Program Guide - San Francisco International Film Festival - San ...

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36 THE gOdFATHER Founder’s dIreCTInG AWArd FRANCis FORd COPPOLA This award is given each year to one of the masters of world cinema, in memory of Irving M. Levin. PREviOus RECiPiENTs 2008 Mike Leigh 2007 Spike Lee 2006 Werner Herzog 2005 Taylor Hackford 2004 Milos Forman 2003 Robert Altman PREviOusLy KNOwN As AKiRA KuROsAwA AwARd 2002 Warren Beatty 2001 Clint Eastwood 2000 Abbas Kiarostami 1999 Arturo Ripstein 1998 Im Kwon-Taek 1997 Francesco Rosi 1996 Arthur Penn 1995 Stanley Donen 1994 Manoel De Oliveira 1993 Ousmane Sembène 1992 Satyajit Ray 1991 Marcel Carnè 1990 Jirí Menzel 1989 Joseph L. Mankiewicz 1988 Robert Bresson 1987 Michael Powell 1986 Akira Kurosawa THE CONvERsATiON “For me, the goal is to do work according to my own feeling and hope it lives for years, not just a season,” said Francis Ford Coppola in 1982. Forty-six years after he directed his first film, it’s safe to say that he’s succeeded. Before he had turned 39 Coppola had already won five Oscars, two Palme d’Ors, solidified his place in the film canon with The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now and had entertainingly built up and melted down several fortunes in the name of Cinema. “In a funny way I became an important studio director when I was very young,” he recalled in a 1992 interview, “but I always wondered what happened to the director I wanted to be.” Now, about to turn 70 and as invigorated and questioning as ever, this legend of American and world cinema is giving himself the chance to find out. The past two decades have solidified his non-filmic enterprises, with Coppola forging modest empires out of wine, cooking, and hospitality (he runs hotels in Belize, Guatemala, and Buenos Aires) and giving himself, finally, a financial security away from the last film’s gross or the next studio’s fee. “I feel like I’m on a track of doing what I call ‘personal films’ that I can finance myself,” he said. “I don’t just want to make the type of normal movies that come out every weekend.” His most recent film Youth Without Youth, based on a story by noted philosopher Mircea Eliade and filmed in Romania, serves as a prime example of Coppola’s new, personal approach. Part philosophy, part romance, part meditative fantasy, the film afforded Coppola a sense of creative freedom that he hadn’t felt since the pre-Godfather days. Unabashedly philosophical in its treatment of life, love and language, ONE FROM THE HEART THE OuTsidERs COPPOLA NOw By Jason Sanders it’s as far from Mafia mythology, Vietnam-War histrionics, or, for that matter, Hollywood moviemaking than anything he’s done and takes its intelligent adult pleasures not from giving answers, but from asking questions. Coppola’s current project is the Buenos Aires-set Tetro, which from early accounts is as heartfelt-and truly independent as a first-time filmmaker’s debut. “Well, as a young man I had an old man’s career, now maybe as an old man I can have a young man’s career,” he quipped recently. “I feel like I’m doing what I wanted to do when I was 18.” Coppola’s first original screenplay since The Conversation, some 30 years ago, Tetro is the bittersweet story of two brothers, their talented musician father and the conflicts and tragedies within a highly creative Argentine-Italian family. Surrounded by longtime colleagues like Walter Murch and newer ones like the brilliant Romanian cinematographer Mihai Malaimare, Jr. (who also shot Youth Without Youth), Coppola draws from his own family memories to create this, his most personal work yet. “Even though this is a fictional story,” he says, “I used what I know best, my life.” Such personal filmmaking is truly a return to Coppola’s roots. As a student at UCLA Film School, Coppola worked as a script doctor for the legendary cult impresario Roger Corman. Impressed by Coppola’s writing skills, Corman gave the tyro a chance to direct with the 1963 horror quickie Dementia 13, but it was his next films, the satirical coming-of-age tale You’re a Big Boy Now (1966) and the brilliantly improvised road-trip movie The Rain People (1969) that truly announced Coppola as a talent to watch. And from there, The Godfather: Brought on at the last minute, the young Coppola spent the entire shoot
APOCALyPsE NOw sELECTEd FiLMOgRAPHy 2009 Tetro 2007 Youth Without Youth 1997 The Rainmaker 1996 Jack 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula 1990 The Godfather: Part III 1989 New York Stories (segment “Life without Zoe”) 1988 Tucker: The Man and His Dream 1987 Gardens of Stone 1986 Peggy Sue Got Married 1984 The Cotton Club 1983 The Outsiders Rumble Fish 1982 One from the Heart 1979 Apocalypse Now 1974 The Conversation The Godfather: Part II 1972 The Godfather 1969 The Rain People 1968 Finian’s Rainbow 1966 You’re a Big Boy Now 1963 The Terror Dementia 13 imagining he was about to be fired, with nearly his every decision countered and dismissed by studio heads. Brando? No way. Pacino? Never heard of him. Gordon Willis’s cinematography? Too dark. The result? The biggest money-maker in film history at the time, which launched Coppola towards a career he could barely have imagined. “I wanted to do little Antonioni films, little Fellini films,” he recalled in 1992. “I never planned on being part of the big stuff. I never imagined it.” Where some artists hoard their career success for their own personal gain, Coppola reinvested his in meaningful films and the professional development of his friends and colleagues. His collaborative studio, American Zoetrope, founded with George Lucas and John Korty 40 years ago this year, in 1979, became the epicenter of a new cinematic culture, and Coppola (to paraphrase Iranian director Mohsen Mahkmalbaf) started making not only films, but also filmmakers. “American Zoetrope, San Francisco’s only major movie studio, is full of longhaired, bearded types,” stated a bemused 1984 article, and within its confines Coppola helped nurture (and fund) such filmmakers as Lucas (who started as an intern on The Rain People) and Philip Kaufman; international legends like Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and Akira Kurosawa also benefited from Coppola’s generosity as a financier and producer. “Francis was the great white knight,” recalled George Lucas in a recent New Yorker profile. “He was the one who made us hope.” Meanwhile, Bay Area icons like editor and sound designer Walter Murch and director Carroll Ballard became Coppola’s most trusted colleagues, and, by extension, among the industry’s most leading talents. yOuTH wiTHOuT yOuTH Breathing new life into American film, Coppola set about reinvigorating the San Francisco cultural landscape. He bought buildings, a radio station, a magazine, a theater and, in Napa Valley, an old winery that later became an exemplary career in itself. His fervent, visionary embrace of new technology prefigured the digital film movement by decades. “I think electronic cinema is going to make art less expensive to make, available to more people. I think in two years there won’t be any more film shot,” he said, back in 1981. His films became as wide-ranging, idiosyncratic, and bold as his interests, with now-classic works like The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979), clearly ahead of their time, criticized on release as too arty or incomprehensible. Like a modern-day Don Quixote, Coppola has spent his career getting knocked down, but getting back up, proclaimed a genius one year and foolhardy the next, but tenaciously staying true to his own vision. In 1997, Coppola was asked of his legacy. “If I could widen the cinema one little percentage point more, at a time when it’s not being widened, that would be very, very gratifying,” he responded. His career has accomplished far more than that. Francis Ford Coppola is one of the true geniuses of world cinema. And he’s not done expanding the frame yet. Jason Sanders is an archivist and writer at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. His writing has appeared in publications including Filmmaker Magazine, Cinema Scope, Release Print and International Documentary. 37
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WORLD CINEMA ACCLAIMED INtERNAtIONA
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ShortS 172 ATLANTIS UNBOUND IMMErSI
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