the season’s end, but come on, this is Star Wars. Nobody stays dead for long.
