INTERVIEW BY DAVID BRESKIN
THE ROLLING STONE INTERVIEW | FEBRUARY 7, 1991

DAVID BRESKIN: Give me an idea about Megalopolis, the big project you’ve been thinking about for years.
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: It’s very ambitious. It’s a dramatic piece about society and the city of the future. I’ve always had a lot of opinions about that, but I’ve never had a dramatic piece I could put into that. It’s based on republican Rome and contemporary America: Debt was the plague of both societies; both have a patrician class but are republics. And I’ve tried to imagine the Catiline conspiracy as happening incontemporary New York, and I’ve evolved an original screenplay based on that.

I’ll be able to work on the scale of Megalopolis if Godfather III is successful, and my hunch is that it’s going to be very successful, certainly like the other Godfather films. And I think the news will be that the big studios will want me to do another big event movie in the next few years. I know that certain Hollywood entrepreneurs think I’m good for that. I’ve already been offered. I can feel that they think I’m acceptable to big actors, that big actors like to work with me.

BRESKIN: Do you see your life as a tragedy?
COPPOLA: No, not at all. I have a great family. I have a wonderful career. Even if I was to be, with Godfather III, disgraced as I was in the past, I’m a very flexible kind of artist. There are a million options. I could direct a soap opera and probably enjoy it. I could write. I could do something technical. I love comedy. There’s no project I couldn’t direct. I love people. I live in a great place. I live in a great country.

But everybody’s life is tragic. That’s why we read the Greeks. Human life is tragic. Everybody’s life. And in that sense my life is a tragedy, but only in that sense.

BRESKIN: How would you describe your own Achilles’ heel? Can you do it in such a way, without giving yourself a backhanded compliment, like “I’m too generous with my time”?
COPPOLA: I get terribly embarrassed. Terribly embarrassed. Very self-conscious. It was my lip, it was my eyeglasses, it was my weight. I’m very easily embarrassed. It’s that new-kid-in-the-class syndrome; I get very, very embarrassed in certain situations.

BRESKIN: We’re going to cut to the record, Francis. When you were nine, you wrote your mother a note that said: “Dear Mommy, I want to be rich and famous. I’m so discouraged. I don’t think it will come true.”
COPPOLA: She has that note. I think I was older and already pursuing the drama and show-business world. I always felt I had a lot of gifts but that my gifts were somehow not easily showable. I was not good at anything, except science.

BRESKIN: You had polio and were paralyzed for a year when you were ten and described yourself as “a lonely ugly duckling, sad and sick and thinking.” How much of that kid do you still carry around or did you carry in your formative artistic years?
COPPOLA: Well, I would say that my childhood years are very vividly what I’m like now. And what happened after that didn’t make much of a difference. Polio, and the fact that I was the new kid in school every year, and that my name was Francis, which was a girl’s name. And I was very skinny and looked like Ichabod — gangly. And I had a very big lower lip — which was the bane of my life, my lower lip. Of everything, the thing most profound to me is the shape of my lower lip. Everything that happened came from this condition.

And in 1949 I was struck with polio, taken out of school and didn’t see another kid except my sister. Sitting in that room, paralyzed, watching television, listening to the radio, playing with my puppets, cultivated a kind of make-believe private life, augmented by technology. I became obsessed with remote control. Obviously, if you’re paralyzed, how to turn the channel of the TV is very important.

BRESKIN: Early in your career, you were a very ambitious, driven man — you felt like the greatest thing around if people liked a picture and an abject failure if they didn’t.
COPPOLA: Very much so. And now, at age fifty-one, in terms of my ego, I really have taken myself off the market in terms of ever really being gratified. Gratified in the way I saw, let’s say, Peter Bogdanovich gratified once when I saw the screening of The Last Picture Show. I remember that very vividly. Boy, that audience saw that picture, and that audience was with that picture in such a fabulous way that when it was over, everybody in that theater, including myself, stood up and gave him a standing ovation. It was thrilling to be there. But I’ve never experienced anything like that. Except once, when I did a college play, the cast gave me an ovation like that. But never again since. And I sort have reconciled myself that that will never happen to me, except maybe when I’m eighty years old and they trudge me out to give me some humanitarian award. In other words, I have taken myself “off the hook” on a number of issues that young people fantasize about. And that’s one of them.

BRESKIN: If ‘Godfather III’ is a success, it would make you sad?
COPPOLA: No. It’s just that anything that makes me happy is always followed by a footnote of being sad. Because what I really wish could happen is already gone. You can see a picture of my two kids, Roman and Sofia, taken after that accident happened, and it’s a picture of three kids. Because you can see on their faces the one that’s missing. I try to understand. That’s what makes us human beings. Would you rather be a rock? Would you rather not have those feelings? That’s why tragedy is such an exalted art form.

BRESKIN: Once the trauma wears off, you never experience the world again in quite the same way.
COPPOLA: Aeschylus said something really beautiful, something like “This thing pours on your heart, drop by drop, until in awful grace of God comes wisdom.” In a way, you can’t experience things in a bigger, deeper way, until you understand or have some tragedy.

I was always a magical kid. All I had to do was say a Hail Mary, and it would come true. That story Fredo tells in Godfather II — every time you say a Hail Mary you catch a fish — that was me! I once caught twenty-two fish because I said twenty-two Hail Marys. And then all of a sudden, you say the Hail Mary and it doesn’t work, in the most profound sense you could imagine. It just makes you realize that being a human being is not to have everything go the way a child wants it to go.

In a sense, losing a kid like that, that particular kid, the relationship we had, it will just be my story. [Pauses, teary] I always was shocked that Odysseus comes back and his son, Telemachus, rejoins him, and I didn’t know that in the next chapters Telemachus is killed. Oh! You never told me that! It gives it another slant. It’s your stripes for being a human being. You have to understand it in the bigger sense of things. And of course, I have two great kids, and we all share the vitality of that boy, and in some funny way he still figures into things; he’s still around in a magical way. He was a magical kid. We got him for so many years. And for the twenty-two years he lived, he had a complete life; someone could live eighty years and not do what he did. It’s not like I’m a broken guy. But in a way, there’s always going to be that arm missing. It’ll never come back, I guess.

BRESKIN: If it takes the edge off the successes, perhaps it also might take the edge off the failures you’ll no doubt encounter — they might not be as devastating from now on.
COPPOLA: I’m less interested in successes or failures, quite frankly, at all. The thing about the failures: I still have that new-kid-in-school thing, I hate to be embarrassed. It’s very embarrassing to be taken to task all the time in the newspapers, and all your neighbors see it and they don’t want to bring it up. I never have been such a megalomaniac that it is not very easy to hurt my feelings.

BRESKIN: Is that one of the reasons you’ve threatened to leave Hollywood filmmaking? From your second feature on, in 1967, you’ve been threatening to go make cheap, little “amateur” movies on your own.
COPPOLA: My happiest thing is to be cozy. Just to have a little place, my own thing, a little shop. It could be opulent, but it would always be cozy. And I would like my career to be cozy. I envy people like Woody Allen, who has found a way to function: He writes a script every year, he makes a movie every year, and people find it interesting.

BRESKIN: Weren’t there times, at the height of your success, where you wondered, “Is this me?” It happened in such a hurry.
COPPOLA: I was the first one! It wasn’t like Hollywood was filled with young people. There had been Orson Welles, the boy wonder, who was an example for everyone. But generally, the motion-picture industry was closed — men in their fifties who had worked in the studio system. So for me, not only was I one of the first young people in a generation that had fallen in love with film, but I was also one of the first young people to become rich overnight. And my attitude toward money was, you know, I wasn’t in London with models, gambling, I was buying cameras and I was buying radio stations and magazines. I was ahead of my time in a way. I was interested in the communications age. What was my dream here twenty years ago? I bought a radio station, a theater, a magazine, a film company. Of course, I was seeing one day where there’d be a production that could be written for the theater, broadcast simultaneously on radio, that would become the basis of a screenplay that would be in the magazine and then be a film. I was already thinking about the kind of communications company that these guys are supposedly thinking about now, except I was doing it. And I was greeted with general resistance: Who is this megalomaniac and what is he doing?

BRESKIN: Well, it didn’t help that you’d compared yourself to Napoleon when you talked about power.
COPPOLA: Yeah, but you can compare yourself to Hitler —

BRESKIN: Which you also did!
COPPOLA: I know. The fact is you learn from these people. When I talk about the fact that Napoleon was a person who understood that artillery was power in his time, and communications is power in our time, it’s because I was the kind of person that read all those stories of Napoleon, Caesar, those people. I tried to learn. It doesn’t mean that I’m Napoleon or Hitler by any means, but we do use the people who are the prime movers in the culture to inspire us. People confused the enthusiasm and the sincerity of what I was doing with megalomania. God, how many of all the filmmakers who have made money have put any of that money into their love? George Lucas, that’s it. And why George Lucas? Because he is my younger brother in a way, and so George did a lot of things that we cooked up together. I don’t see any of these other fortunes going into anything other than hard securities. Now it’s people saying: Let’s make movies that have incredible chase scenes, that have violence, let’s make Die Hard. That’s not coming out of young men and women involved in something alive. That’s not alive.

To be really respected in this culture is not about being courageous and having imaginative ideas, it’s about being financially successful. The real decision on how good Godfather III really is will be made not on the basis of whether it has an independent life as a work of art but on the basis of how much money it makes. It’s sad.

BRESKIN: We’re living in an age where box-offices grosses are printed in the daily papers.
COPPOLA: Why is that? Because people are more comfortable with sports. They want a score. A batting average. It will be announced soon that I’m taking steroids.

BRESKIN: Also, it feeds into the notion that nothing succeeds like success. It tells you to go to the No. 1-grossing movie because other people are —
COPPOLA: And don’t go to the No. 6 movie, which really has value. It’s such a disservice, this new attitude of scores, of grosses, in the paper. Even the obsession with how much a movie costs. When you start to make a movie, really, ninety-nine percent of what people want to talk about is how much it costs.

I was very crestfallen during Apocalypse Now that America didn’t see me there in the Philippines with an American flag, saying, “I claim this for the American film industry!” I wanted to be thought of as American and that America would be proud that if I had $30 million of my own money that I would fearlessly invest it in a movie that had serious themes. I was crushed that they ridiculed Apocalypse because it seemed to be such an out-of-control financial boondoggle, and yet for Superman, which cost so much and was about nothing, there was respect.

BRESKIN: Why were people rooting for you to fail?
COPPOLA: Because I had had a big success with The Godfather, and then I tempted fate and had another success with Godfather II. That’s enough. That’s enough.

BRESKIN: Are you still happiest when you’re writing? Is that still your greatest joy?
COPPOLA: I just enjoy imagining things. Daydreaming. Daydreaming is nice before it’s checked. An idea can give birth to another idea before it’s prematurely killed. I’ve found in dealing with people, with society, that you barely get an idea out into the room before there are four or five reasons why it should be killed. Sometimes good reasons, sometimes not. Nonetheless, if you kill off an idea too early, then you never get to places you would have gotten to. I like very much the imagination process. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found I can do it much better alone.

BRESKIN: One of the things you’re known for is a more improvisatory style during the actual production of a film.
COPPOLA: Yeah, I call it collaboration. All projects are a combination of structure and improvisation. There’s the comment that a script by me is like a newspaper — you get a new one every day. On this film, maybe the script was a newspaper because the news was coming in every day: Robert Duvall will not be in the picture; we don’t have enough money to do the funeral scene; Winona Ryder won’t be there for this or that scene. So I kept trying to make changes, so that the script would hold water. I don’t think if I was directing Streetcar Named Desire that there’d be a new script every day unless Blanche maybe will not be there for the nervous-breakdown scene. When we make something like Godfather III, we’re not just trying to make a movie. Given the serious nature of this drama, we’re trying to make a little piece of literature and do it on demand. So, of course, unlike an existing novel, it’s going to go through all sorts of rewrites.

BRESKIN: What have you learned about power through your exercise of it?
COPPOLA: I learned: Don’t scare the natives. Don’t let them be afraid that your power will be bad for things. I think after World War II, there was a movement in philosophy to shun the charismatic individual. In fact, to go the other way: to think about more generality and plurality. Yeah. And beware of the unusual individual. There will be another period where there are charismatic political leaders, until there’s another Mussolini and everyone’s hurt. But there is a distrust for people like me in this period. So therefore a person like me should try to be a little more prudent. Go slow. Don’t frighten anyone. My exuberance is mistaken for megalomania.

But let’s face it, as the great people that we have in our culture die, people my age are being promoted into being the kindly gray eminences. And people might like the fact that I don’t have axes to grind and might want my opinions. And that’s the kind of power I want. No one’s frightened of it, and everyone loves that kind of person.