Francis Ford Coppola Breaks Down His Most Iconic Films

What we consider real art is a movie

that does not have a safety net.

Godfather I did not have a safety net.

Godfather II did not have a safety net.

Apocalypse Now did not have a safety net.

It was made on its own terms.

It didn't also have a few dozen car crashes

and whatever the formula is that is the safety net.

[upbeat music]

The Godfather, well, it's sort of astonishment

that 50 years have gone by.

A lot of these memories are still pretty vivid in my mind.

I was about 29 when I began preparing The Godfather,

and in the course of the years involved in making it

and editing it, I guess I was in my very early 30s.

And nothing about what my life was like

remained the same after The Godfather.

Certainly, that film changed everything for me.

But let's be frank here, you never wanted my friendship.

And you were afraid to be in my debt.

[Man] I didn't want to get into trouble.

I understand.

I could easily be described as penniless

before I made the film.

My father was a musician, so my childhood was

pretty much raised in the shadow of my father's career.

And we all wanted him to get his big break.

My brother wanted to be a novelist

and I wanted to be the junior version of

whatever my brother was.

So all this ultimately leads

to me getting involved in theater.

And then from theater, I became involved

as a UCLA film student, partly because my brother

had gone to UCLA.

Ultimately, nothing was to prepare

to the experience of The Godfather.

Number one, it was a terrible experience.

I was always on the verge of about to get fired.

And a lot of my choices were immediately discarded.

I wanted Al Pacino to play the character Michael,

and they said, That's ridiculous,

no one's ever heard of him.

And I wanted Marlon Brando

to be the now famous Don Corleone.

And they said, Oh, he's a lot of trouble

and no one's going to see his films anymore.

I wanted to make it in New York, they said,

You can't make it in New York, it's too expensive.

I wanted to make it set in 1945, the way the book was.

They said, It's ridiculous, you can't do it,

you can't have it, you can't do it,

and then, This is a terrible movie.

To the point where at least four occasions I came

that close to getting fired and then surprise, surprise,

it turns out to be this gigantic success.

And suddenly I became this famous person,

which in itself was also another thing to deal with.

So I have to say to you that 50 years ago

having made The Godfather definitely changed my life

in many, many ways for the better,

but certainly in many also confusing ways

in terms of my relationship with my idol,

who was my brother, and my father,

who I did have the pleasure of standing next to

when he won an Oscar for the second Godfather.

That was a real thrill.

So all I can say to you is it was interesting.

And I refused to be a fool

dancing on the string held by all those big shots.

I don't apologize, that's my life, but I thought that,

that when it was your time that,

that you would be the one to hold the strings.

In school, I had learned the technique

of sort of outwitting the faculty.

The faculty controlled everything in theater school.

They got a kick out of my being rebellious

and my competition with them

and controlling the productions I did in school.

But that was where I learned how to deal with the studios

and trying to figure out how, even with no power,

which a young filmmaker has zero power,

that I could still through bluff

and misdirection to get my way.

And I guess that's how I got my way in The Godfather

and got Pacino to be in it and got the look I wanted.

It was more expensive to make The Godfather

as a period picture than what they had wanted,

which was to make it be set in 1973,

which is when it was being made.

But I credit those victories not to any,

I certainly had no clout, but I had a certain degree

of skill in outwitting the people supervising you.

And the tremendous talent of the people I was working with

on The Godfather, the photographer, Gordon Willis,

the production designer, Dean Tavoularis,

the costume designer, Johnny Johnson.

And that extraordinary cast, Al Pacino, Jimmy Caan,

Robert Duvall, Johnny Cazale, Al Lettieri,

Marlon Brando, Diane Keaton, on and on.

And not to mention the writer, Mario Puzo,

who had written the story and the characters.

With such people to work with is the only way

you can explain The Godfather

that we now know as a classic.

But if Clemenza can figure a way

to have a weapon planted there for me,

then I'll kill 'em both.

I didn't know anything about what we call the Mafia

or Cosa Nostra, but neither did Mario

know anything about it.

He did everything by research.

He read The Valachi Papers.

And of course, a lot has been written

about the story of the Italian gangster in New York,

the so-called five families and what happened.

So my feeling was that even though I knew nothing about it,

I had never met a real mafioso,

my family were all musicians or tool and dye makers,

but one thing we were, we were an Italian-American family.

So the home, what we had at the dinner table,

the way the men related to the women,

the way the children were at the wedding running around.

The fact that Italian weddings where sandwiches thrown

wrapped in paper and all of those traditions

and sensibilities were in my blood

because I was an Italian-American kid raised in New York

at a time when it wasn't even cool to be an Italian.

My feeling was that I could give the movie authenticity

about how Italian-Americans live.

I couldn't give them any other authenticity,

but I did work very hard to study

and try to take out of the novel

what I thought was in there, which was,

despite all of the pot boiler stuff, there was in there

sort of the latent idea of a classical,

almost Shakespearean story about a great king

who had three sons and needed to choose one to succeed him.

So I think it was that political analysis

and story of power and its succession

that made the film more weighty and more interesting.

[upbeat music]

The Godfather, Part II.

When the time came for there to be a second Godfather,

they wanted a second, Godfather,

I thought it was absurd idea.

The Godfather was complete after The Godfather.

I knew how to make that type of Italian-American

gangster film, but I didn't wanna do it again.

I wanted to do something else.

'Cause if you make films you don't know how to make,

you learn a lot.

If you make films you do know how to make,

you maybe will make more money,

but you basically don't learn as much.

So I was more curious on going on into different forms

and make more movies I didn't know how to make,

which certainly was Apocalypse Now and all the others.

They basically wanted me to make another Godfather

because it had been so successful.

And finally, they made me an offer I couldn't refuse

after I did try to say, I'll write it

and I'll supervise it, but I want to pick a new,

young director to direct it, and had one in mind.

And they just said, No, absolutely not.

We wouldn't trust this to some new young guy,

which they had trusted it to me,

so that didn't make any sense.

But eventually when they said that I could do

anything I want and I wouldn't have to kowtow

to their structure and have them read my script

and give me their notes, which I said I wouldn't do,

and could call the movie The Godfather Part II, which was,

there was more pushback on the title

than even the ridiculous amount of money I asked them for,

which they didn't seem to care.

But they rejected the idea as a title saying

people would think it was the second half

of the movie they had already seen.

I said well, that was it, I would do it

or I wouldn't do it.

And that brought a whole eternity of part twos

and part threes and part fours,

which if I had known that would happen,

I wouldn't have done it.

Any rate, I got to make that and I just used the story

that I was interested in.

[boy singing in Italian]

You know, you can always understand the son

by the story of his father.

Take Rupert Murdoch.

He was a kid in Australia whose father ran a big newspaper

and he used to take his son to see it.

Or Ted Turner was involved with a father

that was basically a salesman of billboard ads,

and out of his interest in his father, he went on.

So the story of the father is always embedded in the son.

If you're interested in the subject,

you read one of the earliest Persian books

called Shanna Hamma, the story of kings.

And it's all about the fathers and the sons

of the first kings of Persia.

And the son never betrays the father,

the father always betrays the son.

I'll do business with you, but the fact is

that I despise your masquerade,

the dishonest way you pose yourself,

yourself and your whole fucking family.

Senator, we're both part of the same hypocrisy,

but never think it applies to my family.

Godfather II, when you think about it,

was a much more complex picture

than certainly the first Godfather

or many other pictures I've made.

I mean, it had a part in Las Vegas,

it had a part in Lake Tahoe,

it had a part in old New York in the '20s,

it had a part in Sicily, it had a part in Cuba,

all these places, and yet the production

went smooth as could be.

And people who say that I can only make movies

when I'm basically suffering and under the gun,

Godfather Part II was not suffering

and it was not under the gun.

So to me, that demonstrates that being scared

out of your mind is not a necessary element

to make a good picture.

Subsequently, other movies I made

that I didn't know how to make, I came to learn

how to make them in the course of doing it,

which is how I, is my peculiar approach to cinema.

I like to learn by not knowing how the hell to do it.

And then I'm forced to discover how to do it.

And with the great and most able collaborators,

which I've always had, because I have had the good taste

to choose colleagues who are so extraordinary

as Vittorio Storaro and Dean Tavoularis

and these wonderful actors who have been involved.

And the great Marlon Brando.

I mean, he was not just a great actor,

he certainly was a great actor, a very unique kind of actor,

and you talk to him in very different terms,

you'd never talk to him about acting,

but he was also a great man the way he thought about life,

about termites, about people, about ants, about reality.

I mean, he was, aside from his acting, a kind of a genius.

I'm old enough now to say

that I have met half dozen geniuses.

I met Akira Kurosawa, I met Federico Fellini,

but Brando was an extraordinary man.

Possibly number one on the list of geniuses

I've had the honor and privilege to meet.

[Interviewer] You always hear these interesting stories

about him and being difficult to work with in the acting-

He wasn't difficult to work with,

he just worked a different way.

You didn't talk to him about acting

or I think your motivation, blah, blah,

you didn't talk about that.

In fact, you didn't even have to talk to him.

You could just put a prop in his hand

and he would then use that prop

to accomplish what you really wanted.

[upbeat music]

Apocalypse Now.

[The Ride Of The Valkyries]

As I would've expected,

I had no idea how to make this kind of film.

And because of that, I had to learn on the job pretty fast.

You know, making a movie is like running

on a railroad track away from a locomotive coming at you.

You cannot trip, you cannot fall, you're dead.

You have to understand, I made Apocalypse Now

right after I had won five Oscars

and was probably one of the hottest young,

if not the hottest young director in Hollywood,

and absolutely nobody wanted to be in Apocalypse Now

and nobody wanted to have anything to do with it.

So I own Apocalypse Now for one simple reason,

nobody else wanted it.

So I undertook making Apocalypse Now

by basically agreeing to guaranteeing its cost,

which was stupid, because making a film like that

involves coordinating a lot of elements.

Four or five languages were spoken.

We were in the Philippines.

We had many scenes involving helicopters flying around

and we were in the helicopters shooting.

That wasn't fake, wasn't CG helicopters, it was real.

Clearly, we did not know what we were really doing.

I didn't, I was learning as I was going.

And interest was at 27%.

You think now they're gonna talk about making interest.

Your mortgage might be a fourth percent or 5%,

27% on a dollar, which was rapidly building up

as we were going over budget, all was on my shoulder.

I had gone from the frying pan into the fire.

I mean, Godfather was a tough shoot

because they didn't like what I was doing

and I had no power.

Apocalypse Now now was a very tough shoot

for a whole bunch of other reasons

that were outta my control.

And I had my wife there, and you have that documentary

because I've always had a rule that if I'm going away

for more than 10 days on a movie,

I would take my kids outta school, because I like my kids.

I want them to be around, I wanna see them.

And also I want my wife there.

But I had to do something that would be interesting to her.

She just doesn't want to go off and be the wife,

so I put a camera in her hand.

She's a very talented handhold operator.

And being my wife, when I would come home after the day

and say Oh, this movie is a nightmare,

I'm gonna get a F for this movie,

this is the worst movie ever made,

I was hoping she would say, Oh no, dear,

it's gonna be okay, you're gonna make a great film.

Instead, she would say, Would you say that again

and put the microphone on?

[Eleanor] If you don't feel like going to school,

you finish your term paper, and maybe you get a B

instead of A plus that you wanted, so you get a B.

But I'm gonna get an F.

[bomb explodes]

[bomb explodes]

This film is a $20 million disaster.

Why would anyone believe me?

I'm thinking of shooting myself.

All of this nightmare of not knowing what I was doing,

being against outrageous odds,

having changed the style of the movie,

making it as we went along more surrealistic.

You know, movies are made by many, many things and people,

but one of the things that make a movie is the movie.

It contributes to making itself.

How does that work?

Well, if you're throwing smoke grenades

and you and the photographer and art director say,

Gee, that looks good, let's do more of that,

that's what I mean by the movie starts nudging into you

and saying, Oh, don't go this way, go more this way.

So Apocalypse Now was sort of telling us

to make the film be more surrealistic,

that the journey up the river wasn't just a journey

up the river towards Cambodia,

that the journey was a journey through time.

And we were going through time and we would end up

in the '50s when the French were there.

And then we would end up a thousand years before that

when the earliest homo sapiens were there

in their most original form,

which was these Montagnard natives

who were the Ithagau people of Philippines.

When the movie starts taking over and making it,

when Brando arrived, he looked at me, he's so smart,

and he said, Ha, he said, You painted yourself

in a corner, didn't you?

Meaning, you had made this movie so surreal

that a normal big movie war scene ending

where the other guys come and they fight isn't gonna work.

If you've made the movie go in a very surreal direction,

you're gonna have to think of a resolution that is surreal,

or that can at least have resonance

without just being a typical, well, the army comes,

there was a big battle and it's exciting battle

and then it's over.

So there I was having done this, on the hook for it.

And I wouldn't even talk about other calamities,

such as the typhoon destroying all the sets,

or even a more human scare,

which was Marty Sheen's heart attack.

One thing about Marty Sheen is, of course,

no doubt, his family loved him dearly,

but everyone loved him, he was just an extremely nice person

that everyone was scared.

Had he not survived, the people

who were making the film would have closed down

and the money would've come from me

for what had been spent.

And I could never get it back,

'cause I'd have no finished film.

So when I told everybody, Don't gossip,

don't call home and say Marty's had a heart attack,

because I even am embarrassed with what I said

during my wife's film, although I had the power

to take it out, I didn't, but that was, I had to.

If Marty dies, I want to hear that everything's okay

until I say Marty is dead, you got it?

If it's not done, man, ship the whole office outta here.

The film only even managed to survive is

because his wife courageously just took him to a hospital

and didn't say he's out of the picture.

And because of that, I kept shooting with his brother,

and then eventually, thank God, he came back

and was able to finish,

and he's alive to this day, as we know.

Many people said, Gee, that movie is incredible,

but I saw the rushes and there's unbelievable stuff

that never got in the picture.

So I was encouraged to make a film version called Redux,

which was like another God knows what, 40 minutes longer.

And that was successful.

But the problem is that I felt, well, maybe it's true.

The first Apocalypse Now we left out a couple

of important things like the French plantation,

but Redux version, it had too much put back in.

I said it's sort of like Goldilocks and the three bears.

This one was too much and this one was too little,

so I tried to make a balance, which is called Final Cut.

That still has the drive and the dynamics of the first one,

but keeps a version of the French,

because that was an interesting comment made that

before there had been Americans at the Vietnamese War,

it was a French war.

[upbeat music]

The Conversation.

[Woman] I don't know what I'm gonna get him

for Christmas yet, he's already got everything.

He doesn't need anything anymore.

Well, I haven't decided what I'm gonna get you yet.

I had loved the movie of Antonioni Blowup.

I just thought, I wanna make a movie like that.

That's the kind of movie I wanna make.

Because it was intriguing and it was moving

and it was mysterious.

And I was talking to a wonderful filmmaker

named Irvin Kershner about that.

And I said, I wonder if nowadays

they can eavesdrop on you with these shotgun microphones

where they can bounce light off the window pane

and they can figure out what was being said inside.

And he said, Yeah, that's true.

So I began to learn that.

I was also interested in this idea

to make a movie in which repetition was an element.

In other words, the same thing was being said over and over

but every time you heard it,

it meant something a little different.

And I was interested in experimenting with that.

He'd kill us if he got the chance.

We've always felt that sound is half the experience,

that sound and picture are the two components, 50/50,

that contribute to the effect on an audience.

The interesting thing we knew,

the sound was much cheaper than picture.

So in the early days of zoetrope,

we put all our energy into sound

and in many ways created the modern soundtrack format

which now dominates the world.

That was all done in San Francisco,

because Zoetrope was here, George was here,

meaning Walter Murch was here and his colleagues,

but also Dolby was here.

And through that friendly collaboration between us

and Dolby came a standard that then got proliferated

around the world.

It was always appealing when a character is hoist

on his own petard.

In other words, Harry's punishment for his sins,

be they real sins or not, is that he becomes obsessed

that he's being gazed into.

And the reason he tears his room apart is looking

for the bug, which probably isn't even there,

it's in his mind.

[upbeat music]

The Godfather Coda, the Death of Michael Corleone.

I had no desire to make a second Godfather.

I had no desire to make a third Godfather.

I thought the first one was sufficient.

But sometimes you are swimming in a sea

where there are needs that you have to do,

like feed your family,

which you have to figure out how to negotiate.

My feeling about the third movie was that it was a coda.

In music, if you have a big piece of music

and you have a coda, that's the summing up, the epilogue.

Both Mario and I had agreed that the script would be a coda

and it would be called The Death of Michael Corleone.

Now, of course, by that time,

the studio was much more interested

in calling it The Godfather Part III

because that could imply there being a part four

and a part five and a part six,

which really it's not in that material

but you can make anything be in any material.

At the time it came out, it came out on Christmas,

so it came out in a pretty fast post-production period.

We weren't really finished, but it came out

and they wanted it to be called The Godfather Part III,

and I didn't have the power that I had had during part two,

but I subsequently took a look at it and said,

Well, if I could do it the way I wanted

and what Mario and I had agreed,

I would call it The Death of Michael Corleone.

And it would not be considered a third installment,

but rather it would be considered the third resolution,

that it would try to resolve the entire first two movies

with a coda or an epilogue.

No! [somber music]

And so that's when I had the opportunity,

Paramount graciously gave me the chance to do what I wanted.

And so I took the film and I recut it

and made it a little shorter, in fact,

and began it in a different place

and did it in a different place and moved things around

in a version that I thought was very superior to

what had come out as Godfather Part III.

And so that's what is now going to come out

on the 50th anniversary.

It does the job that I had hoped

and that Mario had hoped to do.

Mario, that collaboration turned out

to be like having a wonderful uncle.

Mario Puzo, he was a real character,

and we developed a nice working relationship

and I'm very fond of him and his memory.

[upbeat music]

Megalopolis.

You know, usually my projects are made in leapfrog fashion.

What that means is that I'll be writing the rain people

and I write and I write and I write,

and then there comes a point where you have

this enzyme secreted which makes you hate

what you're writing, and then you eventually abandon it.

You say, I hate it, it's no good.

Then you start another one and the same thing happens.

You work on it and work on it.

And then after a while you start to hate it,

then you abandon it, and you look at the other one

that you had abandoned and you think,

That wasn't so bad, and then you take it and you make it.

So you're always making the one that you had just abandoned.

Indeed, I was working on Megalopolis,

which was gonna be my, I figured I'm getting old now

and I've made movies in every style known to man.

I've made movies in this style and that style

and that style, I've learned all those styles.

Now I would like to find out what is my style.

And I'm just gonna slowly pick a subject matter

that interests me and then write

an original screenplay from that.

And I did, I always took notes and I read a lot of stuff.

And I became interested in a peculiar little wrinkle

in Roman history, which is known as the Catiline conspiracy.

The Catiline conspiracy really was a story of someone

whose position was very classical and old,

that the old traditions are good, which is so,

versus a conflict with someone who was a more futurist,

that we should leap over the old and into new ideas.

And I thought, Wouldn't it be interesting

if you made a Roman epic, but didn't set it

in ancient Rome, set it in modern New York?

Did a story, a big New York story in which Catiline

and a Cicero or the mayor and an architect were at odds.

And what if there was a girl?

What if it was the daughter of the mayor

who came to be in love with the opponent of the mayor?

So it could be lively one,

I really wanted to make a love story.

So I pieced together this sort of piece

that would be a love story, which is I wanted

to make so bad, really heartbreaking, moving love story,

but also a story of the debate between those

who believe that the way to go is to leap into the future

and those who believe we should secure the security

of the past, and I thought that would be something

that I didn't know the answer to,

but it would sure be worth working on.

And if I might come to a position

where I knew an answer for that question.

Learning from the great Elia Kazan,

I always try to have a word that is the core of

what the movie is really about in one word.

For Godfather, the key word is succession.

That's what the movie is about.

Apocalypse Now, morality.

The Conversation, privacy.

Megalopolis, you know what it is?

[Interviewer] What's the word?

Sincerity, that's the word I use

when I say, What should I do?

Okay, it's a future city, what is it like?

Well for sure it has to be something

that we all wanna live in.

If we come away like lost and say, It's a little creepy,

It all looks like a monastery or something,

that's not gonna work.

[Interviewer] I think it can speak for a lot

of people saying that we're really excited

for Megalopolis too.

Well, I'm gonna start, I'm starting now.

I'm working on it now, in fact.