Word: coppolas
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John Ford," says Francis Ford Coppola, who has been both mentor and best friend to Lucas. "He doesn't really work a lot with his actors or tell them a lot. But he constructs his scenes so specifically, or narrowly-like a railroad track -that everything comes out more or less the way he sees it." Coppola considers Lucas "a pure film maker. He really only wants to put on film the things he loves. He has few pretensions about making 'great films' or 'great art,' and consequently he comes closer than most. I think...
This year audiences had better duck and hold their ears because just about every conflict but the War of Jenkins' Ear will be playing at the neighborhoods. Leading the attack is Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's epic about the Viet Nam War itself. Loosely based on Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse is about a mad Green Beret commander, played by Marlon Brando, who wages his own war in a remote Vietnamese province. Shooting in the jungles of the Philippines has been rather hellish for the cast-which also includes Robert Duvall and Martin...
...dressed in black pajamas, and a Philippine aborigine tribe was brought down from the mountains to portray Montagnards. As camera crews shot around them, they went about their everyday lives of working, eating and even giving birth. Since the Pentagon threw up its hands at the antiwar, antiArmy script, Coppola turned to the more amenable Philippine army, which provided helicopter pilots. The only trouble was that, although the Philippine pilots knew how to take off and land, they were baffled by the intricate maneuvers Coppola demanded. He handled that problem by hiring former U.S. pilots to give...
...problem, however, proved obdurate: Brando's weight. Instead of looking like a Green Beret commander, trim and tough, Brando, who was paid $2 million, panted through the paddies like Sidney Greenstreet vainly looking for the way to Rick's Bar. Coppola's solution was to film only Brando's face and hands in closeup and to use a suitably slim, 6-ft. 5-in. double for long shots. Even Coppola's inventiveness had no remedies, however, for the two typhoons that ripped up his sets...
Here are some others we liked: It's a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946); Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 1964); Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933); The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972); Mean Streets (Martin Scorcese, 1974); Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955); The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz, 1935; The Man on the Flying Trapeze (Charles Bogel, 1935); Swing Time (George Stevens, 1937); Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1935; and the Road to Utopia (you've got us, with Hope and Crosby...