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Nothing Personal
Sad moms scarf Jif
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[10/16/99]

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At his best, his formidable creative energy has
shaken up American movies and reinvigorated
cinema both as art and popular culture.

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By Michael Sragow

Oct. 19, 1999 | The best glimpse you can get of Francis Ford Coppola comes in "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse," a 1991 documentary about "Apocalypse Now" that draws on his wife Eleanor Coppola's film and audio recordings during the shooting of the movie (in 1976 and '77) and her marvelous 1979 book, "Notes." Whether you view him as a tortured poet, an ostentatious showman, a martyr or an ogre, it's impossible not to get caught up in his drive to overcome disasters -- natural, political and theatrical -- and to push his movie to the finish line.

No matter how desperate his statements, no matter how eccentric his MO, he's vastly more engaging than the average precocious millionaire (he was, at the time, in his late 30s). He's going all out for art, and persuading hundreds of people to take the plunge with him. The project seems insane because he isn't trying to fulfill his inspiration -- he's trying to locate it and execute it at the same time. Yet even when his ambition grows to megalomania and his film begins to fall apart, his zeal and riskiness are as elating as they are dismaying. He's in the gambling tradition of American entrepreneurs -- there isn't a single corporate-like censor in his consciousness (or apparently in his corporation, Zoetrope).

The excitement comes from watching him go out on a limb; the heartbreak comes from seeing him saw it off behind him. You feel you're seeing, in extremis, the same creative force that generated the "Godfather" films and helped shake American movies out of their 1960s doldrums.

Of course, despite his youth (now he's all of 60), the "Godfather" films had given Coppola the stature of a patriarch. What fans knew about his life only reinforced that image. Growing up in Queens and on Long Island, he suffered through polio at age 9 (an episode he alluded to in his script to "The Conversation") and grew into a high school misfit, living in the shadow of his confident, intellectual brother August. But once Francis started directing college theater and film he became a charismatic figure. With his mushrooming influence in Hollywood he was soon able to employ his father, Carmine -- an ace flutist and frustrated composer -- to write scores for his movies. And he directed his younger sister, Talia Shire, in her indelible performance as Connie Corleone in the "Godfather" films. Coppola was also the father of three children, Gio, Roman and Sofia; he infected them, too, with the movie bug. (All went on to work in movies, Sofia as a full-fledged director; Gio was killed in a speedboat accident in 1986.)

"Hearts of Darkness" lets you sample the dumbfounding emotional arsenal that this premature sage must employ to get his way. You get to witness the child-wizard flirtatiousness that continues to draw creative people to Coppola. He has a knack for making himself larger rather than smaller by revealing his insecurities. Sometimes, the audio track drips with flop-sweat. In "Hearts of Darkness," he says that he knows he's making a bad movie, that people don't believe him because of what he's pulled off before. (By 1976, he'd made three classics in a row: "The Godfather" in 1972 and "The Conversation" and "The Godfather Part II," both in 1974.)

His frankness has a heroic quality. He's totally disarming when he pinpoints the biggest fear of any audacious moviemaker -- that his work won't live up to the subject matter, that it will be merely "pretentious." He facetiously compares "Apocalypse Now" to the disaster films of Irwin Allen ("The Towering Inferno," "The Poseidon Adventure," etc.). Are these contradictory ejaculations the mark of a driven artist, a self-conscious impresario or a man trying out alternatives? Of course, he is all three -- that's why at the time of "Apocalypse" he seemed indestructible.

A series of nonstop catastrophes wreaked havoc on the backbreaking shoot in the Philippines. A ruinous typhoon deluged locations and wiped out sets. The Philippines armed services were unreliable. Crucial helicopters were often called away to fight Communist insurgents, and fresh pilots had to be coached from scratch every day. Coppola fired one star (Harvey Keitel), shot around the heart attack of another (Martin Sheen) and wrote (and shot) around the forbidding obesity of a third (Marlon Brando). He encouraged his actors to be their characters: In the documentary, Sam Bottoms talks of playing a stoned soldier while on an array of drugs himself; Frederic Forrest -- who's terrific -- reveals just how surprised he was when Coppola sprang a tiger on him. The 14-year-old Laurence Fishburne is an electrifying presence off-screen as well as on. There's a glimpse of Dennis Hopper as a decade-older, strung-out Easy Rider, with melancholy in his eyes and gray in his beard -- perfect for the role of a freelance photographer too long away from home. Through it all, Coppola says that the film's meanings will come into focus partly from the experiences he has making it.

Next page | "My film is not ... about Vietnam. It is Vietnam"