Francis Ford Coppola (born April 7, 1939) is an
Italian-American film director,
producer and screenwriter. Away from showbusiness, Coppola is also
a
vintner, magazine publisher and hotelier.
He is a
graduate of Hofstra
University
where he studied theatre. He earned an
M.F.A. in film directing from
the
UCLA Film School. He is most
renowned for directing the
Godfather films,
The Conversation and
Apocalypse Now.
Life
Childhood
Coppola
was born in Detroit
, Michigan,
to a family of Italian ancestry (his grandparents were immigrants
from Bernalda
,
Basilicata). He received his middle name in honor of
Henry Ford and because he was born at the
Henry Ford
Hospital
. Coppola is son of
Italia (née Pennino) and arranger/composer
Carmine Coppola, who was the first
flautist for the
Detroit
Symphony Orchestra. He was the second of three children (his
older brother was
August Coppola and
younger sister is actress
Talia Shire).
Two years
later, Carmine became the first flautist for the NBC Symphony Orchestra and the family
moved to New York City, finding a home in Woodside,
Queens
, where Francis spent the remainder of his
childhood.
Coppola had polio as a boy, leaving him bedridden for large periods
of his childhood, and allowing him to indulge his imagination with
homemade puppet theater productions. Using his father's 8 mm movie
camera, he began making movies when he was 10.
He studied theatre at
Hofstra
University and graduated from the University in 1960, prior to
earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in film direction from
UCLA Film School. There, he
made numerous short films. While in UCLA's Film Department, Francis
met
Jim Morrison, whose music was used
later in
Apocalypse Now.
Family
Coppola has often worked with family members on his films. He cast
his two sons in
The Godfather as extras during the street
fight scene and
Don Corleone's
funeral; his daughter,
Sofia Coppola,
appeared in all installments of the series (the first two movies
with uncredited roles). His sister,
Talia
Shire, played
Connie Corleone in
all three Godfather films. His father Carmine, a composer and
professional musician, co-wrote much of the music in
The Godfather,
The Godfather Part II, and
Apocalypse Now. His nephew,
Nicolas Cage, starred in Coppola's film
Peggy Sue Got Married
and was featured in
Rumble Fish
and
The Cotton
Club.
His eldest son,
Gian-Carlo
Coppola, was in the early stages of a film production career
when he was killed on May 26, 1986 in a speedboat accident.
Coppola's surviving son,
Roman
Coppola, is a filmmaker and music video director whose
filmography includes the feature film
CQ and music videos for
The Strokes, as well as co-writing the
Wes Anderson film
The Darjeeling Limited.
Coppola's daughter,
Sofia Coppola, is
an
Academy Award-winning writer and
nominated director. Her films include the critically acclaimed
films
The Virgin
Suicides and
Lost in Translation. In
2004, she became the first American woman to be nominated for the
Academy Award for Best
Director, in which she directed
Lost in
Translation.
Other famous members of Coppola's family include his nephews
Nicolas Cage,
Jason Schwartzman and
Robert Schwartzman. Jason Schwartzman has
starred in several films, such as
Rushmore and
Slackers. He also co-wrote (along with
director Wes Anderson and cousin Roman Coppola) and starred in the
2007 film
The Darjeeling Limited. His brother, Robert
Schwartzman, is the lead singer in the band
Rooney and has made small appearances in
several films, including his cousin's
The Virgin
Suicides.
Coppola,
with his family, expanded his business ventures to include
winemaking in California's Napa
Valley at the Rubicon Estate Winery
in Rutherford
, California. He produced his first batch in
1977 with the help of his father, wife and children stomping the
grapes barefoot. Every year the family has a harvest party to
continue the tradition.
His company, Francis Ford Coppola Presents,
owns a winery in Geyserville
, Sonoma County, California. The company also
produces a line of pastas and pasta sauces, and it owns several
cafes and resorts.
Recent
Coppola owns the Turtle Inn in Placencia, Belize. For 14 years he
co-owned the
Rubicon restaurant
in San Francisco along with
Robin
Williams and
Robert De Niro, the
restaurant closed in August 2008.
Coppola serves as "
Honorary Consul H. E.
Ambassador Francis Ford Coppola."
for the Central American nation of Belize
in San
Francisco. In November 2005, Coppola took part as a special
guest at the 46th International
Thessaloniki Film Festival in
Greece.
Coppola is
currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area
. He also spends considerable time in Buenos Aires
, Argentina, where he is establishing a subsidiary
of his production company. In San Francisco, Coppola owns a
restaurant named Cafe Zoetrope, located in the Sentinel Building.
It serves traditional Italian cuisine and wine from his personal
vineyard and bottling company.
Over the years, Francis Coppola has given political contributions
to several candidates of the
Democratic Party, including
Mike Thompson,
Nancy Pelosi for the
U.S. House of Representatives and
Barbara Boxer and
Alan Cranston for the
U.S. Senate.
Career
1960s
In the early 1960s, Coppola started his professional career making
low-budget films with
Roger Corman and
writing screenplays. His first notable motion picture was made for
Corman, the low-budget
Dementia
13.
After graduating to mainstream motion
pictures with You're a Big Boy
Now, Coppola was offered the reins of the movie version of
the Broadway
musical Finian's Rainbow, starring
Petula Clark, in her first American
film, and veteran Fred Astaire.
Producer
Jack Warner was nonplussed by
Coppola's shaggy-haired, bearded, "hippie" appearance and generally
left him to his own devices.
He took his cast to the Napa
Valley
for much of the outdoor shooting, but these scenes
were in sharp contrast to those obviously filmed on a Hollywood
soundstage, resulting in a disjointed look to the film.
Dealing with outdated material at a time when the popularity of
film musicals was already on the downslide, Coppola's end result
was only semi-successful, but his work with Clark no doubt
contributed to her
Golden Globe
Best Actress nomination.
During this period, Coppola lived for a time
with his wife and growing family in Mandeville Canyon in Brentwood
, California, according to author Peter Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging
Bulls (Touchstone Books, Simon and Schuster, New York,
1998).
Early 1970s
In 1971, Coppola won an
Academy Award
for his screenplay for
Patton. However, his name as a filmmaker
was made as the co-writer and director of
The Godfather (1972),
The Conversation (1974), and
The Godfather Part II
(1974). In between directing the
Godfather films, Coppola
wrote the screenplay for the critically and commercially
unsuccessful 1974
adaptation of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's
novel The Great Gatsby, which
was directed by
Jack Clayton and
starred
Robert Redford and
Mia Farrow. While at Warner Brothers Coppola
hired
George Lucas as his assistant and
eventually produced Lucas' breakthrough film,
American Graffiti, which was released
in 1973. Also during this period, Coppola invested in San
Francisco's
City Magazine, hired an all-new staff,
including mob daughter and writer
Susan
Berman, and named himself publisher. Although critically
acclaimed, the magazine was short lived. The magazine floundered
until 1976 when Coppola published its last issue.
The Godfather and The Godfather Part II
In 1972,
The Godfather was released to critical acclaim
and huge commercial success. Directed by Coppola (the first choice
for director was
Sergio Leone), and
adapted by Coppola and
Mario Puzo from
Puzo's bestselling novel,
The Godfather follows the story
of the Corleone crime family under Don Vito Corleone during the
1940s and 50s. The film won three Academy Awards, including Best
Picture,
Best Adapted
Screenplay, and
Best Actor for
Marlon Brando. Coppola himself was
awarded Best Adapted Screenplay, along with Mario Puzo, and was
nominated for Best Director.
In 1974, the highly anticipated sequel
The Godfather Part
II was released. Again directed and co-written by Coppola, the
second film follows the story of the Corleones under Don
Michael Corleone in the late 1950s,
intercut with sequences depicting
Vito
as a young man in the early twentieth century (played by
Robert De Niro) and his subsequent rise to
power. The sequel was as commercially successful as the first film
and received much critical praise. It became the first sequel to
win the Academy Award for Best Picture; it also earned Coppola
Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay while
winning three other awards and earning five other
nominations.
THX 1138 and American Graffiti
In the early 1970s Coppola also helped launch the career of
George Lucas by producing his first two
films,
THX 1138 and
American Graffiti. The latter film
became a huge success at the box office and met to strong reviews,
even earning Coppola a
Best Picture nomination.
Lucas would later go off to create the extremely successful
Star Wars and
Indiana Jones series. Coppola would later
reunite with
George Lucas in 1986 to
direct the
Michael Jackson film for
Disney theme parks,
Captain Eo, which at the time
was the most expensive film per minute ever made.
The Conversation
In between
The Godfather and
The Godfather Part
II, Coppola directed
The Conversation, the story of a
paranoid wiretapping and surveillance expert (played by
Gene Hackman) who finds himself caught up in a
possible murder plot.
The Conversation was released to
theaters in 1974 and was also nominated for Best Picture, competing
against
The Godfather Part II; Coppola became one of the
few directors to have two films competing for the Best Picture
Oscar since the annual number of nominees was reduced to five in
1945.
While The Godfather Part II won the
Oscar, The Conversation won the 1974 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film
Festival
.
Apocalypse Now
Following
the success of The Godfather, The Conversation
and The Godfather Part II, Coppola began filming
Apocalypse Now, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness set in Cambodia
during the Vietnam War
(Coppola himself briefly appears as a TV news director).
Before production of the film began, Coppola went to his mentor
Roger Corman for advice about shooting in the Philippines, since
Corman had filmed several pictures there. It was said that all the
advice Corman offered Coppola was "Don't go." The production of the
film was plagued by numerous problems, including
typhoons,
nervous
breakdowns, the firing of
Harvey
Keitel,
Martin Sheen's heart
attack, extras from the Philippine military leaving in the middle
of scenes to go fight rebels, and an unprepared
Marlon Brando with a bloated appearance (which
Coppola attempted to hide by shooting him in the shadows). It was
delayed so often it was nicknamed
Apocalypse When?. The
film was equally lauded and hated by critics when it finally
appeared in 1979, and the cost of production nearly bankrupted
Coppola's nascent studio
American
Zoetrope.
The film was selected at the 1979 Cannes Film
Festival and won the Palme d'Or,
along with The Tin
Drum, directed by Volker Schlöndorff.
Apocalypse Now's reputation has grown in time and
Apocalypse Now is regarded by many as a masterpiece of the
New Hollywood era.
Roger Ebert considers it to be the finest film
on the Vietnam war and included it on his list for the 2002
Sight and Sound poll for
the greatest movie of all time.
The 1991
documentary film
Hearts
of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, directed by
Eleanor Coppola (Francis's wife),
Fax Bahr, and
George Hickenlooper, chronicles the
difficulties the crew went through making
Apocalypse Now,
and features behind-the-scenes footage filmed by Eleanor.
After filming
Apocalypse Now, Coppola famously stated:
"We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we
had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by
little, we went insane."
In 2001, Coppola re-released
Apocalypse Now as
Apocalypse Now Redux,
restoring several sequences lost from the original 1979 cut of the
film, thereby expanding its length to 200 minutes.
The UK's 2008
Top Gear
special episode,
portraying the presenters' epic journey across Vietnam, prepended
"Francis Ford" before each name in the rolling credits as a tribute
to Coppola's work on this film.
1980s
Napoléon restoration and One from the
Heart
Despite the setbacks during the making of
Apocalypse Now,
Coppola kept up with film projects, presenting in 1981 a
restoration by the British film historian
Kevin Brownlow of the celebrated 1927
Abel Gance film
Napoléon that was released in the
United States by American Zoetrope. Coppola's father scored a
soundtrack for this cut of the film. However, more of the film has
since been found and incorporated by Brownlow, and Carmine
Coppola's soundtrack is written to match the film at a different
frame speed from that at which Gance shot it. Coppola's insistence
on his father's score (others do exist), and his claim to have
worldwide rights on showings of the film (he purchased some rights
from
Claude Lelouch who in turn had
purchased them from a penniless Gance), mean that this film is not
presently screened, and its fullest form is unavailable on
DVD.
Coppola returned to directing with the experimental musical
One from the Heart
(1982). The film was a financial failure.
Hammett
Hammett is a 1982 homage to
noir films and pulp fiction directed by
Wim
Wenders and completed by Francis Ford Coppola. The film is a
fictionalized story about writer
Dashiell Hammett, based on the novel of the
same name by
Joe Gores.German director
Wenders was hired by Coppola to direct this film, which was to be
his American debut feature. But by the time the final version was
released in 1982, only 30 percent of Wenders' footage remained, and
the rest had been completely reshot by Coppola. Wenders made a
short film called
Reverse
Angle documenting his disputes with Coppola surrounding
the making of
Hammett.
The Outsiders
In 1982, he directed
The
Outsiders, a film adaptation of the
novel of the same name by
S. E. Hinton. Coppola credited his inspiration for
making the film to a suggestion from middle school students who had
read the novel.
The Outsiders is notable for being the
breakout film for a number of young actors who would go on to
become major stars. These included major roles for
Matt Dillon,
Ralph
Macchio, and
C. Thomas Howell. Others rising stars in the
cast include
Patrick Swayze,
Rob Lowe,
Emilio
Estevez,
Diane Lane, and
Tom Cruise. Matt Dillon and several others also
starred in Coppola's related film,
Rumble Fish, which was also based on a S.E.
Hinton
novel and filmed at the same time as The Outsiders
on-location in Tulsa,
Oklahoma
.
Carmine Coppola wrote and edited the musical score, including the
title song "Stay Gold", which was based upon a famous
Robert Frost poem and performed for the movie
by
Stevie Wonder.
The Cotton Club
In 1984 Coppola directed
The
Cotton Club. The film was produced by
Robert Evans. It was a
box-office failure, with a budget of $45 million and a gross
revenue of only $25 million. Despite performing poorly at the box
office, the film was nominated for several awards, including Golden
Globes for Best Director and Best Picture (Drama) and the Oscar for
best Film Editing.
Gardens of Stone and Tucker: The Man and His
Dream
In 1987 Coppola reteamed with
James Caan
for
Gardens of Stone but
the film was overshadowed by the death of Coppola's eldest son
Gian-Carlo Coppola during the
film's production. Also in 1987 he directed an episode of
Rip Van Winkle.
He followed this with
Tucker: The Man and His
Dream, a biopic based on the life of
Preston Tucker and his attempt to produce and
market the
Tucker '48. Coppola had
originally conceived the project as a musical with
Marlon Brando in the lead role as his next
project after the release of
The Godfather Part II. Now,
with
Jeff Bridges in the role of
Preston Tucker, the film received positive reviews,
earning three nominations at the
62nd Academy Awards.
New York Stories
In 1989 Coppola teamed up with fellow
Oscar-winning directors
Martin Scorsese and
Woody Allen for an
anthology film called
New York Stories. Coppola directedthe
Life without Zoe segment starring his sister
Talia Shire, and also co-wrote the film with his
daughter
Sofia Coppola.
Life
Without Zoe was mostly panned by critics and was generally
considered the segment that brought the film's overall quality
down.
1990s
The Godfather Part III
In 1990, he released the third and final chapter of
The
Godfather series with
The Godfather Part III. Coppola
successfully managed to get
Al Pacino,
Diane Keaton, and
Talia Shire to return to the franchise, but
Robert Duvall refused to reprise his
role as Tom Hagen over salary disagreements. While not as
critically acclaimed as the first two films, it was still a box
office success. Some reviewers criticized the casting of Coppola's
daughter
Sofia, who stepped into a
role abandoned by
Winona Ryder just as
filming began. Despite this,
The Godfather Part III went off
to gather 7
Academy Award nominations,
including
Best
Director and
Best
Picture for Coppola himself. The film failed to win any of
these awards, the only film in the trilogy to do so.
Dracula, Frankenstein and recent films
In 1992, Coppola released
Bram
Stoker's Dracula, an adaptation of Stoker's novel which
tried to follow Stoker's novel more closely than previous film
adaptations, although its closeness to the book is often debated.
Coppola cast
Gary Oldman in the film's
title role, along with
Winona Ryder and
Anthony Hopkins. The movie's box
office success enabled Coppola to keep his vineyard. The film won
Academy Awards for
Costume Design,
Makeup, and
Sound Editing. Two years
later Coppola produced, but did not direct an adaptation of
Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein, which featured
Kenneth Branagh (who also directed the film)
in the title role and
Robert De Niro
as the monster.
Coppola would only make two more films in the 1990s:
Jack, starring
Robin Williams in 1996, and
The Rainmaker, an ensemble
courtroom drama in 1997. His next project would not be for another
10 years.
Youth Without
Youth was released on December 14, 2007. It was made for
about $19 million, and was given a limited release. As a result,
Coppola announced his plans to produce his own films in order to
avoid the marketing input that goes into most films (making them
appeal to too-wide an audience).
His most
recent film, Tetro, was shot in
Buenos
Aires and was released in select cinemas in June
2009.
Meanwhile, for years, he has tried to make a movie called
Megalopolis, a film about an architect in a futuristic New
York who tries to create utopia through architecture.
Zoetrope: All Story
In 1997, Coppola founded
Zoetrope: All-Story, a
literary magazine devoted to
short stories and design. The magazine publishes
fiction by emerging writers alongside more recognizable names, such
as
Woody Allen,
Margaret Atwood,
Haruki Murakami,
Alice Munro,
Don
DeLillo,
Mary Gaitskill, and
Edward Albee; as well as essays,
including ones from
Mario Vargas
Llosa,
David Mamet,
Steven Spielberg, and
Salman Rushdie. Each issue is designed, in
its entirety, by a prominent artist, one usually working outside
his / her expected field. Previous guest designers include
Gus Van Sant,
Tom
Waits,
Laurie Anderson,
Marjane Satrapi,
Guillermo del Toro,
David Bowie,
David
Byrne, and
Dennis Hopper. Coppola
serves as founding editor and publisher of
All-Story.
Filmography
Director
Writer
Editor
See also
References
- Further reading
- Jeffrey Chown. Hollywood Auteur: Francis Coppola. New
York: Praeger Publishers, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1988.
ISBN 0-275-92910-8.
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