Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola

April 7 1939


An American film director, producer and screenwriter. Contracting polio as a boy, Coppola was bedridden for large periods of his childhood, allowing him to indulge his imagination with homemade puppet theater productions. Reading A Streetcar Named Desire at age 15 was instrumental in developing his interest in theater. Eager to be involved in film-craft, he created 8mm features edited from home movies with such titles as The Rich Millionaire and The Lost Wallet. As a child, Coppola was a mediocre student, but he was so much interested in technology and engineering that his friends nicknamed him "Science". Trained initially for a career in music, he became proficient on the tuba and won a music scholarship to the New York Military Academy. Overall, Coppola attended 23 other schools before he eventually graduated from the Great Neck North High School. He entered Hofstra College in 1955 with a major in theater arts. There he was awarded a scholarship in playwriting. This furthered his interest in directing theater despite the disapproval of his father, who wanted him to study engineering.

Francis Ford Coppola followed with "The Godfather Part II" in 1974, which became the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Highly regarded by critics, it brought him three more Academy Awards: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture, and made him the second director, after Billy Wilder, to be honored three times for the same film. "The Conversation", which he directed, produced and wrote, was released that same year, winning the Palme d'Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. He next directed 1979's "Apocalypse Now". Notorious for its over-long and strenuous production, the film was nonetheless critically acclaimed for its vivid and stark depiction of the Vietnam War, winning the Palme d'Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival. Coppola is one of only eight filmmakers to win two Palme d'Or awards.

As director, writer, producer

• Tonight for Sure (1962)
• The Bellboy and the Playgirls (1962)
• Dementia 13 (1963)
• The Terror (1963)
• You're a Big Boy Now (1966)
• Is Paris Burning? (1966)
• Finian's Rainbow (1968)
• The Rain People (1969)
• Patton (1970)
• THX 1138 (1971)
• The Godfather (1972)
• American Graffiti (1973)
• The Great Gatsby (1974)
• The Conversation (1974)
• The Godfather Part II (1974)
• Apocalypse Now (1979)
• The Black Stallion (1979)
• Kagemusha (1980)
• One from the Heart (1982)
• The Outsiders (1983)
• Rumble Fish (1983)
• The Cotton Club (1984)
• Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)
• Gardens of Stone (1987)
• Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)
• New York Stories (1989)
• The Godfather Part III (1990)
• Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
• The Junky's Christmas (1993)
• The Secret Garden (1993)
• Frankenstein (1994)
• Kidnapped (1995)
• Jack (1996)
• The Rainmaker (1997)
• The Virgin Suicides (1999)
• Sleepy Hollow (1999)
• CQ (2001)
• Jeepers Creepers (2001)
• Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003)
• Marie Antoinette (2006)
• Youth Without Youth (2007)
• Tetro (2009)
• Somewhere (2010)
• On the Road (2011)
• Twixt (2011)
• Distant Vision (2015)
• Jeepers Creepers 3 (2017)

Quotations

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The essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy.

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You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you'll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost.

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I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.

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Anyone who's made film and knows about the cinema has a lifelong love affair with the experience. You never stop learning about film.

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If you're a person who says yes most of the time, you'll find yourself in the hotel business and the restaurant business.

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I think it's better to be overly ambitious and fail than to be underambitious and succeed in a mundane way. I have been very fortunate. I failed upward in my life!

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I like simplicity; I don't need luxury.

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I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini.

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As long as I can make lots of money in other businesses, I'll continue to subsidize my own work.

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By working in the morning, I find a sense of peace; it's isolated peace, but I can definitely be in touch with my feelings, and then I just start.

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I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing.

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I wanted to write and direct movies and not be forced to adapt them from a bestselling book.

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Usually, the stuff that's your best idea or work is going to be attacked the most.

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When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.

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When a movie is about to come out on its initial debut, there are a lot of people involved - the financiers, the studio and the producers and also, many times, the foreign distributors. So it is a time of tremendous pressure and uncertainty.

* * *

You're in a profession in which absolutely everybody is telling you their opinion, which is different.

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Art depends on luck and talent.

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I just admire people like Woody Allen, who every year writes an original screenplay. It's astonishing. I always wished that I could do that.

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I never went to a psychologist or psychiatrist in my life. Never. You know, Italians are a little prejudiced against that kind of thing.

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I was a pretty shy, lonely kid. I blossomed about age 17, when I went to college.

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Listen, if there's one sure-fire rule that I have learned in this business, it's that I don't know anything about human nature.

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I was terrible at maths, but I could grasp science, and I used to love to read about the lives of the scientists. I wanted to be a scientist or an inventor.

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I probably have genius. But no talent.

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I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.

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My big goal in life was always to figure out how I can make a lot of money so I can go off and make films irrespective of the opinion of the three or four critics who seem to rule the roost.

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