When was francis ford coppola born

I was offered Thirteen Days I said I would do it but I had a very experimental way of doing it. My idea was: what if in that moment of history I got called up and they said, "Listen, Mr Coppola, the President is about to go through an extremely difficult period, he's got to make some terrifying, heartbreaking decisions and he wants you to document it.

But you can't go close to him because he's going to be in many difficult meetings through the night. So what you can do is have a 16mm team using very long lenses. We don't want them to know you're shooting. That's what I wanted to do, but they didn't have the courage to do it. So I said, "Make it like a regular movie. In the 60s they were four filmmakers who represented cinema and influenced everyone who came after: Fellini, Kurosawa, Bergman and Kubrick.

Their films are winning awards all over the world and everyone under 35 speaks English. They're very well educated and it's a very cinema-friendly country, but they're lacking in the visual effects department and other areas. We did the post in Bucharest and Walter Murch came over to edit and help oversee all the post. The great thing about post now is that digital cinema has become a reality, so a filmmaker has more ability to compose picture and sound than ever before, and all because of these new tools, such as the latest editing systems like Final Cut Pro, Pro Tools and so on, which are also becoming less and less expensive.

Akira Kurosawa is one of the greatest directors ever to work in the cinema. His films meant an enormous amount to me when I was starting my own career. I think cinema, movies and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made films were magicians.

All the merchandising and financial success of those films aren't one-tenth to what he is worth as an artist and a filmmaker. I think people have realized that The Godfather was never sequel material. I've always maintained there should have been one "Godfather," though I'm proud of the second one, and I thought the third should have been considered a coda and not called The Godfather: Part III Sequels are not done for the audience or cinema or the filmmakers.

It's for the distributor. The film becomes a brand. The only TV I would be interested in exploring would be live television. There's no substitute for a team of artists performing at their peak live when failure is possible. It's a high-wire act. That excites me. I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing.

I think a sequel is a waste of money and time. I think movies should illuminate new stories. I try always to do something that's a little beyond my reach, so that I'll try my best. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I almost succeed, but I think this is what life's all about.

There's no doubt that, by the end of The Godfather: Part II , Michael Corleone, having beaten everyone, is sitting there alone, a living corpse. There's no way that man will ever change. I admit I considered some upbeat touch at the end, but honesty - and Pacino - wouldn't let me do it. People feel the worst film I made was Jack But to this day, when I get checks from old movies I've made, "Jack" is one of the biggest ones.

No one knows that. If people hate the movie, they hate the movie. I just wanted to work with Robin Williams. The trouble with American filmmaking is that producers don't allow the risk of failure. If a good film can't risk being a failure, it won't be really good. The language of cinema was invented at the turn of the last century by pioneers who were free to experiment but today you can't dare to experiment. People who control the motion pictures want to make profitable films. Now we're at a turning point: As artists we can change the world but to do that we need to be free to experiment.

There is no more film, there is no more television - there is cinema. And it can be everywhere and anywhere and it can do anything. Where did I come from? What is going to happen when I die?

What's really important? All those kind of ruminations should also be in a movie, I thought. I thought of it as a love story wrapped in a mystery like in Vertigo Except in "Vertigo" the mystery is some guy is trying to kill his wife.

In my movie the mystery is the real mystery that we are really all in. So now we have to undo the brainwashing of the past 50 years about what a movie can be: that it must be commercial, it must go down easy, it must be structured so that it appeals to the widest possible audience. Even people who read sophisticated books expect that when they go to see a movie, it won't involve any thinking. They're willing to give more to a work of literature. A movie is supposed to be something light that you go to, and you have a good time, and you don't think too much, and you laugh, or you get scared, or you're in awe of the violence, and you go home, and you forget it.

And that has to be broken. When a camera doesn't move then movement is more accentuated because every time and actor walks in, the next movie you see look at the corner of the frame and you'll see it's always doing this. It never stops. In this movie the camera is that and that's it. Everything is accomplished in a classical shot to another shot, which then gives you more, which is one way to make a movie, but I felt that was appropriate for this because by giving it a very classical style then you could relax about that, and not feel, where am I, I can't see anything because it's cutting so fast.

And then you might feel more comfortable to follow the story, but then ruminate. That's interesting. It's a dream and in the dream he's reading books.

So I made the style very deliberately classical and also got to do what I've always wanted to do, is to make a movie without any movement just to see what happens. Who said that all the ideas of how you tell a story or express the cinematic language were all in the silent era?

Why aren't there new ideas that are changing the language of film now? It's partially because film is much more controlled. In those days guys went out and made movies and no one knew what a movie was so if they wanted to invent the close shot the producer wasn't going to argue with him. Today, what is he doing? We want to make money on the film. We can't just make experimental films. And it turned out he was this professor of religious philosophy who used to entertain himself by writing these Borges-like short stories that were kind of like "Twilight Zones.

And it had a love story, and it had all sorts of things that I found intriguing, and all sorts of things that I wanted to learn about, like the origins of language and the nature of human consciousness and the concept of time. And I was getting richer as this was going on - my companies were successful - and I thought, well, why don't I just finance this myself and run off and make it?

Many times while making this movie I thought, well, should I just dumb this down and cut this out? And I said, what a pity! Will that make it less commercial? Well, who knows what it'll be? Maybe people will get a kick out of it. And at each point, since I had no studio to boss me around, I thought, I'll do it. And I still tried to make the film be a fun experience. But on the other hand when you think about it at night you might percolate some good ideas.

There's plenty of books that I've read that I'm not sure that I got at all, but I feel enriched by having read them. So, like you said, who's to say it's best to cut out the idea and instead of the middle ground have no idea?

I think it's better to be overly ambitious and fail than to be underambitious and succeed in a mundane way. I have been very fortunate. I failed upward in my life! The wine business is really a business. The film business isn't a business; it's a very screwy arrangement where you do all this work and the money all gets emptied into this hopper called distribution, and then it slowly trickles down, and when it gets to the people who actually make the film, there's little left - which is what all the strikes are about.

You can't become really wealthy on the scale of what that means today in the film business, but in the wine business you can, because it took off. That wasn't my doing.

It was an accident and I was luckily in it early on, so I benefited. I wanted to be like those great European filmmakers of the '50s and '60s, and if I was hit by lightning it was The Godfather ; that changed my whole life. So I just want to get back to what I was doing when I was first falling in love with films. You can't have great art without risk. It's simply impossible. If you want to eliminate risk, then you'll end up making the same movie over and over again, which is what they're doing now.

I think the language of cinema and the reason that in just years we've become so comfortable with making cinema is from thousands of years of man dreaming. I think it is based on the dream, and the whole language of cinema comes from dreams. I think the secret of life is to not be afraid of risk. People go through life risking their money, risking losing this, risking losing that. But the truth of the matter is, there is only one risk. Because for sure you're gonna die, you are there and you're thinking about your life and you say, 'Oh, I wish I'd done this, I wish I'd done that.

So basically, I try to say yes more than no. The result was Dementia 13 , a gory horror movie Coppola had written in three days and shot for forty thousand dollars. That year Coppola married Eleanor Neil, his set decorator on the picture. Warner Brothers selected the promising young filmmaker to direct their big-budget musical Finian's Rainbow. But the subject matter took Coppola away from his strengths and the film was panned not favorably reviewed by critics. The Rain People represented Coppola's attempt to return to "personal," not to mention low-budget, moviemaking.

A travelogue about a housewife on the run, the movie was made up as the crew went along, evidence of Coppola's flair for the experimental. Coppola might have remained in an avant-garde inventive and experimental rut were it not for his next project. As cowriter of the mega-hit Patton, Coppola earned an Academy Award and quickly restored his reputation.

Paramount Pictures next asked him to direct its screen adaptation of Mario Puzo's best-selling novel, The Godfather. It would prove to be Coppola's greatest triumph. Filming The Godfather posed many challenges.

Coppola fought hard to control the casting decisions. He also resisted studio attempts to cut his budget and to update the setting. Italian American groups protested the depiction of organized crime in the original screenplay. Even Coppola's own crew at times lost faith in his ability to control the enormous project.

Nevertheless, he steered the movie to completion. The Godfather tells the sweeping story of the Corleone crime family, focusing on the rise of young Michael Corleone to control of the family's empire. Propelling the drama forward are powerful performances by Marlon Brando — and newcomer Al Pacino —.

After its release in , critics were floored by the film's depiction of America's criminal underworld. Francis seemed the least likely to redeem his father's promise, however. He was an awkward, myopic child who did poorly at school. At age nine, he was stricken with polio. The illness forced him into bed for a year, a period during which he played with puppets, watched television, and became lost in an inner fantasy world. After his recovery, he began to make movies with an eight millimeter camera and a tape recorder.

He soon became enamored with the work of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. Coppola also trained in music and theater to round out his education. Here he acted in and directed student productions, and founded his own cinema workshop. So determined was Coppola to direct his own pictures that he once sold his car to pay for a millimeter camera.

But he was impatient to escape the classroom and start making his own films. He signed on to direct an adult movie, which caught the attention of low-budget impresario Roger Corman. Corman hired Coppola to work on his movies as a jack-of-all-trades. Coppola's strong work ethic prompted Corman to allow him to direct his own picture. That year, Coppola married Eleanor Neil, his set decorator on the picture.

The sweet coming-of-age drama anticipated the style and themes of The Graduate and received many positive reviews. Warner Brothers selected the promising young filmmaker to direct their big-budget musical Finian's Rainbow.

But the subject matter took Coppola away from his strengths and the film was savaged by critics. The Rain People represented Coppola's attempt to return to "personal" not to mention low-budget moviemaking. A somber travelogue about a housewife on the run, the movie was made up as the crew went along, evidence of Coppola's flair for the experimental.

Coppola might have remained in an avant-garde rut were it not for his next project. His sister is actress Talia Shire, and his nephew is actor Nicolas Cage. In addition to daughter Sofia, he and wife Eleanor also have a son named Roman who directs and acts as well. Their late son, Gian-Carlo Coppola, was an actor. He died in a boating accident in Gian-Carlo's daughter, Gia Coppola, made her first foray into directing and screenwriting with 's Palo Alto.

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Tom Ford is a fashion designer and film director who was the Creative Director of Gucci from