“Different from anything anyone’s done before”: when Francis Ford Coppola went in a disastrous new direction
In the early 1980s, nobody was going to argue with Francis Ford Coppola when he said his next feature was going to rewrite the cinematic rulebook forever and dictate the rest of his career, because he had earned the right to make such bold proclamations.
He’d been written off and dismissed several times already by that point, but his doubters and detractors were being force-fed enough humble pie to make them throw up. He was in danger of being fired from The Godfather, only to deliver the highest-grossing film ever made, a ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ winner, as well as an instant and timeless classic.
He followed that up with ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Original Screenplay’ nominations for top-tier conspiratorial tale The Conversation and won ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ again when The Godfather Part II somehow managed to live up to near-impossible expectations. In addition, he turned one of the most troubled productions in history into another all-timer when Apocalypse Now emerged as a seminal masterpiece.
At that stage of his career, Coppola could do whatever the hell he wanted, and nobody was going to argue because the results were right there that he was more than capable of backing up his lofty ambitions. To a point, anyway, with his first film of the 1980s catching him flying far too close to the sun.
Deciding the best way to utilise his newfound carte blanche was to spend a shitload of his own money, Coppola’s Zoetrope Productions funded the entire $23million budget of musical romantic drama One for the Heart, constructing extravagant sets to fulfil his desire to create something that existed in a slightly heightened reality which sought to combine realism and wonder with intentional artifice.
With so many moving parts, Coppola implemented a brand new technological process of his own design dubbed ‘electronic cinema’, where he’d record storyboards and rehearsals to pre-visualise the film and the use that as the blueprint when cameras were rolling via a secondary monitor, which allowed him to precisely match his actors to the images he’d already devised.
It was revolutionary for the period, with Coppola having nothing but the utmost confidence in his newfound trajectory becoming standard practice. “One from the Heart is interesting to me because I think it represents a new direction in my work that I’d like to pursue in the next ten years,” he said. “Stylistically, and in its use of film language, it’s different from anything I’ve done before; anything anyone’s done before.”
Telling Gay Talese how “all my future films will be musical,” Coppola viewed himself as “more of a film composer” than a director, with his complex technological advances belying a story that was relatively simple at its core. A romance at the end of the day, the auteur’s desire to seamlessly combine the straightforward with the rigorously complex had him bristling with excitement over the boundless opportunities it would present him going forward.
“The story is told through songs,” he added. “Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle enter into a musical dialogue that tells the story. She represents the feminine and he represents the masculine. Everything in the movie represents either the feminine or the masculine. It’s all set in Las Vegas, the world of fantasy and reality. I wanted to do something very simple.”
On that level, there wasn’t much to One from the Heart, but Coppola’s “new direction” never ended up materialising when the movie landed with a disastrous thud at the box office. Earning a little over $600,000 from its run in the United States, the director lost so much money on the project that it pushed him towards his first declaration of bankruptcy.
It couldn’t have gone much worse, in all honesty, and instead of continuing one of cinema’s hottest-ever streaks, Coppola’s 1980s began with financial catastrophe. He debuted two new features the very next year, but did either Rumble Fish or The Outsiders continue on in the same vein as One from the Heart by using cutting-edge technology, musical stylings, or extravagant budgets? They did not because he’d dropped the ball so spectacularly the first time around.
