'The Godfather' of filmmaking, Francis Ford Coppola turns 80
Jochen Kürten ct
April 6, 2019
Francis Ford Coppola is one of the most influential living filmmakers. He creates Oscar-winning films — some box office smashes and a few that didn't go over. At 80, the director still has a cinematic dream to fulfill.
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Francis Ford Coppola's career in pictures
Tops and flops: Francis Ford Coppola, now turning 80, wrote film history with a handful of blockbusters — but he also faced disastrous financial flops. The director of "The Godfather'" looks back at an eclectic career.
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Star director Francis Ford Coppola
Coppola, who was born in Detroit on April 7, 1939, had a career that could have easily been the topic of movie in itself. He was for years one of the most influential and commercially successful directors, but also faced disastrous box office flops that brought financial ruin. At 80, he is a longtime legend of US cinema.
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Coming of age
"You're a Big Boy Now," from 1966, was Coppola's third feature film after debuting as co-director three years earlier with the horror movie "The Terror." The comedy is about a man who finally frees himself from his mother's clutches and discovers life. At the time, it wasn't quite clear where the 27-year-old director was headed.
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Sensational mafia movie
Two movies later, Coppola was offered the film adaptation of Mario Puzo's crime novel "The Godfather." The 30-year-old wasn't the studio's first choice, and the project wasn't really close to the director's heart — but the film was a huge success, artistically and at the box office, making Coppola one of the top directors in the US.
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Behind the political scenes
Coppola followed "The Godfather" with the 1974 thriller "The Conversation" starring Gene Hackman in the role of an introverted surveillance expert. The film was not very successful back then but today, it is considered one of the best US films of the 1970s. "The Conversation" reflects the social and political climate of the country at the time of the Watergate scandal.
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War on the set
In 1974, "The Godfather part II" was a huge success, too. Next, the director turned to the Vietnam War. Inspired by "Heart of Darkness," by 19th century British novelist Joseph Conrad, and with a narration by US war correspondent Michael Herr, the director told an epic apocalyptic story. Shooting took a long time, but when it was released in 1979, "Apocalypse Now" was an overwhelming success.
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Financial disaster
Three years later, Coppola, one of the country's most influential directors, shot the melodrama "One from the Heart," starring Nastassja Kinski. It flopped terribly and led to the director's financial ruin. Coppola, who wanted to be independent from the big Hollywood studios, had taken his own studio to the brink.
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Motorcycle gangs
Coppola basically had to start all over again from scratch, and also work for other producers. With talented new young actors and two movies about youth gangs, he managed a comeback: "The Outsiders" and "Rumble Fish" (above photo).
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Disaster #2
Far from humble, Coppola wanted his next movie to be "big" again. "Cotton Club" (1984) set in 1930's New York, was a wild mixture of a music film and a gangster movie about a roaring period. But the film's box office results didn't cover its production costs and Coppola was back to struggling.
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Challenge to the industry
For years afterwards, Coppola was making movies that did not meet his artistic expectations — but he needed the money. The 1988 film "Tucker," starring Jeff Bridges in the role of the American entrepreneur who rebelled against the mainstream automobile industry of that day is one of the better films from that era — and it echoes the director's own moves toward independence.
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Dracula strikes
After releasing part 3 of the "Godfather" saga in 1990, the director moved on two years later to shoot the classic story of the famous bloodsucker, Dracula. Reviews of the film adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel weren't overwhelmingly positive, but critics praised the film's setting and opulence.
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The winemaker
Over the past two decades, the director has made more headlines with the winery he runs in California than with his movies. Some critics say he gets better results with his wines than with his last cinematic works — but arguably, his 1997 legal drama "The Rainmaker" starring a very young Matt Damon is the best film adaptation of a John Grisham novel ever made.
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In all likelihood, at some point in a few years, a film will be made of Francis Ford Coppola's life and career. There would be plenty of material to draw on and Hollywood loves such biographies. Any potential scriptwriter could consider only the numerous highs and lows of his career and have a banging plot.
Francis Ford Coppola, the director whose films have won many Oscars, the Palme d'Or in Cannes and numerous other festival prizes, a man whose films have been incredibly successful at the box office in nearly every country in the world, has become sufficiently familiar with the dark sides of his profession.
Apocalypse Now: a nightmarish shoot that turned into a documentary
With his studio company Zoetrope, Coppola went bankrupt at least twice. A few of his films took in only enough to cover a fraction of the production costs and Coppola tossed himself off projects, replacing his role with other producers and authors. And on days when he was on set, like when filming the epic about the Vietnam war Apocalypse Now, he surely would have been cursing his calling of being a director. On the shoot, everything that could go wrong did, with shooting interrupted repeatedly, pushing the project to the brink of collapse.
That experience provided enough material for a film of its own. The documentary Hearts of Darkness was produced years later by three directors, including his wife Eleanor, who showed Coppola at work. The director had shot his Vietnam epic while drawing on motifs from Joseph Conrad's book, Heart of Darkness, and the result is a film filled with legends. The documentary tracing its creation, which takes the same name as Conrad's book, impressively depicted the journey into the heart of the dark shooting.
Marlon Brando is memorable as The GodfatherImage: picture alliance/kpa
The Godfather makes film history
In spite of the adversities, Apocalypse Now became a triumph for the director; in Cannes, the opus was acclaimed and awarded with Oscars. It was the second great success for the man who was born in 1939 in Detroit, Michigan to a musician and an actor. A few years earlier, Coppola had already written film history by debuting the first two films in his trilogy, The Godfather.
Regarded as one of the leading filmmakers of "New Hollywood" cinema, Coppola had the world at his feet in the 1980s. The movement that wanted to unhinge the old system in Hollywood with its traditional, long-established film studios led Coppola to found his own production studio Zoetrope — an endeavor that failed miserably. One from the Heart, which he produced and directed, was a gigantic flop.
Small fish to fry at the end
Some film historians say that he never really recovered nor found his way back to his old artistic strength. Of course, Coppola shot more movies, both small and large, but such memorable successes as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now didn't materialize.
Although he proved himself again in 1984 with Cotton Club, the financial damage was immense. As a result, the director also had to shoot a few movies simply to earn money. In later years, he got the cash flowing from another source — wine.
The old wine fan Coppola had turned a hobby into a second job and founded a winery. The Francis Coppola Winery is world-famous today as one of California's most successful wine producers. In addition, the enterprising, Italian-born Coppola now also sells pasta and pasta sauces and operates several luxury resorts.
The CoppolasImage: Getty Images
Sofia Coppola walks in his footsteps
Yet it's for a completely different reason that you'll still hear the name Coppola bandied about the film scene today. If you ask younger people about Coppola's films, you would probably hear titles like The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. His daughter Sofia, who is now one of the world's best-known film directors, shot them.
That, too, is a beautiful legacy of this giant of American filmmaking. And the 80-year-old director himself still has a dream. According to the online portal Deadline.com, he will soon be shooting his long-planned project Megalopolis, a science-fiction epic set in a futuristic New York.
