Word: coppolas
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...impressive career as a younger person," says Francis Ford Coppola, "but it was like an older director's." Perhaps that's why people have been wondering if he'd gone into early retirement. The director of such indelible movies as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now hasn't put out a film in 10 years and has been, by his own admission, in a creative slump for 25. So now he's changing tactics: since he couldn't scramble out of the ditch going forward, he's trying reverse. For his next film, the aptly titled Youth Without Youth, Coppola...
...Youth Without Youth might also be described as a wistful man's picture. An adaptation by Coppola of a novella by the Romanian-born philosopher Mircea Eliade, the unashamedly arty film stars Tim Roth as Dominic Matei, an aging linguistics professor whose youth is restored after he survives a lightning strike. Because of his rejuvenation, Matei is able to work on his unfinished magnum opus and pursue a lost love. With a dense, multilayered plot spanning multiple continents, decades and languages, and heady themes like consciousness and the nature of time, Youth seems a lot more than a decade removed...
...Garrulous and avuncular, sipping a Bloody Mary at 4 p.m. in a Beverly Hills hotel, Coppola explains the crisis of confidence that immobilized him, and his career pivot from John Grisham to a Romanian mythologist. In 2004 the director was much like Matei before the lightning struck; he was frustrated and grappling with a consuming project he couldn't complete. He'd spent most of the '80s and '90s making forgettable films like The Cotton Club and Jack to pay off the enormous debts he had incurred on such experiments as his 1982 musical, One from the Heart. Though there...
...late '90s, Coppola says, "I just wanted to find a place for myself. I didn't want to be a director who was hired: 'Here's a script, we've got Robin Williams.'" After he lost a lengthy rights battle with Warner Bros. over a Pinocchio project, Coppola says he realized, "I don't have that much time. The time has come to do the dream project, the ultimate one that I write myself that's about something really ambitious, that contributes new ideas to the language of cinema." While the Godfather movies are fan favorites, he prefers the films...
...friend who sent Coppola encouraging notes on his Megalopolis script was Wendy Doniger, the first girl he had ever kissed and the one who gave him On the Road when they were students at Great Neck High School in Long Island, New York, in the '50s. (Coppola has optioned the book.) He flew his private plane to Chicago to pick up Doniger, now a University of Chicago professor of Hinduism and comparative mythology, and bring her back to Napa to discuss her ideas with him and his wife Eleanor. Over the house wine and Coppola's cooking, they talked about...