The name Francis Ford Coppola conjures a cinematic career crossed by contradictions: he set out to be a “European,” personal, small filmmaker, before creating some of the most popular, successful films in American cinema; he’s a star auteur whose struggles for independence nearly ended his career more than once; he helped to define the New Hollywood-era, but his methods always look back to the ensemble film-making of the golden era of the Hollywood studios.

FFC turned 80 over the weekend and Apocalypse Now is 40 this year. Here’s a great interview between Coppola and Paul Thomas Anderson…

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The Godfather is one of the greatest American films of all time, and in many ways it represents the best of the New Hollywood movement that flourished roughly from the 1960′s into the early 1980′s. The film included all of the greed, violence and lust for power that earlier films like Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932) had established as defining tropes in the gangster genre. But director Francis Ford Coppola expanded his movie’s themes to tell the story of a family and — ultimately — of America itself. Over the course of his Godfather Trilogy the story of Corleone family is one of love and loyalty as well as brutality and vengeance. Coppola’s original movie turns 45 this year. Celebrating half a century of The Godfather here’s a deep dive documentary about the making of the trilogy…

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Several posts back I mentioned that this year is the 45 anniversary of Francis Ford Coppola’s production house American Zoetrope. It also happens to be the 35th anniversary of the 1979 film Apocalypse Now which was written by Zoetrope man of letters, John Milius and directed — of course — by Coppola himself.

Fellow Zoetroper George Lucas wanted to direct the film, shooting it with a small documentary crew on locations in California. Milius wanted to direct too — his plan was to film in Vietnam in the middle of a real war zone a la Haskell Wexler’s immortal Medium Cool which features a third act shot in the middle of the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. You know you’re in strange territory when the cooler head that prevailed was Francis Ford Coppola’s, who decided to helm the film himself in yet another bid to make a massive hit that would finally free him to direct the personal films he’d always yearned to make between his other massive hits.

The whole funny, willful, ignorant, hubristic, idealistic, psychedelic, militaristic, surf-tastic and cinematic story is told here, in this warm and generous interview of John by his old friend Francis, which illuminates the central role the writer played in the making of the classic film…

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Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts.