Francis Ford Coppola admits ‘The Godfather Part II’ was a movie he should never have made
Francis Ford Coppola is one of the great auteurs of his generation, and just like all great auteurs, some of his gambles have failed spectacularly. For every Godfather, there is a One from the Heart, the 1982 musical that was true to its title but did not come close to washing its face financially. It was a catastrophic failure for the filmmaker and marked a fall from grace that he spent years clawing his way out of.
Coppola went on to make many more acclaimed films, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula and The Rainmaker. In recent decades, however, he’s struggled to regain the masterful command of the medium that he demonstrated so definitively in the 1970s, and it would be understandable if he came out and disowned every film he’s directed since the turn of the millennium (Megalopolis in particular).
However, when discussing the movies that he regrets making, Coppola went way back to his most fruitful decade, identifying a film that most film fans believe to be one of his very best.
Speaking to Movieline in 2009, the director said, “I don’t think Godfather ever should have had more than one movie, actually. It was not a serial, it was a drama.” The first one, he explained, told a complete story, while the second was just rehashing the same territory. “To make more than one Godfather was just greed,” he continued, “Basically, making a movie costs so much money that they want it to be like Coca-Cola: you just make the same thing over and over again to make money, which is what they’re doing now.”
Plenty of cinephiles would concede that The Godfather Part III stretched the story beyond its viable limit and should have been quashed in the development phase, but there are many people who believe that Part II is superior to the first film. Ultimately, whether you prefer the first or second is down to your broader preferences. The first is a tense, visually stunning crime drama centred on volatile family dynamics, while the second is a slower, more novelistic character study of two men, the young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) and the ever deeper descent of his son Michael (Al Pacino) into the criminal underworld.
The fact that Coppola considered the second film to be the result of greed is surprising, given that Mario Puzo began writing the script before the first movie was even released. If the studio didn’t know how much money and praise The Godfather would earn, they probably wouldn’t have been dangling a massive paycheck in front of the screenwriter and director for a sequel.
And even if Coppola was eying a big windfall with another film, he and Puzo made sure to avoid remaking the first one by creating a story that was both tonally and thematically different. Whether it was greed or creative vision that spurred the young director to make Part II, most people who watch it would agree that it was the right move from a cinematic perspective, no matter how Coppola feels looking back.
