AWARDS/
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
FOUNDER'S DIRECTING AWARD
This award is given each year to one of the masters of world cinema, in memory of Irving M. Levin.
An Evening with Francis Ford Coppola and Friends
Friday, May 1
7:30 pm Castro Theatre
429 Castro Street (Near Market)
Join us for a special evening at the Castro Theatre honoring the brilliant career of one of the seminal figures in American film, director and producer Francis Ford Coppola. In a variation on the Festival's standard interview format, Coppola will be joined onstage by Carroll Ballard, George Lucas, Walter Murch and Matthew Robbins. In a moderated discussion with director James Gray, the group of old friends and collaborators will discuss all manner of subjects, cinematic and otherwise. Film clips, including the new Tetro trailer, and extended audience Q&A will conclude the first part of the evening.
After the above, the festival will screen the first American Zoetrope production The Rain People (1969). The film was made from an original script by Coppola and is carefully observed and beautifully shot. Forty years ago this brilliantly improvised road trip announced the young director as a talent to watch. Shirley Knight stars as a Long Island housewife on the run from domesticity who meets up with a brain-damaged football player played by James Caan. The festival screening offers the opportunity to see one of this master filmmaker’s rarely screened works in a pristine print from Warner Bros.
Coppola Now
By Jason Sanders
"For me, the goal is to do work according to my own feeling and hope it lives for years, not just a season," said Francis Ford Coppola in 1982. Forty-six years after he directed his first film, it's safe to say that he's succeeded. Before he had turned 39 Coppola had already won five Oscars, two Palme d'Ors, solidified his place in the film canon with The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now and had entertainingly built up and melted down several fortunes in the name of Cinema.
"In a funny way I became an important studio director when I was very young," he recalled in a 1992 interview, "but I always wondered what happened to the director I wanted to be." Now, about to turn 70 and as invigorated and questioning as ever, this legend of American and world cinema is giving himself the chance to find out.
The past two decades have solidified his non-filmic enterprises, with Coppola forging modest empires out of wine, cooking, and hospitality (he runs hotels in Belize, Guatemala, and Buenos Aires) and giving himself, finally, a financial security away from the last film's gross or the next studio's fee. "I feel like I'm on a track of doing what I call 'personal films' that I can finance myself," he said. "I don't just want to make the type of normal movies that come out every weekend." His most recent film Youth Without Youth, based on a story by noted philosopher Mircea Eliade and filmed in Romania, serves as a prime example of Coppola's new, personal approach. Part philosophy, part romance, part meditative fantasy, the film afforded Coppola a sense of creative freedom that he hadn't felt since the pre-Godfather days. Unabashedly philosophical in its treatment of life, love and language, it's as far from Mafia mythology, Vietnam-War histrionics, or, for that matter, Hollywood moviemaking than anything he's done and takes its intelligent adult pleasures not from giving answers, but from asking questions.
Coppola's current project is the Buenos Aires-set Tetro, which from early accounts is as heartfelt-and truly independent as a first-time filmmaker's debut. "Well, as a young man I had an old man's career, now maybe as an old man I can have a young man's career," he quipped recently. "I feel like I'm doing what I wanted to do when I was 18." Coppola's first original screenplay since The Conversation, some 30 years ago, Tetro is the bittersweet story of two brothers, their talented musician father and the conflicts and tragedies within a highly creative Argentine-Italian family. Surrounded by longtime colleagues like Walter Murch and newer ones like the brilliant Romanian cinematographer Mihai Malaimare, Jr. (who also shot Youth Without Youth), Coppola draws from his own family memories to create this, his most personal work yet. "Even though this is a fictional story," he says, "I used what I know best, my life."
Such personal filmmaking is truly a return to Coppola's roots. As a student at UCLA Film School, Coppola worked as a script doctor for the legendary cult impresario Roger Corman. Impressed by Coppola's writing skills, Corman gave the tyro a chance to direct with the 1963 horror quickie Dementia 13, but it was his next films, the satirical coming-of-age tale You're a Big Boy Now (1966) and the brilliantly improvised road-trip movie The Rain People (1969) that truly announced Coppola as a talent to watch.
And from there, The Godfather: Brought on at the last minute, the young Coppola spent the entire shoot imagining he was about to be fired, with nearly his every decision countered and dismissed by studio heads. Brando? No way. Pacino? Never heard of him. Gordon Willis's cinematography? Too dark. The result? The biggest money-maker in film history at the time, which launched Coppola towards a career he could barely have imagined. "I wanted to do little Antonioni films, little Fellini films," he recalled in 1992. "I never planned on being part of the big stuff. I never imagined it."
Where some artists hoard their career success for their own personal gain, Coppola reinvested his in meaningful films and the professional development of his friends and colleagues. His collaborative studio, American Zoetrope, founded with George Lucas and John Korty 40 years ago this year, in 1979, became the epicenter of a new cinematic culture, and Coppola (to paraphrase Iranian director Mohsen Mahkmalbaf) started making not only films, but also filmmakers.
"American Zoetrope, San Francisco's only major movie studio, is full of longhaired, bearded types," stated a bemused 1984 article, and within its confines Coppola helped nurture (and fund) such filmmakers as Lucas (who started as an intern on The Rain People) and Philip Kaufman; international legends like Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and Akira Kurosawa also benefited from Coppola's generosity as a financier and producer. "Francis was the great white knight," recalled George Lucas in a recent New Yorker profile. "He was the one who made us hope." Meanwhile, Bay Area icons like editor and sound designer Walter Murch and director Carroll Ballard became Coppola's most trusted colleagues, and, by extension, among the industry's most leading talents.
Breathing new life into American film, Coppola set about reinvigorating the San Francisco cultural landscape. He bought buildings, a radio station, a magazine, a theater and, in Napa Valley, an old winery that later became an exemplary career in itself. His fervent, visionary embrace of new technology prefigured the digital film movement by decades. "I think electronic cinema is going to make art less expensive to make, available to more people. I think in two years there won't be any more film shot," he said, back in 1981. His films became as wide-ranging, idiosyncratic, and bold as his interests, with now-classic works like The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979), clearly ahead of their time, criticized on release as too arty or incomprehensible.
Like a modern-day Don Quixote, Coppola has spent his career getting knocked down, but getting back up, proclaimed a genius one year and foolhardy the next, but tenaciously staying true to his own vision. In 1997, Coppola was asked of his legacy. "If I could widen the cinema one little percentage point more, at a time when it's not being widened, that would be very, very gratifying," he responded. His career has accomplished far more than that. Francis Ford Coppola is one of the true geniuses of world cinema. And he's not done expanding the frame yet.
Jason Sanders is an archivist and writer at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. His writing has appeared in publications including Filmmaker Magazine, Cinema Scope, Release Print and International Documentary.
Francis Ford Coppola selected Filmography
2009 Tetro
2007 Youth Without Youth
1997 The Rainmaker
1996 Jack
1992 Bram Stoker's Dracula
1990 The Godfather: Part III
1989 New York Stories (segment "Life
without Zoe")
1988 Tucker: The Man and His Dream
1987 Gardens of Stone
1986 Peggy Sue Got Married
1984 The Cotton Club
1983 The Outsiders
Rumble Fish
1982 One from the Heart
1979 Apocalypse Now
1974 The Conversation
The Godfather: Part II
1972 The Godfather
1969 The Rain People
1968 Finian's Rainbow
1966 You're a Big Boy Now
1963 The Terror
Dementia 13
Previous recipients
2008 Mike Leigh
2007 Spike Lee
2006 Werner Herzog
2005 Taylor Hackford
2004 Milos Forman
2003 Robert Altman
Previously Known as Akira Kurosawa Award
2002 Warren Beatty
2001 Clint Eastwood
2000 Abbas Kiarostami
1999 Arturo Ripstein
1998 Im Kwon-Taek
1997 Francesco Rosi
1996 Arthur Penn
1995 Stanley Donen
1994 Manoel De Oliveira
1993 Ousmane Sembčne
1992 Satyajit Ray
1991 Marcel Carnč
1990 Jirí Menzel
1989 Joseph L. Mankiewicz
1988 Robert Bresson
1987 Michael Powell
1986 Akira Kurosawa