Francis Ford Coppola's comeback

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10 April 2012

These days, Francis Ford Coppola is not that keen on the noise and hustle of the film industry. "It kind of makes me want to just go off and do my thing alone somewhere," says the veteran Godfather director, who turned 70 last month but seems to have the energy of a man half his age.

Indeed, he sees his career as having had a "new beginning", thanks to a return to the independent spirit of his youth and wholesale embracing of digital technology.

There are, however, some things you can't run away from, and the frenetic energy of the Cannes Film Festival is one of them. What is making Coppola particularly edgy this afternoon is the noise on the fifth-floor terrace of the Palais Stéphanie, one of Cannes's ugliest hotels. We are meeting to talk about his new film, Tetro, which has just premiered at the festival to great acclaim. As the noise level from the rosé-quaffing crowd swells, Coppola finally throws his hands in the air, picks up his chair and says: "Let's go downstairs to one of the rooms."

So off we troop, somewhat sheepishly, Coppola carrying his chair, followed by me plus Alden Ehrenreich, the young actor who makes his very impressive screen debut in Tetro, and his co-star, Vincent Gallo. Gallo doesn't often do sheepish, so this looks like an interesting development. But the 48-year-old actor, who comes with an explosive reputation not far short of a health warning, clearly has enormous respect for his fellow Italian-American. Coppola's1969 film, The Rain People — which he saw when he was nine — first made him want to get into movies. "Everything a performer does comes from fear," Gallo tells me later. "And Francis has so much compassion about that. He finds a way to bring you out of the fear. He helps you move back into a safe place."

Coppola is intent on getting to his own safe place, with the aforementioned chair, a high-tech folding stool that looks as though it could have been designed by Nasa. He sighs contentedly as he settles on to it in the room.

Coppola's "second career", which requires a lot of moving about, has little to do with Hollywood and has involved making films in Romania (his 2006 film, Youth Without Youth) and Argentina, which is where he shot Tetro. "I finally accepted that the bigger the budget, the stupider the movie had to be," he says, "because if it has a big budget it has to appeal to everyone. The smaller the budget, the more ambitious you can be. You just have to figure out a production policy." By which he means getting the sums right. For all his creative energy, Coppola has never lost sight of the fact that you need money — lots of it — to make films.

It was financial problems brought about by the failure of his ambitious 1982 film One From the Heart that brought his spectacular rise through Hollywood — he'd won five Oscars and two Cannes Palmes d'Or by the time he was 40 — to a shuddering halt. The bank took control of his beloved Napa Valley Winery and, for the next 10 years, Coppola made films more or less to order. It was a bitter lesson, but he has learned a lot from it.

"When I made Youth Without Youth in 2006, I was very comfortable with the level of production I could achieve with the amount of money I could afford to lose," is how he puts it. That film was little seen beyond the festival circuit, but Tetro has much better prospects, especially after its Cannes send-off, although there is no UK release date yet. It is beautifully shot, mainly in black and white by a young Romanian called Mihai Malaimare (whom Coppola discovered on Youth Without Youth), and is an emotionally intense work, almost operatic at times.

"If you're making a movie which isn't just an entertainment ride, you have to offer people something emotional," Coppola says. "And, for me, if it's going to be emotional, it's got to be about my family, because that is something I can really get emotional about. I love my family.

Family is where you learn what love is." Movies and family — those are the two things you need to understand about Coppola. Hollywood is peppered with Coppolas; his best known relatives are Sofia, his daughter, who made the highly successful Lost in Translation, and his nephew, Nicolas Cage.

Tetro is the story of two brothers — 17-year-old Benjamin, played by Ehrenreich, and the title character, portrayed by Gallo — struggling to get to know one another again in Buenos Aires after a long separation. Tetro is not happy to have been found, claiming he wants nothing to do with his family, mainly because of his father (played in flashbacks by Klaus Maria Brandauer), a famous musician (and also the younger of two brothers), who is a tyrannical womaniser and to whom Tetro refers ironically as "the Great One".

There are parallels with Coppola's own background. He was the younger of two brothers, the son of a musician and had an uncle (composer Carmine Coppola) also in the music business.

Coppola concedes the similarities, but with the clear disclaimer. "Nothing in the film actually happened," he says, "but everything is true. The relationship Vincent had with Alden in the movie was very much the relationship I had with my brother: everything that I loved, I got from him.

"But my father was not the successful one: my uncle was. It was very hard with a father who is not happy in his work. The whole family feels it. Literally, as kids, we used to go to bed and pray for him, Please let Daddy get his break.'" The memories, dating back over 60 years, are evidently still intense.

The origins of Tetro also go back a long way — to Coppola's student years in Los Angeles. Looking for inspiration, he came across the start of a screenplay which he had totally forgotten about. "I found a little fragment from when I was looking for ideas, about half a page. It was funny because it was written with a brown typewriter ribbon, and it said Tetro'. The first scene was a young sailor coming home to Detroit.

A guy is staring at a light bulb, and he goes and knocks on a door because he wants to see his brother. I must have written it around the time I was at UCLA, writing The Rain People."

Tetro opens with an almost identical scene: Benjamin, dressed in a naval uniform (he is actually a waiter on a cruise ship), knocks on a door looking for his brother. But how the film went from this fragment to a two-hour-plus movie gives some idea of Coppola's current — and rather peripatetic — working method.

"I was editing Youth Without Youth," he explains, "and I flew off from Bucharest to Positano for the weekend. I just checked into a hotel and wrote six pages. Then the next weekend, I flew off to Thessaloniki after five days of editing, checked into a hotel with a view of the sea, and wrote another six pages. I'd do that every weekend: go off to a nice hotel, sit in there, set up my table and write. By the time I finished editing Youth Without Youth, I had 110 pages."

But the real key to Coppola's second career is the digital technology he now exclusively uses. It enables him to shoot faster, cheaper and with a much smaller crew, in some ways returning to the Roger Corman "quickie" school of film-making where he learned his craft. What is more, claims the director, he first envisaged the digital future more than 30 years ago, when Hollywood had hardly heard of what he calls "electronic cinema". "I always knew that was coming," he says. "I first announced it at the Oscars in 1979, when I was supposed to give the award to Michael Cimino, and instead I did this whole speech about how wonderful the new electronic cinema' would be. I outlined the whole future of cinema!"

Coppola's main problem is that the future took a while to arrive. But that was then. Like Coppola's chair, digital technology is now lighter, more adaptable, more easily transportable. Everybody is using it. And it has clearly given Coppola a new lease of life that he relishes.

A CAREER IN MOVIES
The early years
You're a Big Boy Now (1966)
A story about a young man called Bernard trying to find love in the New York Public Library. Coppola had John Sebastian and The Lovin' Spoonful do the music.

The Rain People (1969)
Coppola's first masterpiece. A mesmerising road movie about a young housewife who finds herself when she goes on the road with a drifter, called "Killer", played by a young James Caan.

The golden years
The Godfather (1972)
Hollywood was at Coppola's feet after the
multi-Oscar-winning box-office smash changed the direction of American cinema.

The Conversation (1974)
The ultimate paranoid movie for a low, dishonest decade. Gene Hackman is magnificent as a very private surveillance expert who finds himself involved in a murder. Coppola's first Cannes Palme d'Or.

The Godfather: Part II (1974)
A prequel to the 1972 flick which presents a darker, more intense and less grandstanding view of organised crime.
Probably Coppola's best film.

Apocalypse Now (1979)
The result of a nightmare shoot in the Philippines which nearly killed its star and its director happened to be the last great movie of the 1970s: a trippy, intense, unforgettable work that ought to have closed the door on war movies. Coppola's second Palme d'Or, even though the film as shown here was "unfinished".

The personal movies
The Outsiders (1982)
A "disaffected youth" film featuring the new decade's brightest stars — Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Emilio Estevez. It made no money but freed Coppola from the nightmare that had been One From the Heart.

Rumble Fish (1983)
Another "small" youth movie but one of Coppola's most beautiful and touching films, focusing on "rumbles" between small-time motorcycle gangs in an industrial town, starring an iconic Mickey Rourke.

Francis Ford Coppola's comeback

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