The words sound like they might be spoken by a young up-and-comer experiencing his first big break, someone fresh off the bus with stars in his eyes and the unbreakable, still unsoiled spirit of art coursing through his veins.
“Here I’ve finished this film and now I can dream up some new adventure that I know I can finance and keep doing that and learning from it and learning how to make movies.”
Except this isn’t a young up-and-comer experiencing his first big break. This is a filmmaker whose contributions to the cinema have altered the course of the medium. And only now is he able to do what he really wants to do.
At 70 years old, Francis Ford Coppola is embarking on the career he says he thought he was going to have from the start, back when he was a post-UCLA film student training as an assistant to filmmaker Roger Corman. When he and colleague George Lucas established American Zoetrope in the Bay Area in the late 1960s, the sky was the limit. But life had other plans.
“In a sense we never really got it going,” he says. “We were all there at Zoetrope in San Francisco wanting to make personal films and films that were not usually expensive so they could afford to be more extravagant in ideas and freedom, and yet I was never able to get any money to do ‘The Conversation.’ In the despair of the on-coming poverty I took this job that was offered to me and it turned out to be ‘The Godfather’ and it was like getting hit with a tsunami of success. I didn’t know that was going to happen to me and that opened up all sorts of possibilities.”
Possibilities that came with fiscal consequences, of course. The next thing Coppola knew after a wave of creative successes in the 1970s, he was in debt and “had to make a movie every year for 10 years in a row.”