Word: coppolas
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...Carmine Coppola sees himself as something more than just another composer of film music. Collaborating with his son Francis Ford, the senior Coppola has written music for The Black Stallion, The Godfather, parts I and II, and Apocalypse Now. Now travelling across the United States with Napoleon, he conducts symphony orchestras through the score he wrote for the film. But while he shares his son's interest in film, Carmine Coppola says his compositions fall into two distinct categories: programmatic music composed in conjunction with other media, and pure music of a more personal nature...
When Francis Ford showed him Napoleon, Carmine Coppola saw a chance to indulge in the former on a grand scale. "My son has always liked the idea of a silent film accompanied by live music. I think he has wanted to do one like that for a long time himself. To me, there is nothing like the excitement and unique experience of a live orchestra playing. After he saw Napoleon a few years ago, he came to me and said, 'I think this is it. Napoleon...
...When I began working on the score," Coppola continues, "I have two ideas I tried to integrate. Abel Gance was concerned with presenting a man, not a documentary. He wanted to involve his audience. So while I knew that the music had to be contemporary, I decided to rely on the Revolutionary and Romantic music from Napoleon's France...
...recently got a letter from a woman who'd seen it every single time it played in New York last year. She told me, 'Mr. Coppola, now when I go to Napoleon, I just sit and close my eyes. I listen to your music and it tells me what is happening in the film...
...FIVE YEARS, THE cinematic treatment of war has been anything but regular. In Coming Home war was a sociological case study. Michael Cimino attempted in The Deerhunter to create a charged-up folk tale complete with Robert DeNiro as an MIG-toting ubermensch. And in Apocalypse Now Francis Ford Coppola made war something mythic; something so big and so surreal that one wondered who was playing The Ride of the Valkyries after all. But in Australian director Peter Weir's Gallipoli, there is something of a retrenchment, at least intellectually. In the movie, war does not get treated so much...