Francis Ford Coppola Picks His Favorite Criterion Movies & Gives Advice to Filmmakers
Upon stepping into the hallowed Criterion Closet, stocked with hundreds of that cinephile video label’s finest releases, Francis Ford Coppola speaks of a director who “believed in a film he wanted to make, and used his entire fortune, because the financing system of the time wouldn’t finance it. And it came out and it was a big flop, and he died sort of penniless, not realizing that this film he put everything up for” would “be considered today the masterpiece that we consider it.” The auteur in question is Jacques Tati, and the film is Playtime, though one imagines that Coppola’s own recent experience with Megalopolis wasn’t so very far from his mind.
“I think he’s the only filmmaker, other than present company, who took a big hunk of what wealth he had earned in his life and put it up to make a film that nobody else would make,” Coppola continues. But when you do that, “usually it withstands the test of time.”
His long career has afforded him many a lesson in the unexpected turns a picture’s afterlife can take. Take Rumble Fish, his second S. E. Hinton adaptation of 1983 after The Outsiders. He intended it as “an art film for kids,” but “the kids at that time didn’t totally get it right away, and I thought it was a very big failure and was very upset about it, because I sort of loved the film.”
Only later did Coppola find out how influential this seeming dud had been in Latin America, where young people “went to this one theater to see this weird movie called Rumble Fish, which they had no idea what it was, but it somehow struck them, and it inspired a whole generation to become filmmakers and novelists.” But he’d never have been in a position to make it — to say nothing of The Godfather, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now — if he hadn’t heeded the words of Dance, Girl, Dance director Dorothy Arzner, who happened to be his directing teacher at UCLA. Doubtful about his potential to become a filmmaker, he declared his intention to quit trying. To which Arzner responded: “I’ve been around, and I know you’ll make it.” Indeed, Coppola made it in the movies — and, more importantly, he continues making movies today.
Related content:
The Story of Francis Ford Coppola’s Four-Decade-Struggle to Make Megalopolis
Francis Ford Coppola Breaks Down His Most Iconic Films: The Godfather, Apocalypse Now & More
120 Artists Pick Their Top 10 Films in the Criterion Collection
Martin Scorsese Names His Top 10 Films in the Criterion Collection
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.