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- [00:02]
Francis Ford Coppola
Tetragrammaton. The interesting thing about the conversation is, you know, I've written in every medium possible. I've typed. I've written longhand. But I'd met a woman just once. I met her, who was a court reporter. And I asked her if I sent her a dictation, if she would transcribe it into a screenplay, you know, which I showed her what the form looked like. I never saw her again. But I basically dictated the script of the conversation and would send my dictation to her, and then she would transcribe it into a screenplay. And that's where the screen, how the screenplay came, that first draft was amazingly. All just talked into a microphone.
- [01:09]
Interviewer
It's interesting, the form and content idea that it's so much about listening and so much about words, and it's not about writing. It's about listening and speaking really well.
- [01:20]
Francis Ford Coppola
In truth, I didn't write it. I dictated it. And I knew that dictation was a skill that. I mean, everyone can talk, but I knew it was something you could learn how to do, you know, so that it came out what you were hoping. And on the disc of the conversation, there is the actual screenplay. But that screenplay was dictated. It was the first screenplay. In other words, it wasn't made, you know, corrected by the film. It was actually. The film was really like that.
- [01:56]
Interviewer
How much effort went into that overheard conversation which really plays throughout the movie. It gets revealed to us bit by bit over the movie. We hear most of it in the beginning, but then as the film goes on, we hear a few more phrases.
- [02:12]
Francis Ford Coppola
Yes.
- [02:13]
Interviewer
It's a very simple conversation.
- [02:15]
Francis Ford Coppola
Yes.
- [02:16]
Interviewer
Yet it says a lot.
- [02:18]
Francis Ford Coppola
Well, you know, it was my intention that the key phrase in it, which is, he'd kill us if they had the chance, that it really be the same. But. But in the end, we finally cheated, and we used the take where the inflection is slightly different. In other words, it's the difference between. He'd kill us if he. He'd kill us if we had the chance to. He'd kill us if he had the chance to. He'd kill us if he had the chance. Anyway, there was a slight inflection, but I really need to credit my editor and sound mixer and colleague, Walter Murch, who was really very important in the project because, of course, he is a sort of sound genius. Number one Walter Murch, I'm sure you may have heard of him. And that was the first film he ever actually was the editor on. There was another. A second editor named Richard Chu. Who was very good. But Walter was really, you know, almost like worked as a co director with me on the editing of the film. And. And his talent went through, you know, carefully, every little beat of that movie. And then ultimately he did the final sound mix. A funny story, I'll tell you, which you'll get a kick out of, is that when I was. Walter was a young USC student when I first met him, and I was trying to get him to work on the sound of our movies, and the unions wouldn't let him because he wasn't a union member. And finally, after going back and forth with the head of the union, they agreed he could work on it, but not if he had the word editor connected to his credit. So Walter said, well, call me sound designer. And that's where the phrase sound designer came from. Just a union squabble. And now you can't go see an opera or a play or a movie without there being a sound designer credit. So Walter invented that.
- [04:17]
Interviewer
How important is sound in a movie?
- [04:19]
Francis Ford Coppola
Well, George Lucas, my young colleague, used to say, you know, sound and image is 50, 50, but sound is much cheaper. So we really. We didn't have a lot of money in those days, so we always emphasize sound because we knew it was a. Had a big role to play in what the film was going to be like. But it was, you know, sound is cheaper to get than pictures. And we were up in San Francisco, you know, without resources. And that's why the really contemporary movie sound throughout the world came out of. Out of us, really, because we were in San Francisco where there was another company, wonderful company, called Dolby Sound, and they were based in San Francisco. And they were always super kind to us. And we, of course, disclosed everything we were doing to them and through Dolby, ultimately influenced, you know, movies throughout the world with five point stereophonic sound and all of the, what they call atmos. And that's all because really we were there with them as their colleagues, and we didn't have much money.
- [05:30]
Interviewer
Really before that, there was just one big speaker behind the screen. Is that correct?
- [05:34]
Francis Ford Coppola
Well, yeah. I mean, originally there was just one big speaker. And then ultimately much later when Home hi fi became stereo. And then, then very often there were two speakers. But the idea of five speakers, three in the front and two in the back was way later and came and came from Dolby and from Zoetro Bar company.
- [05:56]
Interviewer
Do you think of the conversation as a genre film?
- [06:01]
Francis Ford Coppola
You know, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of movies as genres. I mean, it's like, you Know, what genre is the Taj Mahal? What genre is Notre Dame? What. You know, this. This thing to put everything in ratings and. And score them and give them, like sports, give them, have one win over another. It doesn't. Art is not like that, in my opinion. You know, I mean, I remember when the New York Times started to give the movie review stars, and I was so offended. I said, you know, this is. In sports. It's not like the pennant where the Yankees are in the lead and number two is the number three. Art is not something that you can rate that way. I mean, it's. You can like it or not like it, or you could think you have favorites and stuff, but. But to turn that into a rating system is offensive to me.
- [07:01]
Interviewer
Tell me about casting Gene Hackman.
- [07:04]
Francis Ford Coppola
Originally, when I had written the script, I wrote the script before I made the Godfather. I was a theater student in the 50s, so that to a theater student, the trinity was Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan. I mean, they were the gods to me of cinema. So, of course, I admired all three my whole life and. And still do. But Brando was obviously an exceptional actor, and. And, you know, I dreamed of one day working with him, and I wrote the Conversation with Brando in mind. And ultimately, when I managed, I never met him, of course, but I did get word back with him turning it down. And so then the. The conversation just went into repose for a while. And the whole adventure that came up when they offered me the Godfather, and you know why they offered me that? You have to realize that at the time, there hadn't been a sort of successful gangster movie for a while. And Paramount got that novel, the Godfather, before it was published. They had bought it very inexpensively, and they thought, well, maybe if they made it into a movie, they ought to make it with an Italian director. I mean, they offered it to important people. Everyone turned it down. So they decided that they should offer it to an Italian American, someone who was a screenwriter and someone who was young and cheap, that they could tell what to do. And I happened to fit the bill on those two things. I was beginning to be a successful screenwriter, and I had written a number of scripts professionally and, you know, was Italian American, although my family were all musicians. I never. I never. I don't think I met ever a person who was a gangster as a kid. And I was young and married with two kids, so I was, you know, I need. I could be pushed around because I, you know, except I didn't want to do. Do the film I felt. I don't know. Have you ever read the original novel, Rick?
- [09:19]
Interviewer
I never have.
- [09:20]
Francis Ford Coppola
Yeah, it's really the story that makes up the movie is like a sliver of a much longer book that's pretty salacious. And, you know, it was written by the author who's a wonderful man. Was a wonderful man and a talented writer. This particular book was written as a pot boiler because he. He wanted to have some money so he could leave his kids some money. So he wrote this pot boil. And Paramount bought it and they hired me. The first thing I said when I finally accepted it is that, you know, they wanted to shoot it in St. Louis. And they wanted to shoot it in the period that was when we were shooting it, which was around 1973. And you can figure that the reason they do that is so all the cars can just be the regular cars and all the hairstyles can be the regular hairstyles, and all the clothes can be 1973 clothes. So that was. That's what they wanted to do. And I said, well, I mean, the picture has to be shot in New York because that's where it's set. And. And. And it has to be shot. Shot right after the war, 1945, because, you know, the. Michael has just come back from World War II. And. And so I was trying to be more faithful to what I thought was the essence. And they. They had planned to make the film in St. Louis, as I said, and they budgeted for like two, two and a half million dollars at that time, to make it, you know, as cheap as possible. And my decision of saying, well, it had to be New York and it had to be, period, the budget went from $2.5 million to $6 million. So I was out. I mean, they wanted to fire me. Then when I came up with my casting, they basically had made a hit picture called Love story with Ryan O' Neill and Ali McGraw who later then married the head of the studio, Bob Evans. And, you know, it sounds crazy to have Ryan o', Neill, who's the blonde guy, play a Sicilian. But in truth, Sicilians. There are blonde Sicilians with blue eyes because they came from France. There are Sicilians who are. Who look like Robert Redford, actually. So it's not inaccurate. But, you know, to think of a Sicilian as an Italian. I had met for another movie, a young actor named Al Pacino who was dark and intense. And you know how when you read a book and you imagine someone in it, then it's sort of fixed in your mind? I read it and imagined Al Pacino and it was unknown. I had only met him once because I was writing another thing that I didn't get to do. And he came to visit me and I met him. So I suggested Al Pacino for the part and I eventually suggested for the Godfather part, Marlon Brando. And they hated those ideas. First of all, they thought, you know, Al Pacino was a short, little runty guy and Brando had just made actually quite a beautiful movie with Pontecorvo called Queimada or Burn. But it was a huge flop financially. Boxo. But it was a very good movie. So they hated the Brando idea. They said, you're not even allowed to talk about that because also he was considered troublesome and someone that made things difficult. And Pacino, they kept referring to how short he was, I guess because Bob Evans was a tall, good looking guy. And so now, you know, between my ideas for casting and the fact that now under me the film was going to cost twice as much, I was really, I was positive I was going to get fired. I mean, it just seemed to me. And I. And as I said, I had two kids and my wife was pregnant and I wasn't out going to discotheques. I had a family that I had to take care of. So it turned out that I had also, a year before written the script for Patton for 20th Century Fox. And it was an unusual script, was very unusual. And I thought my producer liked it. But they hired Burt Lancaster to play Patton. And I think they were flirting with the idea of William Wyler. I know they were flirting with the idea of the great American director. And when I say great, I mean great William Wyler to direct it. And Lancaster didn't like the script. He felt that I started the movie with Patton in all of his rank and glory, talking to the audience just as if he was in the theater, right? With this unusual beginning. And Lancaster, I guess maybe Wyler felt, well, he sort of worked his way up to that. That was not a good way to start. Anyway, I got fired and went off to San Francisco. So later on we were renting an editing machine to Fox and they said, it doesn't work. You know, send a technician down there. I went down myself. I had no technician, but I saw it was George C. Scott doing patent. What had happened, I didn't even know, was that Lancaster left and Wyler wasn't going to be involved. And they hired George C. Scott and he didn't like the Burt Lancaster script. So the head of the story department of Fox was a very nice man named David Brown. He said, well, we got this weird script that a young guy did, and it's interesting. So Scott liked it. And so that's how I discovered that my version of Patton script was done. So then we were coming up to the Academy Awards soon, right when I was going to get fired from the Godfather. And I was seeing the Oscars with my buddy Marty Scorsese, who was, you know, part of the younger group that we were all friends, and I win the Oscar for Patton. And Marty said to me, he says, well, they're not going to fire you now for at least three or four months because it would be embarrassing. And it was true. So basically I was going, you know, from section to section, always thinking I would get fired, and then something would happen. I wouldn't get fired, but then would get another distance and. And that was really almost like the whole movie. Should I tell you how Brando got the part?
- [15:46]
Interviewer
Please. Yes.
- [15:47]
Francis Ford Coppola
Well, you know, I was in a meeting with all of the heads of the company, including the. The president of Paramount, who was from a big filmmaking family. And we were sitting around the table and I. I said, let's get either Marlon Brand. We need a great actor for this part. So let's get either Marlon Brando or Lawrence Olivia. Olivier, I realize Olivier English but he looks like a mafia head if you. If you know the one named Vito Genovese. And he's good enough actor that he could do it, but he was too ill at the time and he turned us down. I said, then there's Marlon Brando. He's. He's really only 47, but he's one of the great actors of the world. And as I'm speaking, the head of the studio, the. The president says, francis, as president of Paramount Pictures, I'm telling you that Marlon Brando will never be in this picture. And you're no longer. You're no longer permitted to talk about it. And then I pretended I had a fit and I just fell on the floor. And they all looked at me and. And I said, you're telling me I can't even talk about it? How can I direct the movie? I'm not even allowed to talk about it? And they said, okay, three conditions. Number one, Marlon Brando will shoot a screen test. Number two, he'll do the movie for nothing, free. And number three, he'll put up a million dollar bond to guarantee that he's not gonna cause any trouble on the picture. And I said, okay, because I feel at least now I could Talk about it, you know, I mean, of course, that was absurd. He's not gonna put up a million dollars. Well, how do I do the screen test? So I contact Brando's representative, and I said, I would imagine that Marlon might like to fool around with, you know, some. Just experiment a little and see if he can find a way to. To do the character. And. And if he would, I would come over and, you know, kind of work with him or. Or suggest things. And. And that's all I said. So I was told that, yes, you could come to his house early in the morning. And I did a little research, and I found out that Brando always wore earplugs because he didn't like loud, jarring noises. So I got some. Like a friend of mine, like a ninja cameraman. I said, you know, let's. All that we've got to communicate just with hands. We're not going to talk or shout. It's going to be very quiet. I'm going to be quiet. So we get there early in the morning. I remember there was a beautiful baby in the kitchen with a. With a nanny. And we're all set up, and the door opens it. Out walks this man, beautiful man in a. In a Chinese robe or Japanese robe with long blonde hair as Marlon Brando, you know. And when we look at him and he see, he was so smart, he knew exactly what was going on. So the first thing he did is he walked over and got some shoe polish out of the thing and started to make his blonde hair black. And then he made it into a bun. And suddenly he started to have, you know, black hair. And then he put on. I. I brought a couple of shirts, and I bought. I bought. And I bought props. I bought provolone cheese. I brought Italian cigar. I. I figured he. You know, I wouldn't really direct him. I would just put things near him, and he could take them or not. And he went. I remember he went for a long time with his collar, and he says, those guys, a collar is always. He says, talking to himself. And then he says he talks like he looked like a bulldog. And he takes some Kleenex, and he stuffed it in his mouth. And then he says he got shot in the threat. So he goes. Now his phone rings. Amir's real phone rings, picks up the phone, and he goes, I have no idea who was on the other line, but he started to turn into this character that he was inventing. And I'm shooting with a handycam, and my guys are shooting, and it's Amazing, this transformation that he did. And he did it. I didn't do anything. I just put you. And he took the provolone and he used the props, the cigar. He did a thing. So now I know I got something great. But I knew these guys, they're also scared when you get into the intermediate management. The guy who owned and bought Paramount Picture was a guy named Charlie Bluthorn. He was about a 56 year old Viennese guy. He created the first conglomerate. He had a company called Gulf and Western that was. He would buy and sell auto parts and he just made a fortune and he bought Paramount and he was accessible. You could talk to every. We all called him Charlie. So I decide I'm going to take my thing and fly on my own dime to New York and show the test to Charlie Blutorn, which I did. And I went on his. He was there in the Gulf and Western building, which is now with Trump Towers or on Columbus Circle. And I went into. The secretary knocked and they said, oh, is Mr. Bludorn. And she said, yes. And Charlie, come in. I fancy. What are you doing here? I said, I want to show you something. So he said, I come one second. So down the hallway he had a conference room. I set up a better max or you know, a videotape thing. And he came out, I turned it on. And he comes and looks and there's Brando coming out in the Japanese robe with the thing. And he says, no, no, that's crazy. That. No, that's incredible. And that's incredible. What do you have? It's amazing. So once I did that, he was in. Of course, they didn't talk about the million dollar guarantee. They did get him for scale, which he never was happy about. And that's how Brando got the part.
- [21:57]
Interviewer
Would you say he was washed up in Hollywood at that time?
- [22:01]
Francis Ford Coppola
Well, at the time he was washed up, he had made some flops and he had been chastised for bad behavior on Mutiny on the Bounty and some pictures. So I don't think he was. You know, people are washed up and then they're not washed up anymore. But at the moment of the Godfather, he was washed up.
- [22:21]
Interviewer
Had he not made the Godfather, had you not had the idea to get him and convince people for him for it to happen. I don't know that we would think of Marlon Brando in the same way. Not that he's not Marlon Brando, maybe the greatest actor of all time, but I don't know if that was his second act or his third.
- [22:39]
Francis Ford Coppola
Act Well, I personally, having experience with the guy now, I'm sure that something would have come along that he would have created something so spectacular that he would have, which he did with the Godfather, but he would have. He was a genius, not just as an actor, but what he used to talk about and how he used to think. It was very unusual. And I mean, I met some incredible people. I'm now 80. What am I, 85? I'm going to be 86 in a few months. I met Claude Renoir and I met Marcel Duchamp and I met all these incredible people. But Marlon Brando would be high up and Kurosawa. Marlon Brando would be high up on my genius list.
- [23:29]
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- [24:57]
Francis Ford Coppola
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- [25:04]
Interviewer
What was your relationship with Puzo like?
- [25:07]
Francis Ford Coppola
Wonderful. He was like the uncle, your Italian uncle and I adore. That's why you notice with the Godfather it always says, Mario Puzo's Godfather. I'm the one who insisted that because I believe that who writes the original material should get the. You know, this idea of a film by so and so is ridiculous. You know, if it's an original screenplay, okay, a film by so. But. But if someone else wrote the play or the novel, that's why all my films it says, you know, Bram Stoker's Dracula or John Grisham's the Rainmaker. Mario Puzo, he was a wonderful man. He was, he was a character. He, he loved to gamble and he was a terrible gambler. And so I had this nutty idea, let's go to a gambling casino in Reno and book Ourselves into a Sweden in Reno. Because you can, in a gambling casino, you can have breakfast at 4 in the morning. You can have anything you want anytime. So we used to write through the night and then he would like to go down and, you know, have a break and play roulette. And he would, he would like lose a thousand dollars in a half an hour. And then he would tell the people, well, we're losing thousands down here, but we're making millions upstairs. And we would go back up. But he, you could not love him. Mario Puzo, he was so sweet, you know. He was great because I would write the drafts and then he would in long hair put things. And I would have a line where Clemenza says, you know, you gotta make some spaghetti for your group. He says, first you brown some sausage. And Mario's note was, gangsters don't brown, they fry. But he was always making it better in his own way. He did write a book that is a really top beautiful novel. Even Joseph Heller, who wrote catch 22 was a friend of his. Agreed. But this Godfather was a pot boiler. His other book, and the name will come to me as a beautiful first rate novel. He was a good writer.
- [27:17]
Interviewer
Do you think of yourself primarily as a writer or a director?
- [27:21]
Francis Ford Coppola
My heart wishes I wanted to be a writer. I don't have the talent I wish. I believe all of us human beings, I believe we're a genius species and we all get talents. It's not always the talent we want. However, you know, I, I didn't get the talent I want as a writer, but I got other things. I got a good imagination and I got a lot of energy. So I'm willing to rewrite the script 100 times if each time makes it 1% better. And I have a weird talent for forecasting the future with like a kind of Cassandra. But there are directors, you know, who just like see it. And that's a gift I don't have.
- [28:06]
Interviewer
Is the forecasting the future only as it relates to filmmaking or other things as well.
- [28:13]
Francis Ford Coppola
It's come out more in filmmaking like I made the conversation 10 years before Watergate or I made my film about basically women's liberation 12 years before the woman's movement, which came out of the political. So. And even megalopolis, which is America as Rome. America just, just basically elected, you know, someone, you know, Sola or somebody, you know. So my films do have a prophecy element in them. I don't know how, where it comes from, you know.
- [28:48]
Interviewer
Yeah, it's unintentional, but it has come.
- [28:50]
Francis Ford Coppola
To be the case several times already, you know, so, so. But you know, I mean, I was, I was a theater student as a kid. I was like, did you ever see the movie called Rushmore that Wes Anderson made? Of course, yeah. I was like that kid in Rushmore. In fact, that's my nephew, Jason Schwarzman. Fantastic, wonderful boy, wonderful kid.
- [29:12]
Interviewer
How different is the word on the page in the script to the movie? How different are those two things?
- [29:19]
Francis Ford Coppola
Well, if you've seen a script, which I'm sure you have, you see how it's broken down. It's basically like a short story and the script is broken down with a lot of exterior, interior and describing what has been going on. That whole format is really not done for creative reasons. That's done so that's easily budgeted. They want to know how many days and nights, how many nights. So the whole format is that the movie is basically what you see and what you hear. And that's how they broke up the script. So that it. So that when you, when you read a screenplay, you know, ignore all that exterior, interior, medium shot, that's all for the guy to budget it. Just think of it in terms of like it's telling you what you're going to hear and what you're going to see. One of the interesting things, Rick, is that because a cinema got invented, you know, cinema got invented first before, I mean the. The moving picture, before television. And that was an accident because what was going on in that period when the motion picture was invented, there was also television was being worked on. And it could have been, one could have happened first. It just so happened that the motion picture camera, which was silent and black and white at first happened first. And because it happened first, these brilliant originators of movies worked in a way that had never existed before, which was telling stories with pictures. Of course, pictures had told stories. The great artist FRW Marnau said sound had to come, but it came too soon. And what he meant was that they were really inventing a new way to do drama through just images without sound. Once sound came, it just stopped the whole thing. And they went back making hokey plays, old fashioned plays. So this wonderful accident that silent movies were invented, if television had been invented first, who knows? I mean, television later, when it was invented, benefited from copying what movies were like. But movies wouldn't have been like that if it had, if they had sound. So it was a great gift. And then of course, sound came about around 1929. And incidentally, I don't know if you know this. But my grandfather, Agostino Coppola, who was a great tool and die maker, machinist, was hired by a company in Fort Lee to make the Vitaphone. And he. I have a picture of him. I'll get it for you. So my. My family, the Coppola family being in that. He made the machine that did the. The Jazz Singer with. With Al Jolson. And my other grandfather, my mother's side was importing. Owned a movie theater and was importing silent movies for Italian immigrants. So our family is five generations in the movie business. My granddaughter just Gia, made a movie called the Last Showgirl. She is the fifth generation of our family in the movie business. Pretty.
- [32:40]
Interviewer
It's incredible.
- [32:41]
Francis Ford Coppola
It's amazing.
- [32:43]
Interviewer
What's the relationship between painting and film?
- [32:48]
Francis Ford Coppola
Did you see Megalopoulos?
- [32:50]
Interviewer
I did.
- [32:50]
Francis Ford Coppola
Okay, so, you know, Megalopoulos takes the position that all artists control time and that a painter is freezing a moment of time. Or as Goethe says, architecture's frozen music or dances time and space. So we control time, artists control time. And so a painting is a movie, but frozen in one moment of time.
- [33:15]
Interviewer
It's a beautiful idea, the artist freezing a moment in time. It's a powerful way to live with that understanding. The reason I wanted to talk about the conversation first was I originally saw it in Film School 40 years ago. And I watched it again this week having not seen it in 40 years. And I feel like I remembered every single image from 40 years ago. And that's not typical for me. Usually you remember the story, but I didn't really remember the story, but I remembered the images.
- [33:52]
Francis Ford Coppola
Interesting.
- [33:52]
Interviewer
And they. Yeah, again, can't explain it, but it was an interesting experience. Like, I've seen this. I remember this. I remember how he was sitting when he was playing the saxophone. I remember the speaker sitting next to him. I remember what the apartment looked like when he tore it apart. It's interesting how certain images stick in our mind in almost a dreamlike way. Again, I didn't remember the meanings of these images, just the power of the frame.
- [34:23]
Francis Ford Coppola
Let me ask you a question. Did you ever see a movie I made? It was a flop called Rumble Fish.
- [34:30]
Interviewer
I've never seen Rumble Fish, but I know a little bit about it. It's black and white. Yes.
- [34:33]
Francis Ford Coppola
Yeah. And. And I may. My intention making it was I wanted to make an art film for kids. And I did. And, you know, my deal always was that if the movie covers what it. What the. Whatever the finance was, then I own it. And Rubble Fish didn't cover it, so I don't own it. And I was sad about it because I sort of love it. It has. Mickey Rourke is in it. And interesting. But interestingly, when it played in Latin America, somehow, for some reason I can't explain, it just stuck. And there was a theater in Chile somewhere that just showed it for a year. And a whole generation of South American novelists and filmmakers all were weaned on Rumble Fish, which I didn't even know what it was. In fact, one of them came back to Tulsa where it was shot, and made a film called Searching for Rusty James, which was the character that so. So, you know, it turns out that my greatest dream had come true. To me, the greatest award you get is not a big check. It's not a stupid statue of this or that. It's when a young person comes who made a film, says, I, I became a filmmaker because I saw your film, because I made a film. I told you I made because I saw Antonioni's film or because I saw Stanley Kubrick's film or because I saw Orson Welles film. That's why I did it. There's a new. Have you heard of a film just came out called All Quiet on the Western Front with a director named Edward Berger. He made the film Salvation about the popes. But this is a heavyweight filmmaker. And he comes, he says he wants to meet me. And I said, gee, I love that. I know you're a film. All Quiet in the Western Front is wonderful. That's the remark book. And he said, well, I didn't know anything about movies, but when I saw Apocalypse Now, I decided I wanted to be a filmmaker. That, to me, is joy. That's all. Because that's what it's about. It's about, you know, we're on the shoulders of the people who came before and we, we're passing it into, into the future that way. That's. That's what the apprenticeship system is. And the fact that you could have made somebody so important want to make films, boy, that's a gift.
- [37:02]
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- [38:32]
Interviewer
What motivated you to go to film school?
- [38:35]
Francis Ford Coppola
I was a theater major, as I told you, and I was really successful. I. I was a. I was not successful at anything, but in my college career, I became the big bench in the film department. I had all the. The keys, and I had a lot of clout, but I had no money and no girlfriend. And I was sort of hanging around on the campus waiting for rehearsal that night. And there was a little building we called the little theater, and it had a poster on it said, today, four o'. Clock. Sergei Eisenstein filmed 10 Days that Shook the World, October. So I didn't, you know, I had nothing to do. I went in there. There were about four or five people in there, and there was no. And it was a silent film, but there was no music. In other words, they didn't play a piano score or something, was just silent. And I saw October 10 days that shook the World, which is a long film. And I came out and I said, wow, I'm not gonna be a director and go to Yale Drama School. I'm gonna be a filmmaker like that. And I decided to go instead of. I was gonna go to Yale, to the famous Yale Drama School, and instead I went to ucla, because in those days, if you could show residency, college was free.
- [39:52]
Interviewer
Was film a small industry at that time?
- [39:54]
Francis Ford Coppola
No, there was Hollywood, but no one had ever gone from film school to make Hollywood films. There were only a few film school. There was usc and they were considered more technical, so they made documentaries and technical films. There was UCLA across, and then there was NYU and CCNY. There were about five film schools in the country, and UCLA was the RD one. And so I went to UCLA and it was occupied during World War II. At UCLA, there were bungalows near Sunset Boulevard that were built by the army and had some purpose that wasn't part of the school. Then it got absorbed by the school, and that was the movie department. The students were pretty much 100% men, except for maybe just a few. I remember I was amazed when I went because one of the new students was a Swedish woman named Ingrid Thulene, who had been a star in Bergman films, and she went to UCLA to become a director. This goddess Bergman there. And there were two or three other girls, you know, so I was there in this new crop. I was the only one who had come from theater. So, you know, in fairness, I noticed that movie directors who don't come from theater, who or who were not ex actors, tend to not know a lot about acting, which is interesting. And because obviously the two most important things of movies, the essential the oxygen and hydrogen, is writing and acting. I mean, you can have. If you have good writing and acting, you can have terrible photography, terrible music score, terrible sound effects, terrible everything. The movie can still be good. But if you don't have good acting or writing, you can have the greatest score, you can have the greatest photography. And it's not a movie can't possibly be good. So I knew that from my theater background. And there were a lot of older guys who were more senior in the UCLA film school. And there was limited equipment. So like an editing machine, for example. They would take the editing machine and lock it in their editing room. So they always had it. And the new kids didn't, you know, how to scrounge to get an editing machine. So whereas theater, my experience in the theater was as a group experience. You all worked together and then you went and had pizza together and you had a crush on some girl that you didn't tell her you had a crush on. And it was the opposite in movies. Everyone was a loner. Everyone was alone with their editing machine. And in fact, my company, American Zortrope, was basically introducing a more theater culture to film. You know, in our company, all the film, we all were together, we would go eat together and we would, you know, help each other on each other's films, which is what my generation of filmmakers is still like. You. You never hear someone in my generation, my colleagues, say a bad thing about another director in that there's a colleagueship that's really nice.
- [43:12]
Interviewer
Who were the other young directors in your group?
- [43:16]
Francis Ford Coppola
Well, there was a brilliant, brilliant director named Carol Ballard. He made later the film the Black Stallion and Fly Away Home. And there was a very crazy, but in his own way brilliant character named Dennis Jacob. There was extreme, the only one who sort of made it a teeny bit in the movie business, other than Carol Ballard, who over time is greatly appreciated. There was a guy named Noel Black, who was a very nice gentleman, and he had a little bit of a career other than that. My generation, there's me Kind of, in a way.
- [43:58]
Interviewer
Tell me the story of Zoetrope. What did you envision?
- [44:02]
Francis Ford Coppola
I'm about five years older than these colleagues. So George Lucas is about five years younger than me. Except for Carol Ballard, he's four years older than me. But pretty much everyone, even Marty, is about probably five years younger than me. They're all about four or five years. John Milius. And what happened was I won what was called at UCLA the Goldwyn Award. And that was sort of like the Nobel Prize to UCLA writers, mostly novelists. I was the first screenplay ever to win it. Goldwyn Award was $2,000. And I was living on a dollar a day. So it was a lot of money. And it was also immediately, since it was a screenplay that won, every agent in town wanted to represent me to be a screenwriter. And I got a job as a screenwriter working for a company, a famous man named Ray Stark. And I had been an assistant also to Roger Corman. When I was poor, I learned a lot about filmmaking from Archer Corman. Any rate, one thing had led to another and I was now directing a Hollywood picture. I was. I was, you know, 25, I had two kids and I was directing a movie called Finian's Rainbow at Warner Brothers starring Fred Astaire as an older man. But he was a wonderful person. And a young woman named Petula Clark. And then in England.
- [45:32]
Interviewer
She's great.
- [45:32]
Francis Ford Coppola
Yeah, she's a great singer. She was a wonderful singer and a sweet, sweet lady. And then a crazy English guy named Tommy Steele. But it was a really cheap movie. Was like less than $2 million and was. I wanted to shoot it in real Kentucky where there really were people in the tobacco business. But I had to shoot it on the old sets of Camelot or all phony sets. I hate it. Anyway, one day I'm shooting and in those days the whole crew were, you know, grown up adults wearing suits and ties. Even the crew were like that. And I look on my left and there's a skinny kid watching. So at one point I went over to him and I said, what do you want? What are you looking at? He said, not much. I said, well, I said, okay. What are you doing? He said, well, I want a scholarship to observe what's going on at Warner Brothers. And this is what's going. But I'm really going to go to the animation department and. And, you know, Hanna Barbera were there or something. So I said, I'll tell you what. If because I liked having a young person, I was there with all these older men you know, I tell you what, why don't you come here every day and you can come and watch here? And all you have to do is one thing. He says, what? I said, you have just come up with a great idea every day. And he did. And that was George Lucas.
- [46:58]
Interviewer
Amazing.
- [47:00]
Francis Ford Coppola
He was so bright, and I knew it. So finally I said to him, you know, George, I have another movie that I want to make going across the country in a small little van with the editor and everything, and shoot whatever happens incorporated into the script. It's called the Rain People. If you come with me and we'll do it together, then the next film I'll do will be one you want to make. So he said, great. So I made this film called the Rain People even before the edit of Phineas Rainbow was done. I mean, I had left when I wanted, but I and wanted to get out of there. And we had, like, two little vans and another van with the editing machine in it. And we were in a position. We had a script. It was about a woman who leaves her husband. She loves him, but she doesn't want to be a wife, and goes on the road. And the idea is that we could make it, but if something's happening, if there's a, you know, emergency, and we could go 300 miles that way and incorporate it into it. So it was another slightly different kind of filmmaking. When I went to college, there was a football player that we all sort of loved whose name was Killer Kelly. And Killer Kelly had been so banged up that he had a metal plate in his head, and he was like a child. And. And. And. And the college just hired him to rake leaves. And I always used to see him, and my heart went out to this big man, you know, who was like a kid. And eventually they. They. I heard that they gave killer Kelly, like, $1,000 and basically said goodbye. So I met this young guy, like an actor named Jimmy Khan, and I told him the story. And my idea was that there's a guy, he's hitchhiking, and that this housewife picks him up. Maybe she wants to have an affair, I don't know. But she becomes sort of saddled with this person dependent on her. And that was what the story. But the idea was that we could go anywhere we wanted to. You know, there was a mine disaster in Virginia. We went there and incorporated that. Or there was a parade in Memphis, and we got. He wandered through the break. So it was a style of filmmaking. So George and I did that. But essentially, we had a whole film Company. We had all the equipment, we had all the people, and we ended up doing the final scenes in Kansas. I think I forget the town, but the town fathers of Kansas said, if you guys stay here, we'll get you a studio and you can have. But we realized we were a mobile film company. And so one thing led to another and George was from Modesto, so to him San Francisco was the big city. And I wanted to get out of LA because I wanted that control that was on the movie business to go away. So we decided to take the whole unit and just. I had a house and a summer house. I sold them and we made a sort of a. Kind of a studio of sorts with sound and everything in San Francisco. And that was Americans. And then George wanted to call it the Transamerica Sprocket Works. And I had visited, when I bought the equipment, a Danish company called Lanterna Film. I wanted to call it, you know, American Lanterna, you know, or. Or, you know, magic Lantern. And eventually we went back and forth and we called it American Zoetrope. And with the idea was it was this group of filmmakers and it wasn't just me making the film. It was. George was gonna make one. John Milius was going to make one, a man named John Cordy. Did you ever hear of John Corty? K O R T Y. He was a important filmmaker in San Francisco. And so that's how it happened.
- [50:58]
Interviewer
So when you were 25 years old and directing your film, were there many other 25 year old directors who came from film school at that time? Was that a real thing?
- [51:09]
Francis Ford Coppola
There was one who was someone I admired immensely, who was young, who had directed the Sonny and Cher movie. And he was from Chicago. He didn't really come from a film school, but he really impressed me. And we were always up for the same thing, but we were good friends. His name was Billy Friedkin and he had made a film that I thought was the highest thing you could do. He made a film, the People vs. Paul Crump. Did you ever hear that movie?
- [51:41]
Interviewer
I've not.
- [51:41]
Francis Ford Coppola
It was a black guy was. Was going to be executed for murder in Chicago and was not guilty. I mean, this is the gist of it. And Billy made a film about it called the People versus Paul Crump. And it was so effective that he got pardoned or he didn't. He didn't get killed. And I said, if you can make a film that saves somebody's life, my hat's off to you. And. And that was Billy Friedkin, who later made the Exorcist and Sorcerer and the French Connection.
- [52:18]
Interviewer
Yeah. Did you become friends at that time?
- [52:20]
Francis Ford Coppola
Very good friends. But he was much hipper than I was. You know, I was married with three kids, and he was more. More adventurous and he was an incredible character. He. He. He married Jean Moreau for a while.
- [52:35]
Interviewer
Wow. Typically at that time, the directors would have been people who had done other jobs on the set and worked their way up and were maybe 50 or 60 years old, I imagine.
- [52:46]
Francis Ford Coppola
Yes. But there were some directors who were more interesting than that. There was another company, I forget, which was basically the offspring of studio executives. So they. I mean, they had a lot of inside. But Hal Ashby was a director who had been an editor who was very advanced and he made some wonderful films. And that's when a lot of the Corman people I knew, co. Like Nicholson was always in the Corman pictures, but he became very important. And Dennis Hopper, who later was in my apocalypse, Dennis Hopper was a handful. He was amazing. He was in Rumble Fish.
- [53:30]
Interviewer
Tell me about Roger Corman and that whole world.
- [53:32]
Francis Ford Coppola
The Corman world, The Corman world was before all this happened. I was very poor film student and I was living in a tiny little place. I had gone to military school for a while. In fact, the same military school that Donald Trump went to, New York Military Academy. And I ran away. I went AWOL and didn't want to stay there. And my father never forgave me for that because he had borrowed the money on one of those deals where you pay and he still had to pay even though I wasn't there. So he said, I'm going to have nothing to do with your college. So I had about A$25 a day to live on beside this little hovel I lived in. And that meant I kind of had 25 cents for breakfast, 50 cents for lunch, and then I would eat Kraft macaroni and cheese dinners every night because that was it, you know. So I was very extremely poor. But there was some fabulous faculty members. One was a woman who. My directing teacher, who was a famous woman, really named Dorothy Arsener. Have you ever heard of her? She was the only woman director in Hollywood for. In the 30s and 40s. She directed Crawford and she was a great. She was a woman and she was my director here. She was. I mean, everyone at UCLA so respected her. To this day, I will not refer to her as anything but Ms. Arsner because she was so fabulous. So I noticed on the bulletin board, you know, I was looking for some way to make some money and that Night, I was a busboy at Kelbo's restaurant. And the thing said, call this number for assistant of Roger Corman. Some knowledge of Russian will be helpful. So, I mean, I saw October 10days shook the World. That was my knowledge of Russia. So I said. I called up and they said, we'll call you back and let you know if you get an appointment. Well, I hadn't paid my phone bill, so I didn't know. I was just in horror that I would get this call, but the phone wouldn't go through. Ultimately, I did get the call, and I went. And it was a very bright woman. So she hired me, and the job was to take this Russian movie he had bought. The Russian movie was very idealistic. In other words, it showed the cosmonauts seize the golden cosmonaut of hope for the future. And Roger said what I was told through this woman who was my boss, to take out all of the Golden Hope stuff and cut in monsters that they see. And he said he wanted a monster that looked like a great female organ, and ultimately the male organ gets swallowed by it. So my job was to do this. So I was in every day. If I couldn't speak Russian, I was doing the, you know, writing a new to loop it into English. But I would get there very early and slump myself over the Moviola. So when she and Roger came in, they would see, like, I had been there all night, which I hadn't. So ultimately, I did this ridiculous job, and it was released as Battle beyond the sun or something. So ultimately, she gave me her thumbs up, and Roger offered me to be his assistant. And he offered me, I think, $75 a week. When I complained, he said when he had an assistant job, he got $40 a week. Any rate, I became his assistant. And that meant, basically, I had to wash his car. I had a. He had a lawn with sod. I had to move the sod. And then. But finally, he. He was going to make a movie with Vincent Price. Of course I had. I knew who Vincent Price was. And what he did is the company making the movie. He had them hire me because I was on this payroll of this. This AIP studio. But I would only work. I would work as the dialogue director. So in other words, I would run the lines with Vincent Price and these other actors who were in it. But I was a theater student, so. So he said, well, you can stage it if you want. And he would shoot, like seven pages a day. So, I mean, he just would go through it. And so I was there ahead of him with Vincent Bryce, reading the lines and then setting it up. And then he. They would shoot it, which was incredible. But at 12:30, they all broke for lunch. I had to then go back and be his assistant. In other words, what he had done is he had them pay me, but he then got me being the assistant for free. And so at one point he said to me, do you know anyone who knows how to do sound? And I said, of course I know how to do sound. Because he was going to make a picture in Europe and he wanted to take someone there to be the sound guy. If also, if someone went on one of those trips for Roger, if he. If the person bought a car. In those days, we used to buy cars that you buy. A Volkswagen in Germany was cheaper. So if you bought a car then and you agreed to take the people around on the film of the car, he'd give you $300. Well, that's when I won the Goldwyn, where I had $2,000. I bought an Alfa Romeo sports car car and picked it up in Europe. But of course, Roger didn't like it because I could only take one person. I was hoping I'd get a girl that would. But instead I took one of the Israeli guys, this guy named Yoshi Gross, his name. He was a great big guy from Israel, and he was the cousin of another Israeli guy named Menachem Golan. And this Joseph Gross was wonderful. He said, I know you're unhappy to have me in the car, but we'll have fun. I'll tell you a few jokes, you'll love it. And he was right. And we driving, you know. So I drove all around with Yoshi Gross. Bottom line is that everyone knew that Roger, after the company made a film, would use all the stuff paid for and make another film for himself. But he was called back to make a film called the Raven with Peter Laurie and Vincent Price. So we all knew that there was this whole unit that he would probably could sell him on making a picture. And in those days, Psycho had just come out. So I just wrote one page. I wrote the key scene of a Psycho kind of movie. Everyone wanted to get the job, but basically Roger chose mine and sent me, said, okay, can you do this? I'll give you $20,000 to make the. I mean, not give me the budget, 20,000. I'll make the film and I'll send this lady with you because I'm going to put the money in two names for co signers. And I suggest you make it in Ireland, because, you know, they all speak English and, you know, so I take my Alfa Romeo and I go to Ireland and I go to where there's this little studio in a place called County Wicklow, and I meet an English guy there, and he says, what are you doing? And I said, I'm making a movie for Roger Corman. He says, well, what's it about? I said, well, here's the one page. I hadn't written the script yet. He said, tell you what, I'll wanna buy the English rights. And he said, what do you want for them? And I said, $20,000. So now I had $40,000. So when I told Roger about it, he said, well, send me the $20,000 back. And he knows he wanted to own the picture for free. Instead, what I did is I told the lady he had said, I said, we got to deposit this check in the bank account, co sign it, and I put the whole $40,000 in the bank account under only my name, and I made the movie for $40,000. So Roger was plenty pissed off, but then when he saw it, he more or less liked it. And. And that was a film that he called dementia 13, which was technically the first real film I ever made. And you know who loves that film is. Who's the great writer who writes scary stuff? Stephen King. That was one of his favorite movies, Dementia 13.
- [62:04]
Interviewer
Do you remember when you first saw Psycho? Did it feel like a different movie when you saw it?
- [62:09]
Francis Ford Coppola
Oh, I thought it was. Scared the hell out of me. I mean, it really were. I mean, Hitchcock, you know, Hitchcock never had great acting in his films, but, you know, Psycho worked like gangbusters then. Vertigo. I mean, Vertigo I thought was incredible when I was a kid, but the best acting in a Hitchcock film is Strangers on a Train or the Wrong Man.
- [62:35]
Interviewer
Yeah. Tell me about Vincent Price.
- [62:38]
Francis Ford Coppola
He was a wonderful man. He was really just like what you imagine, a great thespian. He was. I had seen him in a favorite film of mine and my brother's. My big brother who was an important figure in my life. Did you ever see a movie with Vincent Price called the Baron of Arizona?
- [62:59]
Interviewer
I have not.
- [63:00]
Francis Ford Coppola
Oh, it's Samuel Fuller. It's great. But I loved Vincent Price from the Baron of Arizona, so I was in awe of him. He was a wonderful man. He had been in a film that I. He was great in called Champagne for Caesar. I remember that I saw when I was a kid, and I always remembered this character that Vincent Price played. My brother used to take me to the movie So I love people like Vincent Price and all the, all the Korda films made in England. You know, Four Feathers and the Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, Unbelievable Michael Powell films.
- [63:40]
Interviewer
You described making the Rain People. How different was that than what other people were doing in terms of making movies at that time?
- [63:50]
Francis Ford Coppola
It was quite, quite different. We were a mobile unit and we were incorporating and I was rewriting, I was rewriting and we were editing as we were going, the story as it came along. And originally I had a part for an actor named Rip Torn. You remember Rip Torn?
- [64:11]
Interviewer
Yeah. Fantastic.
- [64:12]
Francis Ford Coppola
He was great. And he was in my film with Geraldine Page on you're a Big. My first movie that I made. So I had made a deal with Rip Torn to be this motorcycle cop in the movie that she has a fling with. Sort of. It doesn't quite work out. And Rip Torn was telling me that he was a character and he wanted the. He wanted me to buy him a motorcycle and then he would do it. So then I would buy. I bought him the motorcycle, but it was stolen. So he said, well, you got to replace it. So I bought a used motorcycle. And he got all upset about. In the end, at the last minute, he bails on me. I have no one and I have the part. So Jimmy Khan tells me about a guy he worked with in an Altman film named Robert Duval. And the last minute I'm able to get Bobby Duvall to be the motorcycle cop in the Rain. By the way, George Lucas also shot a 16 millimeter documentary about the whole making of the Rain People, called Filmmaker, which you can get.
- [65:18]
Interviewer
Would you recommend to anyone who wanted to be a director to study theater first learn about acting?
- [65:26]
Francis Ford Coppola
Oh, without a doubt. Not only that, I tried to get every film school I ever visit to have first year directing students not make short films, but do one act plays. Because if they do one act plays, they get to see the result in front of an audience right away. If they make a short film, they get bogged down in post production and end up not seeing the short film for eight months. And they don't benefit from seeing how an audience react. Also, in theater you learn about acting, and in film school you don't learn about acting. In fact, traditionally, every school, every university that has a theater department and a cinema department, they don't get along, they don't work together. Even in Poland or in some other country, there's a natural disassociation and it's cultural. It's that, you know, the, the cinema people think that theater People are phonies, you know. And so, darling, it's a funny thing. I really worked hard at UCLA recently to bring the cinema and film people together with some degree of success.
- [66:36]
Interviewer
It's a great idea. I imagine even learning about cinema probably would make the theater better as well.
- [66:43]
Francis Ford Coppola
No question. Cinema is the child of theater. I mean, and it goes back to the Greeks and perhaps before the Greeks. There's so much to learn that we, you know, that we, we hand down. But. But it's funny also, you think that the cinema students would welcome having some actors for their films. And I, I know so, so few cases of where, where good actors from the UCLA film school worked with a filmmaker, but they got married. So that was Caleb Deschanel, wonderful cinematographer from usc and his wife Mary Jo was in the theater department when you.
- [67:25]
Interviewer
Moved Zoetrope to San Francisco after the rain. People tell me about setting up shop and tell me what happened next with Zoetrope. What was the vision for it and what happened?
- [67:35]
Francis Ford Coppola
We didn't quite get what we really wanted. I had wanted. My idea was to buy, with the mortgage, of course, a big white elephant mansion. Reason is that all those bedrooms and things are perfect. I saw a place in Denmark like that that was right on the water. And it was this wonderful film company called Lanterna Film. And it was all kids working together, boys and girls, you know, editing and stuff. And a big mansion is perfect. All the facilities in there. And then sometimes they even had a. Something related to a entertaining room that you could shoot in. So we were looking for old broken down mansions that we couldn't find anywhere. They wouldn't sell it to us. We had a lot of problems being vetted. And so finally there was a south of, you know, San Francisco at all in those days, south of Market Street. There was the south of Market street area, which was a little seedier. And there were some warehouses and there was a record company that was there on Folsom street and they were looking for someone to share the lease. And I made a deal where we would have a place for our truck to come in and all our equipment. And then we had a big area where we could, where we built the screening room and a mixing so we could mix sound. And it was this whole, this whole area and we had offices and George liked it, but he really had bought the idea of being in the country and having it more in there. So he was never 100% comfortable in this more. And I viewed it as a temporary thing that if we were more successful, that someday we would be able to buy some sort of place. So it was like that for about a year and a half, and then basically we just went broke. Like, I was offered the Godfather. I bought for myself a little house with my wife and then two children, my pregnant wife and two children. And George wasn't comfortable. He wanted to be somewhere. And so we got a place in Mill Valley, and George liked that. And so we had, like, a Mill Valley annex. When he made American Graffiti, of course, that made money. So finally George had some money, and then he. Ultimately, he bought property in a place ironically called Lucas Valley. But it was. He got a kick at that. It was Lucas Valley before he bought it, and he built his Skywalker Ranch there. And then he started becoming really successful. I mean, more commercially than me by far.
- [70:25]
Interviewer
What was your involvement in American Graffiti?
- [70:28]
Francis Ford Coppola
Well, I was unfortunate he couldn't get it off the ground without me. And I really liked the script. In fact, I had made the Godfather by then, and I had enough money. Merkin Graffiti was going to cost $700,000. And I went to the bank and I asked if I had enough my Godfather credit, could I have $700,000? And it was my wife who said to me, you know, Francis, someday you could certainly finance the film, but it should be your own film, and that. And the bank said, I'll give you the $700,000, but I want you to wait for a few days. Because we had a client who financed his own movie and lost it all. So basically, we got Universal to put up the money, and they were. They required that I be involved in it. And I. I was helpful on Graffiti. I helped with the casting because that was, you know, George didn't really know all those actors. And that was done by my associate, Fred Roos, and it was wonderfully cast. And he was shooting without a cinematographer at all. They were just shooting. And I went to his friend who liked him and got Caskill Wexler to come on American Groovy. So, I mean, I was there as the big brother.
- [71:53]
Interviewer
Were the songs written into the script?
- [71:55]
Francis Ford Coppola
He. That was his idea. It was the first time that the score of a movie. Yes, he had picked all those songs. And I remember we got all of those songs for $140,000. Today, you can't get one song for 100. He did many unusual things. Number one, he had the first score that was all basically rock and roll. And he's the first person at the end of the movie. When the movie ends, there's, like four lines about the main Characters that so and so went and did this so and so went to the Vietnamese War. That was George's all his innovation. No one had ever done it before. And when we show. When we showed the film preview to Universal, Universal sent up some executives and they saw the preview, and when it was over, they said, well, we're very disappointed. We really think it needs a lot of work. And I said to them, I said, are you kidding? I said, they loved it. I said, you ought to get on your knees and thank this young man for saving your job. Because. And then. Because if you don't want, I'll buy the film for you right now. Because I did have the ability to do it, even though my wife. I wish I had. Oh, no, I don't. Because, you know, my philosophy is, you win a few, you lose a few. It all comes out the same.
- [73:15]
Interviewer
That movie really impacted that music as well. Like, the whole revival of 50s music really began with that movie. And to this day, you can hear a radio station that plays music from the 50s.
- [73:31]
Francis Ford Coppola
Right?
- [73:32]
Interviewer
That was not the case before that movie.
- [73:34]
Francis Ford Coppola
Well, there was a great line in it that he had that George wrote, which is rock and roll went downhill ever since Buddy Holly died.
- [73:43]
Interviewer
Tell me about John Milius.
- [73:45]
Francis Ford Coppola
He was extraordinary. He was. He was. You know, the USC guys all had specialty. Walter Murch was sound, Cleo Deschanel was photography. George was everything. And John Milius was their writer. And he was this flamboyant guy who just. It just tumbled out of him. You know, he was. And you know, you know what happened to him. You don't know what happened to him. Tragically, about eight years ago, he was. He was on a blood thinner. His girlfriend said, oh, that blood thinner stuff is nonsense. I think you should just drink certain kind of milk product. She interfered and she stopped him from taking it. He had a stroke and now he can't speak anymore. And then he has, fortunately has a. I mean, he is heartbreaking. He has to write on a slate, but he's got a young lady who really takes care of him and loves him. And I mean, his head works. I know, but he just can't, you know, it's a stroke.
- [74:52]
Interviewer
Did he write the original script for Apocalypse Now?
- [74:55]
Francis Ford Coppola
Totally, totally. It's mostly his script. I didn't even. What I did is I had a copy of Heart of Darkness with me, and between the script, I would use my underlying copy of Heart of Darkness to do it. In fact, like the Dennis Hopper character in the movie, he wasn't in the script at All. But when I saw how wired Dennis Hopper was, I invented. There was a character in Hard Darkness called the Russian who's sort of like the sayer of Kurtz, you know, the Prophet or whatever. And I invented that character with Dennis Hopper right during the movie. And that became a. Remember the Dennis Hopper part in Apocalypse? Yeah. Of course, that didn't exist. That was out of the book. But even, like the music that people think of my family, a classical musician. It was my idea to play Wagner through the attack. That was John Mears idea.
- [75:52]
Interviewer
There's a story that you shot for several weeks and then took a break and went back to San Francisco and then rethought the film during that break. Is that what happened?
- [76:04]
Francis Ford Coppola
Not exactly. What happened is when we were casting, some of the people I liked weren't available. And my best bet was Harvey Keitel, who's a great actor, but Harvey Keitel is in a school of acting that is very active. You know, sort of De Niro does it, too. But in other words, it's not a reflective guy looking. It's a guy being active. So when he actually started shooting, I felt it was wrong. I haven't done this many times, and I. And that's the worst thing you could do is to change an actress that you start. But. But I really felt it was wrong. And now weeks had gone by. I mean, I was. My neck. I was. The debt was all mine. In those days, interest was 21%. So I was, you know, scared, and I felt I had to make that decision. And no, nothing against Harvey Keitel. He's a wonderful actor, but he felt it was. It was that type of in your face that he's good at, that this wasn't going to be that. So I. Marty Sheen had tried out for it, but he wasn't available. But by the time this happened, I went back and met people and Marty Sheen was available and I made the decision. And then when I did have Martin Sheen, who had a nice face and was someone that could be someone just watching, then I felt I needed something early in the picture to show what a complex human being he was. And so I. I invented that scene where he looks at himself in the mirror and smashes. And he's totally, obviously a weird guy. So that throughout the movie, when you see him looking at the jungle and stuff, you know that this is a person that's not just a regular, simple person.
- [78:10]
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- [79:38]
Interviewer
How often do things happen or come up during the process of making something where you realize there's an opportunity to do something that wasn't planned that's actually better than what was planned?
- [79:51]
Francis Ford Coppola
Well, you know, obviously there are many, many film directors, film artists would it go? And therefore there are many, many different methods. I mean, Hitchcock's method was one that was very controlled. He would, he was a brilliant artist. He could make storyboards, as it were, or he could design the film and then, and then do it just like he designed it. So with every filmmaker, there's the potential of another way to do things. According to him. My style is sort of like, to me, making a film is like asking a question and the answer is the film. In other words, I don't know the answer. And sometimes, as in, obviously, I knew how to make a gangster picture because I made a few of them. But when I made Apocalypse Now, I had no idea how to make it. And if you don't know how to make a movie and you admit it and listen to the movie, the movie will tell you how to make it. It will do it for you. And that's what I have found in many of my projects to be. And in a way, I deliberately create situations that cause accidents, sometimes big accidents. I don't mean accidents that endanger life, because I never would do that. But in other words, I create accidents or do things and then make use of what happens so that the film has in it this excitement of it. Give you an example, like in the Godfather, Marlon is at the beginning of the movie first scene, at one point, I saw a cat. It was not a movie cat. It was not an idea that was in the, you know, it was just a cat studio cat. It was a cat. On the third or fourth take, I just Picked it up and put it in his hand. And he didn't say, what do you want me to do with this? Or I didn't say. I just put the cat in his hand, and that's the take in the movie. So I like the actors to know that whatever happens might be something we want. You know, it's just my style. I mean, and I don't care. I mean, Marlon once said something I thought was so interesting. He said to me about acting. He said, you can't care, or they'll see it on your face. So, in a way, as a director, I don't care if I lose all the money I have. I don't. I didn't do this to make money. I did this to do something more beautiful than making money. And, of course, I have to feed my kids and all that like everybody else, but that's not my high priority. So I'll take chances in movies, and sometimes those chances give beautiful results, sometimes they don't.
- [82:42]
Interviewer
Yeah. You know, enough to know it's out of your control, and you'll set the stage for something wonderful to happen.
- [82:51]
Francis Ford Coppola
Right. But it sort of is under your control because you're not protecting yourself. I mean, you're doing it without a net. And, you know, the stakes are high in some. I mean, not with human life. I have never killed any animal or creature in my life for any reason. I'm trying to get to the point where I'll brush away mosquitoes. That's the hardest one. But, like in the horse's head or the caribou being killed in Baka, I had nothing to do with that. I just said, well, if it's going to happen, can I. Can I photograph it?
- [83:29]
Interviewer
Tell me about directing Brando.
- [83:32]
Francis Ford Coppola
Well, Brando is very easy to direct because the first thing he does is he sits down and puts his hand like that, and he's asking basically where the frame is. And then he'll proceed to act with whatever in that space, and he'll just do it. And you can say things to him like, make it more angry, make it less angry, make it funny. He doesn't like to have acting talk. He just, you know, make it louder, made it softer. And basically, I. I always worked with Brando through props is, though. Whatever. I know that whatever I put in front of him, he's going to use, but he. He. He doesn't panic. In other words, if, like, here I am now, let's say a herd of buffalo were to run behind me, he would. And that happened. He'd say, oh, look at the buffalo. You know, he wouldn't say, well, I better get out of here. He uses anything and everything when they're shooting.
- [84:31]
Interviewer
I never heard that idea before, that he would want to know where the frame was and that he was aware of the framing and wanted to make everything work within the frame. I would think of him, the method, as being more free and emotional, and he would go where he goes, and the camera would have to follow him because he would be free.
- [84:54]
Francis Ford Coppola
But he know. He knew what he was doing. Like, for example, in Apocalypse now, the problem was. I mean, I'm saying wonderful things about Brando, but the truth is, he was like a big kid in terms of, like, if he. If. If you said, look, I don't want you to eat that ice cream, he would eat the ice cream. So when he came for Apocalypse now, he knew that he was supposed to. He was a Green Beret colonel, that he couldn't be a fat Green Beret colonel, but he came way overweight. But then he knew that. And I won't recount the many steps of this, but basically what that meant is that that's what made us shoot him in the dark with just a beam of light. But he had just that beam of light. But, boy, did he use it. He poked his head in it. He poked his head out of it. He. In other words, whatever he was going to use, he used it creatively.
- [85:51]
Interviewer
It's also. That's a great example of problem solving, because you wanted the military guy to be in shape when he showed up, and he wasn't. So you shoot him in the dark. And it's iconic because of the fact that you were working around something that you wouldn't have chosen, Right?
- [86:14]
Francis Ford Coppola
In other words, when I first realized that he was so big, I said, why don't we go the other way to him? I said, why doesn't he be. He got big, and we show him with a mango in one hand and a native girl in the other. He said, no, no, no. In other words, he was shy about being overweight. He didn't want to know. My original thing is, if it's. If it's raining and you can't shoot, figure out how to do the scene in the rain. If he's fat and he's a Green Beret guy, say he's a Green Beret guy who got fat and see him eating all the time, and. And he's. He's given into his senses. You could have done it that way. But people who are overweight, be it Marlon Brando or Orson Welles. No one who's fat likes to be fat. And they're. They're shy and embarrassed by it. And Miranda was no exception.
- [87:07]
Interviewer
How recent was the Vietnam War to Apocalypse Now? The filming?
- [87:11]
Francis Ford Coppola
It was going on, I think. Really? Oh, yeah, it was. I mean, it was. Right. It was near the end there, but. But it was still going on. Wow. You know, the U.S. the guy who was minister, the Defense Secretary of Defense was. What the hell was his name? He had been it twice, but they totally said, no help, no helicopters, nothing. America, we want nothing to do with Apocalypse. So I found the helicopters and stuff in the Philippines. Rumsford. Secretary Rumsford. He was not a good guy. I don't. No.
- [87:48]
Interviewer
Would you describe yourself as confident or insecure?
- [87:52]
Francis Ford Coppola
Well, I'm insecure. I mean, I don't know of any artist who's totally common, you know. You know that you're walking on a ledge that you could fall off at any time.
- [88:06]
Interviewer
Would you say you're hard on yourself?
- [88:09]
Francis Ford Coppola
All I know is this. Right now, there isn't a human being. Guys who did terrible things to me that I haven't forgiven in my totally. Because I say, well, they had their reasons. I wasn't on their mind. But the person that's hardest to forgive is yourself.
- [88:29]
Interviewer
Do you think of yourself as a perfectionist?
- [88:35]
Francis Ford Coppola
I don't think of myself as a perfectionist, but I think I am a perfectionist. I have a counter right over there. I'm looking at it. There's nothing on it but a coffee machine and a thing. And someone's always putting a thing of basil over there because there's not a lot of room here. And I like it the way it is. And I don't even want this beautiful thing of basil over there. I want it the way I want it.
- [89:00]
Interviewer
Yeah. How different is the finished movie of Patton than your script?
- [89:07]
Francis Ford Coppola
It's very similar to my script. In fact, I would love someday for someone to take the movie because I shared the credit with someone else, which I don't mind. It's just like that script.
- [89:21]
Interviewer
I want you to walk me through making a movie. What happens when you make a movie? How much is intentional? Who brings what? How does it change?
- [89:29]
Francis Ford Coppola
Okay, well, the first thing is you're getting pregnant with the movie. So, like I am right now, and I'm taking American writer that I just am a great admirer of. I just think she's the greatest is Edith Wharton. I mean, there are many American writers I admire, but many of them are women. But Edith Wharton and she wrote a not so great book, one of the ones that is less than her master. I mean, she mean House of Mirth and Age of Innocence and Ethan Fromman, all these. But she has a screwy little book called the Glimpses of the Moon. And I'm. There's something about it fascinates me. But years ago I directed when I was just doing the Godfather, everyone was offering me chances to like direct an opera, direct a play. I mean, I was getting all these possible things and I figured, well, I'll do it, you know, I'll learn something. So I directed a play called Private Lives by Noel Coward. Wonderful play. And I mean, I came to love it because I directed it, but it's really a beautiful play and I did it in a very crazy way. In other words, do you know Private Lives at all? No. Coward play. Well, it's very funny and it's about some two honeymooning couples looking over the French river. And it's always done with them leaning on the ballots, looking at the sea with the audience being where the sea is because there's all this really funny Noel Coward lines. And what I wanted is I wanted to do it around the other way, where you're looking at it and the other way so you're seeing them against the gorgeous view movie director, you know, So I did it that way. And then there's a lot of music coming in, record players and stuff. So instead of them doing that, I had a pianist on the apron of the stage doing it live. And. And I did this. I did this play this way. And it was very successful, it was very well received and I loved it and I loved Noel Coward. So somehow I decided I'm going to do this Edith Wharton adaptation of this movie. I'm going to make as if I'm doing Noel Coward. There's no connection. The only connection between Noel Coward and Edith Wharton is me. So now I'm making it and I wrote a script and the ending of the Edith Wharton novel is very weak. That's what people. Why it's not one of our biggest ones, but it is weak. But I came up with a way that's not weak. And so I'm sort of just. Now here's exactly what I'm doing. I have a script which has filled with Noel Coward songs and a sort of a style that is not unlike the Private Lives that I. It's as though Noel Coward adapted a Edith Wharton book and is now making it in this movie in England, which is why I'm here. You Know, because I'm. I'm now actually in pre production of that movie. So now I'm deciding what style I'm going to make. So I don't have any money because I invested all the money I borrowed to make Megalopolis is basically. It's gone. You know, I mean, it'll. I think it'll come back over 15, 20 years, but I don't have it now, so I don't have any money. So I don't. I have to do it very cheap, which I'm doing. And I'm starting to have people come over. I'm in this house where you see. Which I borrowed from some person who I knew in Tulsa, and I'm sort of just working with nothing, but I'm starting to actually make the movie already and that I can see how it could work. And I feel it does work. It's beautiful. And these Noel Coward songs, which are 70 years old, are so beautiful when even, I mean, people don't realize what he did. I mean, he. Those guys like Cole Porter and Noel Coward and Rogers in Hart and, you know, Jerome Kern. I mean, these. This music is endlessly wonderful. So I'm seeing something that has no reason to exist except. I love it.
- [93:53]
Interviewer
Yeah. What was it about the book that fascinated you?
- [93:57]
Francis Ford Coppola
It's. The premise is so absurd and wonderful. The premise, if I may tell you, is that, you know, in previous marriage was always about business and affairs of state. And, you know, I mean, you. This idea, you meet someone, you fall in love and you get married. That's. That's very unusual. It wasn't like that, you know, and in the 30s and in the 20s, the marriageable group was so specific. Just in other words, you couldn't be part of it because you couldn't get past the butler in certain crowds. In other words, you had to have a certain education. There was a way that it had to be a certain group. And in this story and glimpses of the Moon, it's about this American group of these marriageable people. And because America had divorce and many European countries didn't, what the Americans would do, they would go see people in England and in Bay Ritz and France and equally wealthy people and stuff. They'd be married, but they'd have affairs. And then if they had an affair with someone who was wealthier than their husband or their wife, they would get a divorce and then they would marry upwards. And so it was this present. Well, there are two people in this crowd who are penniless. They lost all their money Their family lost all their money in the stock crash. Or whether they have all the elegance, they have all the intelligence, they have everything, but they don't have any money. But they're allowed to be in the crowd because they. They'll help out in. In a way, and they're accepted. And they have this crazy idea that. She has the idea that, why don't they just get married? And he said, well, what we live on. He said, well, we'll get all these wedding gifts from our friends, and they'll let us go stay at all their houses in Venice and places and stuff. And then after, you know, the. When the money runs out, then we'll help each other make a better match, which is what we're doing now. So basically, they do it. And the movie is, of course, about the inevitable fact is now the money's running out, but they love each other. But they've made this arrangement, and it's heartbreaking to them, you know, but of course, it. I won't tell you, but it's very beautiful. I think what happens in the story.
- [96:31]
Interviewer
Are all of your movies autobiographical?
- [96:35]
Francis Ford Coppola
I think so. You know, I'm starting to think worse. I'm starting. You know, there's two ways of viewing life. You're doing it. I'm sure when you're young, you view it from left to right. You're a young person looking out at what the future is going to be for yourself. But then there's a point as you get older where you switch and you're looking right to left and you're looking at that young person who you know is becoming you. There's philosophers that Heidegger writes about this. So I'm at the point where I'm now looking at life from the point of view of where I am now 85, and thinking about this kid who is so insecure and his mother probably didn't love him, and all this stuff from this point of view. And then it occurs to me something even more strange, which is, what if I really am a solipsist? What if I'm all that exists? You know, we all learn about that. You know, Cardinal Barclay and solipsism and stuff is, what if all the people like my wife, who I lost, I love so much? What if she was just a chip of my consciousness? And so I. I tell you why, Rick. I feel that because when I made the Godfather, I had no power. I was young. I was like Michael Corleone. When I made Apocalypse Dao, I was in Hawk for $21 million. Interest was 21%. I had to be like Kurtz. And then I made a film called Gardens of Stone about a man who creates this young soldier. And then he's killed. And I lost my son. I said, wait a second, what's going on here? Do I have to live? Every movie I make now I. I make a film about a man who loses his son, and in the first week I lose my son. I didn't. It wasn't. I wasn't even. So I think this. This is. Something weird is going on. Maybe my. Maybe I am a solipsist movie director and I'm just making all of this stuff. So I put into Google, I think I'm a solipsist. What should I read? And the answer came up. Read Andy Kaufman's novel Ant Kind. Did you ever hear of Ant Kind? You know who? Charlie. Charlie. Charlie Kaufman.
- [98:59]
Interviewer
Charlie Kaufman, yes.
- [99:00]
Francis Ford Coppola
He wrote a novel called 700 page novel called Ant Kind. It's incredible. It's hilarious. So now I'm convinced that my life. The only way I can explain my life is that it's something Charlie Corkman wrote. Wow. It's the only. Only sense I can make out of it. Because a mind like that. Because otherwise, how did all this. How can I be living? Am I really a filmmaker making my life?
- [99:31]
Interviewer
Yeah. Nothing makes sense, really.
- [99:33]
Francis Ford Coppola
It really, you know, and there's good reason why it doesn't make sense. Because our brain is so hardwired for our survival that we don't really even see the world as it is. And there is. That's why, you know, there isn't the creator. There's the creator and the destroyer. That this idea of duality we have because it's helpful to our survival, but it isn't what the world really is. I don't think.
- [100:02]
Interviewer
Can you imagine by the limitation of not having money for this next film that you're making, that that could actually be a positive thing?
- [100:11]
Francis Ford Coppola
Sure. Yeah. Because I'm now making decisions. I'm. I did stuff in the last few days in this crazy house that. Not even my house, I bought it that was so beautiful. And every time they said, well, let's bring this because you don't have that, I said, no, we don't have any money. Well, let's do this. I know we can't. We don't have money. But we did everything we did without any money. And it was beautiful.
- [100:34]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [100:35]
Francis Ford Coppola
So I wouldn't have had it if I had money.
- [100:37]
Interviewer
How does new technology change filmmaking?
- [100:41]
Francis Ford Coppola
Well, that's an Interesting point, because I always make a point with my young apprentices that I want them to learn how it was when it was filmed, before it was digital. Just the same reason I teach people who, who are going to always drive automatic transmission what it is to drive a sticker, just so they understand it. And the reason you need to understand how filmmaking was when it was film is because so many of the techniques and traditions evolve for good reasons, which are now no longer necessary. So it's very hard for them to understand cinema making if they're born in a digital age. I have apprentices now. They're the filmmakers of the future. I have one from India, one from China. I mean, they're fantastic. And then you saw Megalopolis. You remember how the guy, what's his name, Caesar, has all these apprentices. Those were my apprentices. They're really filmmakers, all of them. And they were the only ones that could, I told everything that could criticize and have ideas and so. And they're brilliant.
- [101:52]
Interviewer
When did you start having apprentices? It's a great idea, by the way.
- [101:55]
Francis Ford Coppola
Well, I mean, George Lucas was not my apprentice, but I treated young people like that. Like that.
- [102:01]
Interviewer
Yes.
- [102:01]
Francis Ford Coppola
But I tell you right now, Rick, the way to save this wreck of a world is to include the young people, start giving them responsibility because that, you know, that right now they'll say, oh, those kids, all I care about is, is Minecraft and tick tock and stuff. That's because that's all they're allowed to do. You know, I would involve them earlier. I would like give 14 year olds the right to vote, but four votes would be one vote. And then 16 year olds, two votes would be one vote. In other words, I would get them in because they are capable of coming up with solutions that we're not capable of coming up with. I don't think, you know, all the great physicists who really did the incredible work in quantum physics, they were all 18, 19 years old. Just like girl gymnasts can only do that stuff at 14. Physicists can only do what that, what they're doing at 18. And even Einstein really was, you know, he worked for a while in the patent office, but he was. These are young, these young minds we have, we're wasting.
- [103:14]
Interviewer
When you were offered to do Godfather 2, was it obvious that you wanted to do it?
- [103:20]
Francis Ford Coppola
I didn't want to do it. In fact, at first I didn't accept. I said that I would. I said I want nothing to do with it except I would write it with Mario and I would choose a director when we had a concept and suggest them. And so then after a while, I told him, okay, I have the idea, I have the thing, and I have three conditions. And they said, well, who's the director you want? I said, well, he's Marty Scorsese. He wasn't in those days, so famous. And they said, absolutely not. I said, well, then forget it. So finally, Charlie Boudron got on the phone and said, fansis, I'll give you anything you want. He said, that's what it sounded like. I said, okay, number one, I want total control. I don't want to have to talk to Bob Evans or anyone. If I want to say I'm starting, I'll start. All I'll agree to is the limit of the budget. The second thing was, I want to call it The Godfather Part 2. I don't want to give it, you know, Son of the Godfather or anything like that. And number three, I said, I want a million dollars, which I never had. And so they came back, they said, well, we can give you the million dollars. You have total control. But everyone says that calling Godfather 2 is a mistake because people will think it's the second half of the movie they already saw. I said, then forget it. Now I'm the guy who started this. Spider Man 6. I'm so ashamed. Rocky V. I should be shot.
- [104:54]
Interviewer
What's incredible about it, though, is that looking at the history of cinema, sequels and series tend to not be as good as the original. But in the case of Godfather ii, some people argue it's better than the Godfather. That's a very unusual situation.
- [105:14]
Francis Ford Coppola
You know, it was. It's luck. I don't know. What was it? Look, I tell you one thing. We had a preview of Godfather Part 2 in San Francisco that the audience hated it. And they said, the acting is terrible. And I went to bed that night under the bed, so worried. And then it came to me. I said, the problem is that, you know, Godfather 2 was. Went between the past and the future, back and forth. And it was always planned to go, like, every 10 minutes. It's too fast. I should double it. I should make it go every 20 minutes, because the audience can't get yanked out of it. So the editors stayed up all night for three days and made 120 picture cuts to do that. And then we took the picture to San Diego, and the reaction was the opposite. They loved it. And then we took it to New York, and they loved it. Then the rest was successful. So, you know, movies are an illusion. And if you don't have the right. If they don't accept the illusion. Like for years they didn't accept Apocalypse Now. Gradually, Apocalypse now got terrible reviews, didn't get any Oscar nominations. One important critic, I think his name was Frank Rich, said it was the worst film ever made in Hollywood, you know, but little by little got used to it. So, I mean, I'm. You know, when you go out on a ledge, you have to accept that everyone's not going to like it. And it may take time. I mean, you know, the French Academy said what a good painting was, but, you know, poor guys like Matisse and everyone. You could give it away in those days. Now, of course, those are the paintings people want. They don't want the French Academy paintings. Yeah.
- [107:10]
Interviewer
Did you ever get notes from a studio executive that were helpful at any point in your life?
- [107:15]
Francis Ford Coppola
Yeah, yeah. No, there were. Yes. You know, you have to read through them and say, oh, that was. Even Evans, who I was a totally antagonistic with, was his idea to have John Marley play the Hollywood guy. And who was the, the. The police captain? Sterling Hayden. That was, that was Bob Evans idea.
- [107:40]
Interviewer
Tell me about your relationship with Evans.
- [107:42]
Francis Ford Coppola
In Godfather, he assigned a guy as his guy to mind me named Jack Ballard. He was this production guy with a bald head and he was horrible. Every. He was on my case every, every day saying, you're late, you have a meal pay. You can't do this. You know. Then at one point they told me that they were going to bring in an action director because they. It wasn't. There was no action in the movie. And I had to. Basically, I took my, my kid and my sister Tally, who was in the movie, and we went the weekend and made that scene where she breaks all of the crockery and stuff just to not have them bring in. They were always either firing me or replacing me. Once I was told on a Tuesday, the first day Brando came in, everyone said that they, they hated Brando's first day's work. And I said, well, look at. I said, it's, you know, he's. The first day. I mean, he's, you know, it's an actor. He give him a few days. I said, hey, what, I can go back. It's Tuesday. I can go right back in there and reshoot the scene. And they say, no, no, no, don't do that. And then one of the producers who was a friend of mine, said, you know, the reason they won't let you go in is because they're going to fire you this Friday. And, you know, they never fire a director in the middle of the week. They always fire him on Friday. So the new director has the weekend to come in on Monday. So they said they're going to fire me Friday. Who's they going to bring? They want your editor to be who had directed a picture. And I had. I loved this editor guy. I still do. He's gone, of course, and he had made a picture, and he asked me, would you hire my producers and different people and his crew to be your assistant director? Which I did. But they were conspiring all the time to get me fired and get him made. So they said, okay, they're going to fire this weekend. I knew that this editor, Aram Avakian, would never. He was my friend. I know he wouldn't have done that. He was worried about me. But I don't think he. I am sure he would not. He would not do that. So basically, I fired them all on the Tuesday that I told you this. And then I took Brando and I went back up there and I shot the scene again. So now they had to wait to see whether the scene was any better or not. You know. So this shook everyone up. Everyone was, I'm sure, can he do that? Can he fire everyone? Well, he did, you know, I didn't have the right to fire everyone. I just did it and said, okay, now we're going up and doing it. I just took that chance.
- [110:28]
Interviewer
Wow.
- [110:29]
Francis Ford Coppola
So, of course, then they saw the footage and they said, oh, the new stuff with Brando is much better. We think it's very good. But what's in the movie is the old one.
- [110:40]
Interviewer
When you finished the movie before it screened, what were your thoughts about the movie? Did you know it was going to be a big hit?
- [110:48]
Francis Ford Coppola
No, no, I was sure it was a flop because the last minute, Evans hated the music, and he ordered me to take the music out. And I said to him, I'm not going to take the music out. You can fire me and get a new director and have the new director put the music you want in, but I'm not going to take the music out. I love the music. So for about four days, Walter Murch was there with me because he was working with me for four days. We were in a stalemate where I wouldn't change. I mean, they could have just changed the music, but they didn't want to fire me. A week before the picture came out. So no one had ever seen the picture, no audience had ever seen the picture was always Paramount and Evans and the Inside guy saying, the picture isn't working. It's too long, it's too short. It was driving me crazy. So finally I say to him, to Bob Evans, I said, tell you what, this is what I'll do. Let's show it to a controlled group of people, which had never happened, and see if they like the music or not. And he said to me, who gets to decide whether they like the music or not? And I said, you do.
- [112:01]
Interviewer
Wow. Cause you knew.
- [112:03]
Francis Ford Coppola
No, I didn't know. I knew I loved you.
- [112:06]
Interviewer
No, but you knew that you wanted to get a real reaction. And if there was a real reaction, everybody would know the real reaction.
- [112:14]
Francis Ford Coppola
Yeah, but I didn't know I loved the music. But he was very. He hated the music and wanted Johnny Green to rediscover. I think the problem was he had promised Johnny Green. And I had this Italian guy, you know. Great. So anyway, they all came in, about 300 people, to a Paramount screening room. And it was the first time an audience saw the movie other than the. In, you know, the executives and stuff. And when it was over, it was incredible. And we said, what did you think of the music? And he said, the whole movie is great. What do you mean? And they were just. They weren't even talking about the music. They were talking about the picture. We've never seen anything like. It was wonderful. And the mute. And he said, the music, it was great. It was credible. And so finally, Evans conceded and he just had some music changes of, like when there's some. Some old source music when they fly into Las Vegas. And. And at that point, I then knew that I had. But another guy had seen the picture. That is like a Big Brother to me. Did you ever hear of a guy named Robert Towne? Yeah, he wrote Chinatown. You know, I always have this big brother figure in my life because I had a great big brother. And Bob Town was someone I looked up and he said. He's the first person who said, franz, the film is great. And he says, brando is great. He said, only needs one thing. And I said, what's that, Bob? He said, it needs a scene between Brando and Al Pacino. And I said, well, would you write it? He said, yes. And he did. And he wrote the scene. And when I won the Oscar, I said, bob Towne wrote the scene and did a lot of other great things. But, yeah, he was the only one who was encouraging. Everyone else thought it was a big flop. Even when I went, when it was opening, I had no idea what was going to happen. I Had no money. And so I accepted a job to rewrite the Great Gatsby film that they were doing with Redford. Because I had three kids and I was writing this and I was horrified because the Great Gatsby novel doesn't have a lot of dialogue in it. So I meant I had to make it up. And I had only a week to do it. So I'm calling my wife and she's in New York and she says, francis, the Godfather is going to open. They said it's going to be in five theaters because it's getting such good reaction. And she's telling me, my God, there are people going around the. The block waiting to see the Godfather. Says, I can't talk to you, Elliot. I gotta finish this script. And it was so crazy. The biggest success I ever had, which was of course the Godfather. I wasn't there because I was trying to write the script for the Great Gatsby.
- [115:05]
Interviewer
Was that Paramount screening the first time you got to see it on a big screen?
- [115:10]
Francis Ford Coppola
I showed it to all my friends, which was pretty much the same cut. All the film savvy people in San Francisco, no one said it was so great.
- [115:19]
Interviewer
Who was Al Ruddy?
- [115:21]
Francis Ford Coppola
Al Ruddy was a producer who, along with his partner Gray Frederickson, was making a film in San Francisco with Sydney Fury, I think. And he had a company called Alfran because he had a rich wife whose name was Francoise. And since the Godfather was basically an unimportant project to Paramount at that time, they. They got this Alfred, which was Al Ruddy, and his partner got the job. But Al Ruddy was never around. He was always cooking up. He made a big thing about the anti Italian. There was a mafia guy who started an anti Italian league. Al Ruddy was just never around. You know, he only showed around when there was a publicity still. And he's the guy who wrote the book that they made that show, the offer, which nothing happened where they said it was. Nothing happened the way they said it was. And nothing's happened with whom they said the picture. They had a movie star play Al Ruddy. And there's a nice still of him there, you know, with a guy with a beard that's supposed to be me. There's no real picture of Al Ruddy there because he was never there. Well, for example, in the offer they're showing everyone riding around in a studio, Paramount picture stuff. Paramount didn't own the studio in those days. We were in an office in Crescent and Beverly Hills, the studio. I never was in the studio because they didn't own it. You know who owned it?
- [116:58]
Interviewer
No.
- [116:58]
Francis Ford Coppola
The Vatican. The Vatican had a big Italian company, real estate company that invested in real estate and they owned the Paramount Store studio.
- [117:08]
Interviewer
That's amazing. How has the film business changed over the course of your life?
- [117:14]
Francis Ford Coppola
Well, I saw it change into the era of the so called Blockbuster. And then because of the outrageously overcharging cable fees that were initially done, the cable companies made so much money that they then bought the film industry. So that now the film industry is owned by people who bought from people who bought from people who bought from people who owned it. So the only thing the people who run the film studios are worrying about is the debt service. That they are hired and paid a lot of money to ensure that the company makes its debt service. And if it doesn't, they're fired. So that you're dealing with not only a company, but a whole antique system. In other words, like when there was a trolley car on Santa Monica Boulevard years ago when I was a kid. And when they removed the trolley car, they also removed the tracks because they never wanted a trolley car back. They wanted it to be buses. So there's the movie companies, but there's the tracks. The tracks are the Rotten tomatoes. And the ratings, in other words, all of the accoutrements that are the, the train tracks or the infrastructure is all controlled by these companies that are desperately trying to not go bankrupt. So that if you're not on their side, if you're not in their world, then you're going to get, you're not going to get four stars, you're going to get no stars, you're not going to get. It's like the people. For example, another analogy. It is possible to make jet fuel for aircraft that will not pollute the earth. But to do that, they say we're up for it, we want any kind of solution to that, we'll buy it. But what they don't say is that the tracks, the infrastructure, what takes the fuel from the tank to the airplane is what they own. And what would work would be hydrogen. But their system can't operate because it doesn't hold hydrogen at those low temperature. So in other words, it's, it's not just the people who own the existing systems, they also own the infrastructure that supports it. That's more important to them.
- [119:35]
Interviewer
Do you know how the Godfather was received in Italy?
- [119:39]
Francis Ford Coppola
I think it was very, very well received. Il Padrino was a big hit because. I know, because I ended up having more cousins than I thought I had.
- [119:51]
Interviewer
What's the most beautiful place you've ever been on the planet?
- [119:56]
Francis Ford Coppola
I have to say that my wife and I went to Syria and it was extraordinary. And it was before all the war and the Arab Spring and everything. And it was. We just thought it was just most wonderful, beautiful. The people were just so sweet and nice and the food was so great. And we went to see the Palmyra and it was an enchanted time. We were there a good three weeks too.
- [120:29]
Interviewer
Wow, that's beautiful. I would not have expected that answer.
- [120:32]
Francis Ford Coppola
It was an unforgettable trip. And the people were wonderful. But, you know, people are wonderful. Human beings are. You always say, oh, those people are not nice. And then you go there and they're nice.
- [120:46]
Interviewer
Yeah. Everywhere.
- [120:46]
Francis Ford Coppola
Everywhere. Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge.
- [121:29]
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- [122:29]
Francis Ford Coppola
Tetragrammatin.com.