Propeller Conversations: Francis Ford Coppola — Dec 17th 2007

By James Marcus

At age 65, Francis Ford Coppola is an elder statesman of American film, a notably successful producer of other people's movies (including those of his daughter, Sofia), and a pretty damn good vintner to boot. For the last decade, however, he has made no movies of his own. With Youth Without Youth, an idiosyncratic production shot on the fly in Romania, Coppola finally breaks this cinematic silence. In early December, he sat down to discuss the new film with James Marcus, who was himself aided and abetted by the Propeller community. The conversation began with a question about the genesis of Youth Without Youth, which is loosely based on a novella by the Romanian philosopher and religious scholar Mircea Eliade.


Coppola: It turns out that Eliade used to write these little fables--maybe for fun, maybe to play around with some of the ideas that were derived from his studies. And when I first read Youth Without Youth, it was like a Twilight Zone thing. Every two pages, something extraordinary would happen to this man. He's hit by lightning. When he wakes up, it turns out that he's young again, and also smarter. Then he turns into two personalities, and one seems to be sending messages about the future of the human species. I said to myself, this is the craziest story I ever read! And I started to become really excited about it: I could make this movie, I could go to Romania. Just bring a crew there, not spend a lot of money.

Propeller: Your excitement about the project makes it sound very rejuvenating.

Coppola: Yes. You know, I didn't count on being so successful so young, with The Godfather. Of course it was great--suddenly I had some money and status. But naturally it bent my career out of shape. I had made The Rain People and The Conversation, and I assumed I would go on to shoot more of these personal films.

Propeller: But that didn't happen.

Coppola: No. So at age 65, I did find myself wishing that I could be that kind of young, European-style film director--like Fellini, when he was making pictures like I Vitelloni. I never got to do that. So I thought, Why can't I be like that now? I'll just go to Romania with the attitude and the budget of an 18-year-old.

Propeller (submitted by SUBMRNR): Do you foresee returning to big-budget filmmaking? Will this project be the catalyst that allows you to finish Megalopolis?

Coppola: I can't imagine wanting to make a big-budget film, for reasons you can guess. There are huge responsibilities, there's a million people. Just count how many producers you see on the credits--they must all be putting their two cents in. So I'd rather make one personal film after another, even if I have to finance them myself. What else do I have to do with the money?

Propeller: So we won't be seeing Megalopolis any time soon.

Coppola: I was frustrated with my Megalopolis movie. I mean, where was I going to get $80 million? Who was going to be in it? And then, when the Twin Towers tragedy happened, a movie about a utopia in New York was harder to make. I tried! I must have done 20 rewrites. In the end, I was feeling kind of depressed about the whole situation.

Propeller: At which point Youth Without Youth entered the picture. It seems that you were excited not only by the crazy momentum of Eliade's story, but by the opportunity to experiment once again with the language of film.

Coppola: To me, the cinema still feels like the most magical field. It's amazing: it's only a hundred years old, but there have been such masterpieces! And it seems to me that the language of film is going to keep evolving. Two hundred years from now, maybe we'll see movies that can actually get inside a person's head.

Propeller: How does the cinematic language of Youth Without Youth differ from that of the films you shot twenty years ago?

Coppola: I stumbled on some new things. For example, there are a lot of dreams in the film. Dreams in the movies are always all wavy, or colored pink. But dreams are not like that. They're realistic. So I started doing the dreams upside down.



Propeller: There's also some tricky business with the protagonist and his double, both of them played by Tim Roth (above, with costar Alexandra Maria Lara).

Coppola: The double is an interesting figure in the film. He was in the story as well, but I used the double much more extensively. At first I wondered whether I should use another actor. Then I thought it would be interesting if I just had [Roth] talk to himself. When he's himself, I shot him looking left to right. When he's the double, I shot him looking right to left. Cut those together, and it looks like he's really talking to someone. I found it pretty convincing.

Propeller (submitted by ind06): The in-camera effects you used in Bram Stoker's Dracula were very striking--they reminded me of the earlier versions of the story, particularly the 1958 Horror Of Dracula by Hammer Films. Did you use similar effects in Youth Without Youth, or are they post-production digital tricks?

Coppola: Dracula was made entirely in-camera, using the kind of effects they used at the turn of the century. The effects in this picture--and as with most modern movies, there are more of them than you think--were very subtle. On an elementary level, it was things like replacing the sky, or getting rid of contemporary objects that wouldn't have been there in 1938.

Propeller: And how about a less elementary example?

Coppola: We shot a scene where the characters were walking along the front of a palace--one of Ceausescu's palaces, actually. It's supposed to be in India. Now, although we hadn't filmed extensively in India, we did shoot the exterior of a temple, with many colored banners, and of course we had the sounds of prayer from inside that temple. So when you see the characters walking along the water afterwards, we very subtly put the reflection of that temple with the banners into the water. You can barely see it. Yet it does marry the two locations, Romania and India.


Propeller: This is your first film in high-definition video. Will you use it again?

Coppola: Yes. It's a beautiful image. I don't think anyone would have necessarily known, seeing the picture, how it was made.

Propeller: Did the new technique have any lessons for you?

Coppola: What I learned is that the two most important things are the eye of the photographer and the lens. We shot the film with very high-quality flat lenses. I had this assistant, a nice young film student from Wesleyan, and one day we heard about these fabulous Zeiss lenses they were going to make for the digital cameras. So I bought them--they were about $50,000--and made the commitment.

Propeller: That's an investment, yes.

Coppola: I do think you'll find that in four or five years, every movie will be made in the electronic medium. And shortly after that, all the theaters will be projecting it.

Propeller (submitted by baddad59): Having made Apocalypse Now, have you ever considered making a movie about how the lives of Vietnam vets were changed by the war--especially as they watch their sons and daughters go off to Iraq?

Coppola: Q: A lot of people ask me if I want to make another war film. I don't. The two big hits of my life were The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, which were very violent. Violent movies are successful commercially, but I really don't want to make any more of them. If I were to make a war movie again, it would be more like Kundun, which was very beautiful.

Propeller: Although you may feel like a budding director again, the release of Youth Without Youth is an event. It's your first movie in many years. Are you nervous about what sort of reception it will get?

Coppola: Whenever I'm invited somewhere--even if it's the local school charity event--they play the Godfather theme when I walk onstage. And I almost want to say: Look, I know The Godfather was a magical thing, and I'm certainly proud of it, but I'm begging your permission to discover other things, to fumble around. The fact is that any unusual movie is going to have a tough go. Even The Godfather: if you read the Variety review, you would be shocked.

Propeller: So time will tell.

Coppola: I'm used to making films that are not exactly in the mainstream. You just hope that later, you'll get another look--and that much later, you'll get a real opinion. So I'm waiting twenty years, and only hope that I'm alive to hear what Youth Without Youth really was.

Tags: Francis Ford Coppola, MIrcea Eliade, Youth Without Youth

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