Francis Ford Coppola believed that ‘The Godfather’ ruined his career: “Nobody really wants me to do my own work”
You’d think that if you were the creator of a movie as acclaimed as The Godfather, which is not only considered a masterpiece but often hailed as one of the greatest movies ever made, you’d feel very proud of yourself; smug, even.
But Francis Ford Coppola has long seen The Godfather as a hindrance to his career, believing that it ruined everything for him. It seems almost unbelievable that he would say such a thing, considering that he would then go on to make The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now, but he once told The New Yorker, “In some ways it did ruin me”.
Coppola had made his proper directorial debut almost a decade before with the low-budget horror film Dementia 13, but before then, he’d actually cut his teeth in the exploitation genre by working on movies like the ‘nudie cutie’ Tonight for Sure, and The Bellboy and the Playgirls. The latter saw him team up with Jack Hill to film nude scenes, which were then inserted into a re-edited version of the German film Sin Began with Eve, released a few years earlier.
Clearly, his career beginnings were strikingly different from the gritty gangster and war flicks he’d come to find acclaim with. The 1960s saw him work across various comedies, even a musical fantasy film, Finian’s Rainbow, and it makes you wonder what the director’s true ambitions were, because it didn’t seem like it was the realm of gangster movies.
When he was hired to direct an adaptation of The Godfather, Coppola soon clashed with Paramount Pictures, finding himself at odds with the studio when it came to his casting and style choices, as well as the pace of production. However, despite the odds, he was able to make a hit, of course, returning for two more sequels that would go down in cinema history as legendary pieces of filmmaking (well, maybe not Part III).
But since 1979’s Apocalypse Now, Coppola’s career has majorly fluctuated, what with the bankrupting One from the Heart, the awful 1996 Robin Williams film Jack, and the more recent disaster of Megalopolis. Regardless, maybe his career would never have looked like that if he hadn’t directed The Godfather, because it set him up on a path that it seems he didn’t actually want to go down.
He admitted, “It just made my whole career go this way instead of the way I really wanted it to go, which was into doing original work as a writer-director. It just inflamed so many other desires. After The Godfather, there was the possibility of having a company that could one day evolve into a real major company and change the way we approach filmmaking. Suddenly, a lot of things that I didn’t have a shot at, I did.”
Instead, he ended up taking on many jobs that saw him directing screenplays he hadn’t written, like The Outsiders, Peggy Sue Got Married, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
He explained, “The great frustration of my career is that nobody really wants me to do my own work. Basically, The Godfather made me violate a lot of the hopes I had for myself at that age”.
