“I think it’s a misuse of film”: the video game Francis Ford Coppola hated
It’s hardly been the most consistent relationship in terms of quality, but cinema and video games have been intertwined for decades, not that Francis Ford Coppola approves of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between the two mediums.
Whether it’s movies based on video games, video games based on movies, or movies and video games existing as part of the same expanded universe, consoles and celluloid have never been too far away from each other for better or worse, leaving the legendary director completely aghast as a result.
Of course, given his vocal disdain for superheroes, there was never any chance Coppola was going to embrace the notion of merging video games with feature films with open arms, especially when one of his many masterpieces was placed squarely in the middle after The Godfather was refitted as an open-world adventure in 2006.
Several of his most prominent cast members didn’t have the same issue, though, with the very last credited role of Marlon Brando’s career coming when the dialogue he recorded specifically for the game as Vito Corleone eventually hit shelves two years after his death. James Caan and Robert Duvall went one step further by performing motion capture work, but Coppola was nothing short of indignant.
Discussing the project with Sunday Morning ShootOut, the director insisted that he “knew nothing about it”. Not only that but “they never asked me if I thought it was a good idea”. That’s probably because he would have told them exactly what he thought about The Godfather becoming a video game, which was far from positive.
“They use the characters everyone knows, and they hire those actors to be there, and only to introduce minor characters, and then for the next hour they shoot and kill each other,” he raged. “I had absolutely nothing to do with the game, and I disapprove. I think it’s a misuse of film.”
However, the game’s producer, David De Martini, disagreed, revealing that he and his team met with Coppola “on one occasion, and we shared with him what our vision was for the game and where we were going to go”. They even accepted an invitation to his winery, so it’s not as if the project came completely out of the blue and took him by surprise.
That being said, one person not in the loop was the son of author Mario Puzo, who sued Paramount on the basis of an agreement his father had with the studio, which entitled the estate to a share of the profits from anything Godfather-related. He ended up winning that legal battle and becoming several million dollars richer, while Coppola had no option but to sit there and seethe while his seminal crime story was repurposed as a shoot ’em up.
