Francis Ford Coppola: ‘You Can’t Be an Artist and Be Safe’

 

 

The filmmaker talks about the inspirations for the characters in “Megalopolis” and “The Godfather,” and responds to recent allegations.

 

"COPPOLA COULD HAVE, he told me, continued making gangster films after “The Godfather,” a critical and popular hit, as well as the equally successful “The Godfather Part II.” But he wanted to learn and to make as many styles of movie that he could. “One thing you’ll notice about my stuff,” he said, “is that every film is very different from one another. ‘The Godfather’ is very classical, ‘Apocalypse Now’ is very wild, ‘One From the Heart’ is very theatrical, ‘Dracula’” — his lushly romantic 1992 horror tale — “was very archaic. The reason that my films were so different is because the themes were different.” He had found a style to fit each one. Yet after all that, he kept wondering, as he put it now, “what my style is.”!

READ THE INTERVIEW WITH COPPOLA
BY MANOHLA DARGIS