Francis Ford Coppola: The final chapter
Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam war epic Apocalypse Now won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
Fifty years ago, to the week, every time Francis Ford Coppola went to bat, he hit a home run. He had just won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for . Later that year, he would release , a film that would extend the incredible success of the first, winning six Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director for Coppola. He was the hottest commodity in Hollywood.
And then he wasn’t.
This Thursday, at 7pm, he will release his long-gestating epic, , at Grand Theatre Lumiere. The Cannes Film Festival cognoscenti will wait with bated breath to see if the Italian-American maestro has one final masterpiece to add to the canon.
Pre-Cannes whispers have run the spectrum from bold to batsh*t. But will proponents of his new sci-fi epic put their money where their mouths are?
You’d be forgiven for thinking Francis Ford Coppola is cursed. Ever since the production hell that was his 1979 Vietnam war epic (which also won the Palme d’Or) he has had a tumultuous relationship with cinema.
Coppola has lived by the mantra "Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp”. It served him well for so long. If the Italian-American filmmaker hadn’t done so, we’d never have had the experience, or perhaps more importantly, we’d have never received the immaculate saga.
To the uninitiated, Orson Welles might seem like a one-hit wonder. was — and, perhaps, still is — the greatest debut film ever delivered to the silver screen, but, curiously, he never reached those mountainous heights again. It’s not as if one day he woke up and he had been stripped of his magical powers, so what then?
It is reasonable to suggest his so-called ‘failure’ has been down to the narrow mindedness and risk aversion of Hollywood decision makers (and audiences), notwithstanding his own special streak of stubbornness.
Both Coppola and Welles share striking similarities as filmmakers despite being part of very different eras in Hollywood. Both had films considered peerless in their genres. Coppola took the baton passed by Welles.
Coppola’s work was revolutionary, rich, robust, even mesmerising. Somewhere along the line though, the hot streak came to an end, and his love affair with cinema came to a grinding halt.
One needn’t reach for a flashlamp to find the Coppola works that essentially ended his reign as one of Hollywood’s hottest commodities. , a self-financed Las Vegas-set musical starring Terri Garr and Frederic Forrest, was made for about $26m dollars, making only $636,796 of that back. It was dubbed a critical and commercial failure. Not only did it shut down Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios, it bankrupted the director too.
Similarly, 1984’s was a disastrous indicator Coppola’s star in Hollywood was plummeting. Suddenly, calamitous productions were hanging around Coppola like a neighbour’s abbatoir.
In need of money following bankruptcy, Coppola agreed to sign on to direct per the wishes of producer Robert Evans. Things didn't go as planned, to say the least. It was evident by now that the Coppola/Hollywood marriage was a torrid, toxic one.
Coppola may have lost some love for the game after the dagger of and the sucker punch of but his qualities as a director were never in doubt.
Coppola made movies in the new decade that most directors would happily claim as their magnum opus. It remains virtually if not totally impossible to sustain such a hot streak — perhaps the greatest in cinematic history with The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now — not least in an industry that seems hell bent on restraining its talent for certain profit.
In the months leading up to the release of Bram Stoker’s in 1992, Hollywood insiders who had seen the film felt it was too strange and violent to succeed at the box office (ring a bell?). They even dubbed it "Bonfire of the Vampires" after the notorious 1990 box-office bomb .
How wrong they were.
became a surprise hit, making $215.9m at the box office, and going on to be Coppola’ second most successful film. Evidence yet again of Coppola’s bouncebackability.
Now, he’ll be hoping for the same fortune with . At 84 years of age, the gloves are off and early reactions to his bank-breaking behemoth seem to confirm reaction will be diverse. It’s almost guaranteed to confound and polarise La Croisette and there’s a sense that thinks Coppola might enjoy that.
One might think studios and production companies would have acquired Megalopolis well before Cannes, jumping at the chance to hook up with a Francis Ford Coppola picture. Sadly, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Producers and studio heads, with their apparent powers of prophecy and premonition, have imagined the Megaflopolis headlines already. Harsh? Maybe. But this is Hollywood, baby. And no-one knows that better than Coppola.
In an interview with in 2022, Coppola admitted: “I know that , the more personal I make it… the harder it will be to finance”, before adding: “And the longer it will earn money because people will be spending the next 50 years trying to think: What’s really in ? What is he saying? What does that mean when that happens?”
He’s uncompromising as an artist, always has been. At the very least he’s confident, even if others aren’t. He would have to be, with $120m of his own money on the line.
No amount of finance changes the bottom line: ‘Is a final reminder of Francis Ford Coppola’s genius — or the final nail in his directorial coffin?’
