“Living off the fat of the land”: the three iconic actors Francis Ford Coppola blasted as sell-outs
When you’ve made movies that have changed the world, or even a film that many rank as the greatest of all time in the history of cinema, then you’re probably entitled to act fairly single-mindedly and to have an opinion or two, no matter how controversial, which is certainly a card that Francis Ford Coppola has pulled on many occasions.
After all, we are talking about a man who took nearly 50 years and spent $120million of his own money to make Megalopolis, a shambolic, overblown, chaotic film which brought in a tenth of that at the box office, solely because he quite liked sci-fi movies when he was younger. That kind of guy is not going to be bothered about calling a few people out if he’s not a fan.
Not even when one of the people he’s calling out is one of the primary reasons Coppola became so successful in the first place, namely, one Al Pacino, central star of The Godfather trilogy, the first two of which are rightly lauded as utter masterpieces but arguably wouldn’t be had it not been for Pacino’s Oscar-nominated performances in both films.
Pacino, along with two other giants of acting in Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro were bizarrely described as “lazy” by Coppola some years back in a fairly excoriating rant about how the trio had sold out as they moved into middle age and didn’t have the ambition of someone like Javier Bardem, which was definitely a bit of recency bias given this blast came in 2007 just as the Spaniard had put in his Oscar winning performance in The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men that very year.
So what exactly inspired this volley of wrath from Coppola? Well, he told GQ, “I met Pacino and De Niro when they were really on the come. They were young and insecure. Now Pacino is very rich, maybe because he never spends any money; he just puts it in his mattress…even in those days, after The Godfather, I didn’t feel that those actors were ready to say ‘Let’s do something else really ambitious’,” adding that the trio were “all living off the fat of the land.”
Now, at the risk of going against a man who was crazy enough to make the ludicrously unhinged majesty that is Apocalypse Now, I feel I have to step up on behalf of Pacino and De Niro here, because post-The Godfather Part II in 1974, both men went on to make some absolutely incredible films, not least in the same decade with De Niro’s The Deer Hunter in 1978 and Pacino’s magnificent Dog Day Afternoon in 1975.
But even Jack Nicholson, who was barely getting started midway through that decade, didn’t escape Coppola’s ire, with the director saying, “I think if there was a role that De Niro was hungry for, he would come after it. I don’t think Jack would. Jack has money and influence and girls, and I think he’s a little bit like Brando, except Brando went through some tough times.”
It should be noted here that Nicholson toiled away in films for 12 years before finally finding success with an Oscar nomination, thanks to 1969’s Easy Rider, and went on to land another 11 nominations and three wins over the years, making him one of the most awarded actors in Hollywood history.
It should also probably be pointed out that between Coppola directing The Godfather Part III in 1990 and making his comments about the three actors, he managed precisely four movies in 17 years, which is not a lot; so, in summary, he was talking out of his arse. I say that respectfully, of course, and it doesn’t detract from the fact that Coppola is a total genius, obviously. For a start, he made The Conversation, and that is a fucking amazing film.
