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The Godfather

Legendary director Francis Ford Coppola talks about his return to smaller, more personal filmmaking.


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Published: Jul 14, 2009

[ interview ]

After a decade spent trying to mount a pair of costly passion projects, Francis Ford Coppola abruptly shifted gears and embarked on what he calls his "second career," which began with 2007's Youth Without Youth and continues with Tetro (read the review), the story of estranged brothers (Vincent Gallo and Alden Ehrenreich) nursing the emotional wounds of their upbringing by a domineering orchestra conductor father. On the phone from the American Zoetrope offices in San Francisco, Coppola discoursed on the return to the "personal filmmaking" of his youth and the ideas that went into his first original screenplay in more than 30 years.

City Paper: I understand the germ of the story in Tetro goes back a long time — decades, in fact.

Francis Ford Coppola: It wasn't even a story. It was more an image, a metaphor of a guy staring into a light bulb like a moth. I had no idea why I came up with that. This was probably around the time that I was writing The Conversation, and this was a period when I thought this was what I was going to do. I was doing to make these more personal art films, and make a living doing horror films, because I needed to support my family. I sketched out this idea of a guy in Detroit who ran a follow-spot, and was obsessed with light, and maybe a brother who was a sailor who was trying to find him. It was like literally a half a page. I hadn’t worked it out. I didn’t know what anything was about, other than it had this kind of moth metaphor and maybe this guy had accidents by just being attracted to the headlights of cars.

CP: So what brought you back to this idea after all this time?

FFC: I had bolted from the frustration of that last 10-year period when I was involved in a couple of projects — one was Pinocchio, one was Megalopolis — and I was trying to find my place in what was a very changing film industry. The big, what we'll call, industry films, sometimes called Hollywood films, were more and more becoming very specific, less and less drama, less and less unusual films, something that's going on even more so today. I never had a studio that was my sponsor as such. I might have hoped that Paramount would be that, but then Paramount was sold. So I felt pretty much on my own. I had always lived the way I lived in San Francisco. My social life was not hobnobbing with executives and agents and being in the movie business.

So at first I worked on this Pinocchio for many years, and then that didn't work out for legal reasons. The studio sued, saying they controlled the Pinocchio project, which they ultimately lost the law case of, but by then the project's chances were finished. Then I thought, I was known for bigger films like Apocalypse Now, so I’ll write a kind of film on that scale, but it would be about an architect in New York, and it would be a kind of Ayn Rand piece on utopia. I worked on that for a while. I'm a person who doesn’t like to give up and admit failure. But year after year was going by, and I put more money into it, even shooting second unit, and ultimately I was shooting in New York right at the time of the World Trade Tower tragedy. In fact, I have footage of it a couple of days afterwards. But I found it difficult to lick it, especially given that it was about utopia at a time when New York was forever going to be associated with that attack, at least in modern stories of New York.

I was reading a lot and researching and I came across this little Mircea Eliade short story — It was like a secret. I said, I'll just make this little film myself. It turns out my wine company was doing well, so I'll just put up the money myself, and go off and make it, and follow in the footsteps of the master and learn about philosophical ideas I was interested in. Ultimately, that came out and I was very happy with the film, although obviously that kind of a film, four or five people went to see it.

I thought, "Gee, now I feel confident, I know how to do this. I can produce for the money." I thought I would try to make a more emotional film, and that led me back to thinking to my family, and what a unique family it was. In reviewing some of the things I had written when I was younger, in that period when I thought all I would do was write original screenplays, I found this little half a page. And, "Gee, what was that? A guy staring into lightbulbs." I just started to embroider on it. During the editing of Youth Without Youth, I just found myself writing on automatic — on weekends, actually. That's how it came to be.

CP: The story of Tetro has obvious autobiographical elements, most notably that your father, Carmine, was also a composer and a conductor. But there are other parts that are radically different from your life. How did the balance between the two play out?

FFC: I knew, being a theater student when I was a kid, the playwrights we admired — Clifford Odets, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller — all wrote personal work, even if it wasn’t the actual story of their actual life, other than O'Neill, who in Long Day's Journey Into Night really did tell his family's story. There's no way to work without mining your own personal experiences to try to put flesh on the piece. My father was not a world-famous maestro, but I cooked up that kind of character, in the spirit of a kind of Big Daddy. It seems in any number of plays, the father is always used as the dramatic force, and I wanted to do that. I had no desire to do my own personal family story. In order to do that, I would really intrude on areas which they'd all be mad at me — which I didn't. On the other hand, I couldn’t avoid my feelings about my father. The theme also of having lots of different members of the family being involved in creative things, even the older generations, and there were rivalries and inevitably one was successful more than another, which means they were richer, they had a nicer house.

In trying to flesh out this story, I found, just as when I worked on The Godfather my family weren't gangsters, they were Italian-Americans, so many things that made that family seem more real were based on my uncles and things I had seen, if only details. They certainly weren't shooting people, but they were talking like that. A lot of the details that I remembered were in it. The same goes for this. As I wrote the story of a kid searching for an older brother who had left in a huff never wanting to know the family again, I found myself using some of the moments or words or things that were real, even though the story wasn’t.

CP: One of the most resonant lines in the movie is when Alden Ehrenreich asks his older brother, a novelist who has long since given up writing, "How do you walk away from your art? Doesn’t it follow you?" You didn't walk away from your art so much as it walked away from you, but was that element of the character inspired by your life?

FFC: The different things that happen in the story were taken from various people. Maybe a certain line in the story was really said, but maybe it wasn’t the father who said it. Maybe someone stole someone's girlfriend. In other words, [in the film] the father tended to do everything. The stuff was gathered through things that I heard as a kid, or stories I heard. Every family has their gossip or what uncle so-and-so said to him and that’s why we don’t have him come over any more. I knew that all families have this kind of thing, people not speaking to each other, and I always think it's sad, because then they die and it's all too late. They just waste these family relationships that could've been nice, could’ve been pleasant. There’s a sort of sadness. When the uncle says in the end, "Oh, our family was so promising. We loved each other so much," that's true. Certainly true of my family, and I'm sure of many families.

As I said, I was looking for a place, how could I fill this part of my life, since it's clear the big film business isn't the same. You can't even make a drama any more. It's very tricky out there right now in terms of what audiences will go to. So I thought I'll just develop myself and learn about myself, and have this second career, and the second career would have different rules altogether than the first career. The first career, you're trying to have a career, be successful and be known and make money and support your family and make everyone proud of you. But obviously that's not what's important right now. More what's important is to learn stuff about life, about myself. So I thought if I could make films that are slightly more modest in budget, and that are all personal, meaning that I write them, and then I go off and shoot. When you choose something that you’re writing, it's usually something that you want to learn about. You choose it for the reason that you don’t know all the answers. That makes it very hard to get a film financed. So you just do it.

So this is the second film of the second career. I'm writing a third one now. It will be very different. It won't be about these kinds of characters in Argentina. Each time I do it, I’m setting off on a little investigation of my own.

CP: You're one of those filmmakers for whom the model where the studios finance big-budget sure things and indie directors takes risks on minimal budgets doesn't really work, in that your best films have tended to be both adventurous and costly. It's a real shame that the industry doesn't seem to have a place for those kinds of movies anymore.

FFC: If you want your films to be beautiful, and you want to have beautiful images and beautiful sound and beautiful acting, you have to kind of corral all the collaborators. You keep them together for enough amount of months that you can do it. As we have seen has happened in recent times, a lot of the independent film distributors have gone out of business, because it’s not a very viable business. It's hard to make even enough money to pay for the thing. So you kind of have to go back to those Russian composers who had other jobs, like Rimsky-Korsakov, and were writing music because they loved it and they were working as naval officers or chemists.

So you're sort of forced into there. And of course you have to be a wizard at production, you have to really have it down to mount the production, to actually get the level that you think will be beautiful for the kind of money that you can afford to lose, basically. You could write short stories, or one-act plays, but the cinema is something that is forever intriguing. And you know there's more to learn about it. I'm sure in a year and a half, someone will come out with a film that no one's ever seen, a film like that. It will sweep through the world, everyone will have to see it, and then before you know it they'll be making imitations of that film. The film industry tends to make films that can make a lot of money, and that’s usually something that the audience finds very familiar.

CP: What role does digital technology play in enabling this new career of yours? How important is it to be able to shoot high-definition images without the expense of film?

FFC: In some ways, there's a lot to have learned in the Roger Corman apprenticeship of how to approach a film, in terms of making it for the money you have. When I went to Romania, I didn't go with anybody. I just brought my little package of equipment there, and I met Romanian photographers and production people. One of the best ways to save money on a movie is not have any plane tickets or hotels or expense accounts or car rentals — all that normal stuff that amounts to a fortune. So I went alone, and shot some screen tests with my stuff of some actors, and each time I used a different photographer. In the course of it I met seven photographers, and they were all very good. I could have done it with any of them. But there were one or two I thought were exceptional. One was this very young guy almost just out of film school, and he shot Youth Without Youth, and it was such a pleasurable, harmonious experience that of course I brought him to Argentina and shot this.

It's true, because he was so young, he was very comfortable with computer philosophy, as it were. He had this electronic camera that we used. I sent him to three-week Sony school in L.A., and being young this was very comfortable for him, learning the thousands of settings and how you deal with it. That happens all the time. People are always working on a film, and before you know it there’s one or two people they have to take with them, and then the plane tickets start.

CP: One of the movie's implicit ironies is that it's shot in black and white and set in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of La Boca, which is famous for its brightly colored buildings.

FFC: When I wrote it, I imagined it as black and white. The real Buenos Aires has a lot of theater going on, and there is a kind of bohemian life. I just felt comfortable in La Boca. Also, there are a lot of Italians there. La Boca has a couple of good restaurants, and we ate there. I went there to tell the story partly out of a sense of adventure. Even now, what I'm writing, where I would take it, it's exciting. It's like, where am I going to spend a year? Learning what?

So you can work in a more individualistic way, and you're in a new place, and they don't have quite the industry we do here, with the requirements. Basically, you can't make it in the United States without conforming to a lot of rules, which basically makes the film more expensive, and if it’s expensive enough, then you have to bring in someone to finance it, and the person who finances it has a lot more requirements, and before you know it, cost is piled upon cost and then the movie has to change, because it has to appeal to a broader audience. At my age, now, I’m not trying to prove anything to anyone really. I'm not trying to say I have this exciting career. I have the career that I have, which is me trying to learn about movies and about myself through going on little adventurous projects.

CP: Vincent Gallo's performance is one of the highlights of the movie. It really reminds you what a great actor he can be, even if he has a reputation for being very difficult to work with. How did you end up with him?

FFC: He's got a sense of humor which only gets people angry at him. Even though he's kidding them, he's kidding them in a diabolical way. I didn't know his work. I had written the story more for Matt Dillon, and Matt Dillon was going to play the brother, and there was a kind of irony in that Matt Dillon had played the younger brother in another story about a kid idolizing his older brother. The problem in the movie business, the real movie business, is that there's lots of agents and managers involved, and to get their cooperation on projects that are not big paydays as they call them — I finally in the end couldn't work out having Matt the amount of months I felt I needed down there. I like to work where they get into the place and have a few weeks of rehearsal, not just that they fly down for four weeks and fly back.

So it didn’t work out schedule-wise with Matt. And I didn't know who to play in the part. Someone down there said, what about Vincent Gallo who was in Buffalo '66? And I saw it and I liked it and I invited him to spend a few days with me. Everyone said, "You’re crazy. He's a nightmare. You're gonna have a tough time." And it turned out totally not true. He was hard-working and he was great in the rehearsals, and wonderful with the young boy, who's only 17, and very intelligent and very funny if you get on his wavelength, and striking-looking. I shaved off all his hair, and I thought he had this striking, iconic look, so for me it was a lucky risk. I didn't have a hell of a lot of — who would come and stay with me for four months? It was very hard to negotiate that.

CP: Gallo seems like he brings a lot of himself to the part. Did the character of Tetro change once he was involved?

FFC: I think it always does. I try to have two weeks of rehearsal. I try always for three weeks, I never get it, but I get two weeks, all at the beginning, so it's not like important characters don't come until they appear in the film, which is the way it usually is. The process of rehearsals isn't just us going around reading the script. It's going behind it and doing lots of exercises and improvs and stuff, and in the course of it, gradually the characters become more like the actors. I always for years thought that gradually the actors become more like the characters, but now I think it's the other way around. So a mark is made. I'm an old screenwriter from way back, so I like to stay up all night and type up what we've learned, and finally there's a draft that I put out before the film stars. Not that I don't change it after that. But pretty much that's what we shoot.

CP: It's interesting in the film that not only do you reverse the convention of shooting the present in color and flashbacks in black and white, but the color flashbacks have a deliberately degraded look, as if they were shot on an old VHS camcorder. What inspired that choice?

FFC: I knew I wanted to shoot in black and white. And lately, even on my last picture, I have been more comfortable with a visual style where the camera doesn't move. It just sits there and everything is done through editing. It's the style that I now feel very personally attached to. That meant if I did want to use color to help the audience know what was in the past, the color would be more like a home movie color, handheld camera, except for Tales of Hoffman, which would have been in Technicolor. The Tales of Hoffman thing was real. I had an older brother who did take me to see movies way beyond my range. One of them was Tales of Hoffman, and The Red Shoes. I thought they were beautiful. I didn't really understand them. I just associated them with him. And so my idea was that when the younger brother reads these little sketches or scrolls where [Tetro]'s trying to hide what really happened, the younger bother imagines it as if it were Tales of Hoffman.