The biggest regret of Francis Ford Coppola’s career: “I’m embarrassed, and I apologise to everyone”
It’s not Megalopolis. Despite what audiences and critics might assume, Francis Ford Coppola has shown no signs of embarrassment or remorse about his controversial $120million, decades-in-the-making vanity project. But he does harbour some other regrets, and the director wants to get them off his chest.
In all fairness, the Godfather creator really doesn’t have to apologise for anything. When he burst into Hollywood in the late 1960s, he was part of a young cohort of filmmakers who upended the industry and set it on a brave new path of emotional realism and jaw-dropping scale. He, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, and Steven Spielberg reshaped American cinema, and their influence is unshakable.
That does not mean, however, that their work is infallible. Coppola faced a career-halting backlash in 1981 when he released his epic musical passion project, One from the Heart, and even though Apocalypse Now is considered one of the greatest movies of all time, the making of it was nearly as harrowing as the film itself.
Coppola is the first to point out that his all-or-nothing directorial style is often successful. He has referred to himself as having “a real scientific talent” as a filmmaker, pointing to the precision and careful cultivation of his skills over pure artistic intuition. Part of his success (and failure) stems from his singlemindedness – the refusal to compromise with studios that, in the case of Megalopolis, meant he had to put up his own money for the venture.
In the early ‘70s, that singlemindedness led to one of the only moments that the director would later regret. After the rapturous reception to the first Godfather film, Coppola was one of Hollywood’s hottest commodities, and the producers pursued him relentlessly for a sequel. He wanted nothing to do with it and suggested they hire his friend instead, a young up-and-coming director named Martin Scorsese. They weren’t interested. So he made the outrageous demand of a $1m paycheck. To his surprise, they agreed. Then he made an even more unusual demand – that the sequel contains a number in the title.
Before The Godfather Part II, no Hollywood movie title had ever included a number. But Coppola was impressed with the Russian movie Ivan the Terrible, which had been made in two parts, and, as usual, he wasn’t willing to compromise. The studio worried that audiences would think it was just a remake of The Godfather, but they relented, and thus, a disease was spawned throughout the industry.
“I’m the jerk that started numbers on movies,” Coppola admitted to The Washington Post earlier this year. “I’m embarrassed, and I apologise to everyone.”
He might have started the trend, but he’s hardly responsible for the franchise scourge that has swept the industry in the decades since. In fact, he fought hard to avoid making the third Godfather and has never seemed interested in expanding upon previous films (director’s cuts aside). If anyone is to blame for Hollywood’s franchise dependency, it’s Coppola’s friend and fellow ‘70s cinema transgressor, George Lucas, whose creation of Star Wars showed the industry how to make untold billions through shameless repetition and merchandising.
