As he unveils his latest self-funded epic and mourns the loss of his wife, six-time Oscar winner Francis Ford Coppola embraces the chaos of life – and finds hope for the future
When Francis Ford Coppola was in the jungle, barely coping with the disastrous late-’70s production that was Apocalypse Now, his wife Eleanor was there to turn the camera on him.
Eleanor Coppola was a filmmaker working in the shadow of her husband, who, at that point, had already helmed three all-timers: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II and The Conversation. But making Apocalypse Now – a nightmarish vision of the Vietnam War that Coppola loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness – humbled the director.
The Philippines set was hit with natural disasters. The cast and crew suffered mental and physical breakdowns, while their substance abuse rivalled the scene at Woodstock. And after self-funding the film, Coppola’s fortunes were on the line.
Eleanor captured all of this in her iconic behind-the-scenes documentary, Hearts of Darkness, released in 1991. In it, she describes the movie’s hellish trip down the river as a journey inward toward finding and confronting oneself, not just for “The Cap” (the main character played by Martin Sheen, who endured a heart attack that further delayed production), but also her husband.
At his most vulnerable and despairing, Eleanor was there to hold the camera and show Francis who he really is.
“I wish that I understood it better at the time,” says Coppola, 85, on a Zoom call from his bungalow in Napa Valley. His eyes well up as he remembers his wife, who died in April at 87. “I realize now thinking about it, that what she had in mind, what she wished – that I didn’t grant her – was to be a filmmaking partner. She had imagined when we got together that she would be working on all my films. In some ways she was, but not as formally as I should have accepted. I was too much a prisoner of older ideas – where your wife didn’t work, she stayed home and took care of the kids.”
There’s a tenderness in Coppola’s voice throughout our conversation that grows even softer as he both confesses his regrets and remembers his happiest moments with his wife, specifically breakfast conversations, enriched by her work and creativity. “I learned so much from her and miss her terribly. I have no one like that in my life. I wish that I had done it better.”
At least Coppola can take comfort in the fact that he and Eleanor have been succeeded by generations of women filmmakers (alongside the couple’s producer sons, Roman and the late Gian-Carlo). Their Oscar-winning daughter Sofia has made transcendent films – including Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette and Priscilla – that tap into the restlessness of living in a man’s shadow. And Gian-Carlo’s daughter Gia examines what happens when showbiz ageism rears its ugly head, in the upcoming Las Vegas drama The Last Showgirl. Even Sofia’s 17-year-old daughter, Romy Mars, made a sensational debut – displaying her family’s filmmaking talents in a viral TikTok video where she accidentally redubs the word “fiasco” to the feminine “fiasca,” claiming the grammatical flub as a tribute to women’s history month.
In the infamous post, Mars shows off a rebelliousness that runs in the family. She struggles to make pasta while she’s grounded for trying to charter a helicopter with her father’s credit card – dad is French indie musician Thomas Mars – all the while boasting not just her “nepo baby” privilege but also the most incredible comic timing. The poetry in Romy’s video takes me back to one of my favourite scenes from The Godfather, when the mafia capo Clemenza teaches Corleone family heir Michael how to make pasta and meatballs. Who could have predicted that a half-century later, Coppola’s own granddaughter would own the internet for another pasta-making scene? Time is but a flat circle.
Megalopolis – the legendary director’s eccentric, ambitious, frustrating and profound epic – is about the circularity of time; the way the past informs the present and teaches hope for the future. The film is set in a futuristic hybrid of New York and Roman civilization, as it’s on the cusp of downfall. Adam Driver stars as a visionary architect who is suspiciously a lot like Coppola. His Cesar is a passionate and stubborn dreamer with a utopian vision for the future, which is threatened by a political divisiveness not unlike today’s climate. Also, like Coppola, Cesar has the power to manipulate time, though the latter does so in a more metaphysical sense.
“All artists control time,” says the filmmaker, while seated at a desk in front of a shelf that just happens to hold a clock, an hourglass and a bauble that looks like you’d use it to see into the future. He’s explaining that still photography freezes time, while cinema moves through it. Meanwhile, in the world he creates for Megalopolis, time is collapsed – classical arts, and the customs of Ancient Rome, are in conversation with a new generation waging wars abroad and on social media. “I think if you see this film repeatedly, you’ll understand the manipulation of time is up to us. We are not the prisoner of time as it appears to be.”
Our conversation is running the gamut. Coppola talks about the movie industry and media behaving erratically, and political bodies leaning toward fascism, as they seem to be facing their own extinction. He’s realizing, at his age, humanity is always on the brink of collapse because we keep repeating the atrocities of the past. “We’re always doing things that we all regret,” he says, before citing the current moment. “Any one of us will go out and say, ‘no human child should be killed,’ and yet we’re killing thousands of them.” He suggests the world could live in harmony, if only people stopped stoking fear about other communities and learned to communicate instead with love. It sounds naïve but nevertheless brings him comfort.
These conversations aren’t philosophical tangents. They all relate in some way to Megalopolis, which is such an all-consuming film that it naturally becomes unwieldy. It began with ideas that have been nagging at the director since Apocalypse Now. He wanted to make cinema’s answer to a satirical political cartoon. Over the years, his idea would collect more concepts, beliefs and observations, like scribbles in a scrapbook encompassing everything Coppola wants to say and explore. All the while, the studios refused to back such a perplexing form of self-expression.
The filmmaker eventually staked his own vineyard to foot Megalopolis’ US$120 million bill, a gambit echoing not just Apocalypse Now but his self-financed romantic musical flop, One From the Heart. “The people who run the film industry today are mainly concerned with meeting their debt payments,” says Coppola. “They’re not concerned with making beautiful films. They would like to, sure. But they can’t even think clearly because they’re so focused on survival.”
Megalopolis has been dogged by reports of chaos on set. Crew members complained about the disorderly and old school auteurist way Coppola makes films – he’s always been known to improvise and find the story as he goes along. Variety ran an article, and later posted a video, in which the director allegedly walked into a wild club scene kissing young women on the cheek. (The report mentioned topless extras but that’s not the scene in the video.) One of the extras condemned his behaviour as unprofessional, especially with no intimacy co-ordinators present, but the woman seen in the footage told Deadline Coppola was “a gentleman.”
The filmmaker has dismissed the reporting as a vindictive response to his refusal to play by the rules. In September, he filed a lawsuit against Variety, pushing back with a statement claiming, “[Megalopolis] was a collaboration of hundreds of artists, from extras to box office stars, to whom I consistently displayed the utmost respect and my deepest gratitude,” adding that no publication, “should be enabled to use surreptitious video and unnamed sources in pursuit of their own financial gain.”
That’s not the only controversy. After Megalopolis garnered mixed reviews in Cannes, a trailer tried to paint those responses as part and parcel of Coppola’s legacy, quoting critics who panned The Godfather movies and Apocalypse Now. But the quotes in the now pulled trailer were fake.
Weathering the bad press, the Oscar winner stands by his film, ready to lose a fortune. He’s been in this spot plenty of times before – and has lived his life defying other people’s sensibilities and putting everything on the line to pursue whatever stokes his passion and curiosity.
Coppola makes movies with the same reckless abandon as when he entered into his multimillion-dollar wine business; a why-not decision after purchasing the vineyard as a summer home. He and Eleanor knew nothing about winemaking, but thought they’d enjoy it. Likewise, he built resorts in Belize, which he still owns and frequents, just because he fell in love with the jungle when making Apocalypse Now. He’s chuckling when I bring that up, comparing his connection to the jungle with David Lean, who couldn’t leave the desert for months after shooting Lawrence of Arabia.
“People think the jungle is a dangerous place,” says Coppola, bemusedly thinking about the place that nearly broke him – the place where Eleanor captured his tumultuous journey inward. “The jungle,” he says with a mischievous smile, as if he’s letting you in on a secret, “is a very safe place.” It’s like he never left it.
A version of this article appeared in the October/November 2024 issue with the headline ‘Apocolypse Again’, p. 42.
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