Francis Ford Coppola absolutely “hated” making ‘Finian’s Rainbow’: “It was basically a cheat”
Despite making a handful of the greatest films ever made, Francis Ford Coppola turned some heads when reports emerged about the chaotic making of his longstanding passion project, Megalopolis. While the facts were shocking, it was hardly the first time that Coppola had a miserable experience working on a film.
Being the director of The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather: Part II, and Apocalypse Now will forever endear Francis Ford Coppola in any retrospective on the history of film, as the four classics that he directed in the 1970s are considered to be some of the best and most influential releases in the history of Hollywood. Despite the success that he’s had and the endless praise he’s received from his peers, Coppola always managed to feel like an underdog due to the chaotic way in which he managed his finances.
Prior to his legendary run in the ‘70s, Coppola was a renowned student from UCLA, and ultimately befriended other young filmmakers from the New Hollywood generation, including George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, and Martin Scorsese, and although Coppola believed that The Conversation would be his masterpiece, his inability to get it financed led him to accept a deal with Warner Bros-Seven Arts to direct the musical Finian’s Rainbow, which starred Fred Astaire and Petula Clark.
“It was basically a cheat,” Coppola said when discussing the film with The Atlantic. “The score was great, but we improvised dance numbers. We were competing with Funny Girl. They rehearsed musical numbers for two months. The studio also refused to let me shoot on location in Kentucky. I had to work on back lots.“
Finian’s Rainbow was a relative commercial success and earned mixed reviews, but Coppola grew concerned that he had sold out for the sake of making money. He was so exhausted and frustrated at the experience that he quickly linked back up with Lucas in New York to begin shooting The Rain People, a character drama that he had been workshopping since he was in school.
“I hated Finian’s and I was scared that I was incapable of writing an original script and directing it,” Coppola said. “So I forced my hand, invested my own money, and got studio backing once we’d started.”
No one would argue that Finian’s Rainbow is one of Coppola’s best films, but it’s hardly his worst when considering the disasters like The Godfather: Part III, Jack, and Twixt that he would go on to direct. However, it did prove to Coppola that he would never be happy working for a studio where he didn’t have complete creative control, and may have inspired his more erratic financial moves in subsequent decades.
The ‘80s were a somewhat notorious decade for Coppola, where he directed several passion projects that he’d personally financed, and they all seemed to flop. In addition to his old-fashioned jazz drama The Cotton Club and his rousing biopic Tucker: A Man and His Dream, Coppola also directed the musical One from the Heart, which in many ways felt like a counterargument to Finian’s Rainbow.
Whether it’s for better or worse, the frustrations Coppola had making Finian’s Rainbow led him down the path to make self-aggrandising experimental works like Megalopolis. It might not be the best or worst film he ever made, but it might as well be the most consequential.
