Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola is one of the most influential and acclaimed filmmakers of our time; a five-time Academy Award-winning director, writer, or producer of such films as Patton, The Godfather trilogy, American Graffiti, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Outsiders, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He joins a small group of filmmakers with multiple Palme d’Or awards, Golden Globes, Writers and Director’s Guild awards, and the Academy’s prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. As the co-founder of pioneering film company American Zoetrope with George Lucas, he initiated and nourished the careers of filmmakers Carroll Ballard, John Milius, Sofia Coppola, as well as of actors Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, James Caan, Harrison Ford, Richard Dreyfus, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, Laurence Fishburne, Matt Dillon, and Diane Lane. Zoetrope-produced films have received sixteen Academy Awards and seventy nominations.
As a writer, director, producer, and technological pioneer, Francis Coppola has created a body of work that has helped to shape contemporary American cinema.

Born in Detroit in 1939 and brought up in Queens, New York, Coppola was the descendent of a musically gifted family. His maternal grandfather Francesco Pennino was a songwriter, and his father Carmine was principal flute in Toscanini’s NBC Symphony. Paralyzed by polio as a child, Coppola wrote stories, played with puppetry, and developed an interest in film after being given a toy movie projector. He found kindred spirits at Great Neck High School and again at Hofstra University, where his stellar contributions to theater arts brought him many Dan Laurence theater awards, as well as the school’s highest drama honor, the Beckerman Award. After graduating in 1959 with a BFA in Theatre, he enrolled at UCLA for graduate work in film.

Early in his career, Coppola co-wrote Patton, which would go on to win seven Academy Awards, including his first Oscar®, for Best Adapted Screenplay. His second film, You’re a Big Boy Now, was presented as his MFA thesis at UCLA and marked his first trip to Cannes. Then came Finian’s Rainbow and an original work, The Rain People. His ability to make The Rain People independently of the studios inspired him and his friend George Lucas to found American Zoetrope in San Francisco. Lucas’s first two features, THX 1138 and American Graffiti, were produced under its aegis. Later, with Zoetrope facing financial hardship, Coppola was persuaded by Lucas to direct a gangster picture based on Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel The Godfather. The film was such a sensation that it altered the course of his career forever. Its follow-up, The Godfather: Part II, won six Oscars®, and is credited with starting an industry-wide trend by using numerals in titles and making sequels respectable—and immensely profitable.

At UCLA, he won the 1962 Samuel Goldwyn Writing Award for his screenplay Pilma Pilma, which led to his hiring by Seven Arts as a screenwriter. After varied stints on Roger Corman’s low-budget genre pictures, Corman allowed him to direct one of his own scripts, Dementia 13. It was on the set of this film that he met Eleanor Neil, whom he would later marry and have three children with: Gian-Carlo, Roman, and Sofia.

Between the two gangster epics, Coppola made The Conversation (1974) from his original screenplay: an offbeat quasi-thriller about wiretapping and responsibility that endures as one of his most admired and influential pictures and won the Cannes Palme d’Or.

In 1976, Coppola began filming Apocalypse Now, financing the Vietnam War epic himself. Almost everything that could go wrong did: star Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack; co-star Marlon Brando showed up grotesquely overweight; a typhoon destroyed the sets. Shooting stopped, then re-started, and the budget skyrocketed, delaying the film’s release until 1979. Stylistically and thematically, Apocalypse Now was so unusual, especially for a war film, that critics were initially divided. Nevertheless, its box office was respectable and, over time, hugely successful. Apocalypse Now has come to occupy a very special place in the annals of American moviemaking, influencing generations of filmmakers across the globe.

In 1980, Coppola bought Hollywood General Studios and renamed it Zoetrope Studios. Production immediately began on One from the Heart. Some of the innovations that came out of this period were “previsualization” (a phrase coined by Coppola), the use of ethernet as a means of departmental communication, word processing for screenplays (garnering much suspicion from the Writers Guild, which thought a computer was writing the scripts), the re-introduction of video assist, the development of 5.1 stereo sound (pioneered by the making of Apocalypse Now), electronic editing, and experimentation with high--definition. He then made two Oklahoma-based youth pictures, The Outsiders and its “antidote” Rumble Fish. The Outsiders enjoyed commercial success, but it wasn’t enough to pay the bills, and ownership of Zoetrope Studios passed into the hands of creditors. Coppola’s ensuing financial hardship led to a decade of “work for hire” pictures in order to pay off debts and provide financial security for his family. Although he directed films in the corporate sphere with no rights of ownership, he chose projects that piqued his imagination, always endeavoring to turn them into beautiful and memorable films.

In the ensuing years, Francis and Eleanor’s Napa and Sonoma wineries expanded, and Coppola directed The Godfather: Part III, which garnered seven Oscar® nominations. Later, he was able to recut the film to his and Puzo’s original structure and title as Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. Then in 1992 came Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which snared four Oscar® nominations and won three Awards. Dracula was a major financial success, and Coppola was finally free of his financial obligations. In his mind, his career of “work for hire” had come to an end, and he went on to make three personal films: Youth Without Youth, Tetro, and B’Twixt Now and Sunrise. In 2023, he realized his dream of making Megalopolis, a film he had first envisioned 40 years earlier.

Francis Ford Coppola has always been a dreamer, but he is one of those rare people who has worked with determination to make his dreams into reality. With a child’s imagination and a perpetually curious mind, he continues to pursue his conviction that the magic combination of talent and technology—the basis for the birth of the motion picture—can continue in ever-new ways.