A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually.
Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos.
Art depends on luck and talent.
Even my last year or two of college I was always trying to start a cinema workshop, or make a little film.
Film students were junkies for equipment.
Frank Capra was a prop man, I think. John Ford was a prop man. It was a little bit of a father and son thing, and you kind of worked your way up.
George Lucas doesn't have the most physical stamina. He was so unhappy making Star Wars that he just vowed he'd never do it again.
I always found the film world unpleasant. It's all about the schedule, and never really flew for me.
I associate my motion picture career more with being unhappy and scared, or being under the gun, than with anything pleasant.
I became quite successful very young, and it was mainly because I was so enthusiastic and I just worked so hard at it.
I don't know how brilliant we were, but we were very enthusiastic about movies and the chance to make them.
I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing.
I had a heartbreaking experience when I was 9. I always wanted to be a guard. The most wonderful girl in the world was a guard. When I got polio and then went back to school, they made me a guard. A teacher took away my guard button.
I had a number of teachers who hated me. I didn't do well in school.
I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini.
I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.
I had been a kid that moved so much, I didn't have a lot of friends. Theater really represented camaraderie.
I had no idea that I'd really get to direct feature films, or to be successful at it.
I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.
I liked to work in a shop down in the basement and invent things and build gadgets.
I made this movie for $40,000, which was this little black-and-white horror film called Dementia 13, which we made in about nine days.
I remember growing up with television, from the time it was just a test pattern, with maybe a little bit of programming once in a while.
I remember teachers who really singled me out for their discouragement.
I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.
I think I preferred reading plays to novels or other kinds of books.
I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.
I wanted to work all the time, and UCLA wasn't like that. Students would work on their project, and then they'd be in their room editing for six months.
I was an extremely energetic and enthusiastic person. Movie making was almost like my private passion, because it wasn't as widespread then.
I was good with technology, but I had never done the sound. So I took the recorder home and read the instructions.
I was interested in two things, always. One was science, and the stories of the scientists and scientific experimentation. At the same time I was interested in stories.
I was the kind of kid that had some talents or ability, but it never came out in school.
I was very good in geometry. It was amazing, I had one of the highest grades in geometry in the school.
I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten.
In kindergarten that used to be my job, to tell them fairytales. I liked Hans Christian Andersen, and the Grimm fairy tales, all the classic fairy tales.
It was a wonderful night when we won all those Oscars for Godfather II, because people really didn't like that picture too much at first.
It's ironic that at age 32, at probably the greatest moment of my career, with The Godfather having such an enormous success, I wasn't even aware of it, because I was somewhere else under the deadline again.
Life for me at age 5 and 6 was pretty wonderful and perfect. But then I went through that whole New York school system. I found them very frightening.
Listen, if there's one sure-fire rule that I have learned in this business, it's that I don't know anything about human nature.
Most Italians who came to this country are very patriotic. There was this exciting possibility that if you worked real hard, and you loved something, you could become successful.
Musical comedy was something that I had been raised in with my family and I thought my father would be impressed if I were directing a Hollywood musical comedy.
My class didn't think we would ever get to make feature films. We thought we would end up making industrial films, or be on the fringe or get involved in television.
My father was a musician. He was always interested in new things. He did bring a television home around 1945, right at the end of the Second World War. I was about 6.
My film is not a movie; it's not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.
One of the aspects of it was the idea of an illusion, a magical illusion, in the early days of movies.
One summer I actually tried to make a film. Then when I was graduated in 1960, I went to UCLA, to the graduate film school program.
Our generation represented a major transition. It was the first time that film students were given the chance to make films.
Roger Corman exploited all of the young people who worked for him, but he really gave you responsibility and opportunity. So it was kind of a fair deal.
Ten Days That Shook The World, by Eisenstein, I went to see it, and I was so impressed with this film, so impressed with what cinema could do.
The company I was with, Seven Arts, had bought Warner Brothers. For a while, no one knew who was running it, so I was the first one to break in.
The essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy.
The professional world was much more unpleasant than I thought. I was always wishing I could get back that enthusiasm I had when I was doing shows at college.
The stuff that I got in trouble for, the casting for The Godfather or the flag scene in Patton, was the stuff that was remembered, and was considered the good work.
There was a whole crowd of young actors who used to be in a lot of those early, inexpensive films. Jack Nicholson is the really well-known one.
They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family.
This kind of work is really grueling. You're in a lot of uncomfortable situations for many, many hours.
To use technology to create magic is what appealed to me.
Usually, the stuff that's your best idea or work is going to be attacked the most.
Warner Bros. did not in any way make us a loan.
We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.
We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn't speak Italian in the house. We were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music, ate Italian food.
When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.
When I was about 9, I had polio, and people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while, so I watched television.
When I was going for my graduate degree, I decided I was going to make a feature film as my thesis. That's what I was famous for-that I had my thesis film be a feature film, which was You're a Big Boy Now.
When I was little, my mother would say to me, America is the greatest country in the world. And there was a sense, as Italian-Americans, that it was a great privilege to live in America.
When I was young and it was new to me, it just seemed like so much fun. You didn't want to go home at night.
You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you'll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost.
You ought to love what you're doing because, especially in a movie, over time you really will start to hate it.
You're in a profession in which absolutely everybody is telling you their opinion, which is different. That's one of the reasons George Lucas never directed again.
He is the father of directors Roman Coppola and Sofia Coppola.
He has been granted the title of "duke of Megalopolis" by the Spanish writer Javier Mar?as.
Francis Ford Coppola: Art depends on luck and talent.
Francis Ford Coppola made $6,000,000 for The Godfather Part III. This was the highest salary he ever made for a film.
George Lucas said that the character of Han Solo in the Star Wars trilogy was based on Coppola.
Dementia 13 was Francis Ford Coppola's first feature film that he directed.
Coppola wrote the screenplay for the classic war drama Patton which won an Academy Award for Best Picture in 1970.
As a child Coppola was obsessed with Jane Powell and covered his room with her pictures.
In Rutherford, California Coppola owns a vineyard which produces Rubicon wine.
Coppola children are Sofia, Roman, Mary and Gian-Carlo.
As a young boy Coppola caught polio. During this time he spent in quarantine he learned and practiced puppetry.
Coppola then attended UCLA where he did graduate work in filmmaking.
Coppola grew up in a family of Italian-American heritage which were all very creative. His father Carnine Coppola was a composer and musician. Coppola mom was an actress.
Coppola is also producer for a film entitled “Youth without Youth” to be released in 2006.
Coppola has various films in the works he has one titled “On the Road” slated for 2007. He is the executive producer and producer.
Coppola hailed from Detroit, Michigan where he was born and grew up in NYC.
Coppola married Eleanor Coppola in February of 1963 and is still married to her today. They have 4 children together.
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