Youth Without Youth

[Just Withnail]

Longer reply hopefully coming, but for now: Dissapointing and messy. Fails in many of the ways I felt The Fountain failed (and they have their share of similarities). This post fails as well, by the way.

[Pubrick]

underrated and misunderstood!

thread rebalanced. for now. 

[MacGuffin]

Starz plays Coppola's 'Coda'
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Eleanor Coppola's documentary "Coda: Thirty Years After," chronicling her husband Francis' journey directing his latest film "Youth Without Youth," is set to premiere Dec. 9 on Starz Cinema.

The film, Coppola's second docu based on her husband's work, also will be included in the new DVD release "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse," being released Tuesday by Paramount Home Entertainment. That film documented Coppola's challenges when filming "Apocalypse Now."

In addition to production footage from "Youth" -- Francis Ford Coppola's first film in 10 years -- "Coda" also includes footage from his first short film "No Cigar," behind-the-scenes footage from 1969's "The Rain People" and 1974's "The Conversation" and family home movies.

Based on the novella by Mircea Eliade, "Youth Without Youth" stars Tim Roth as an elderly professor who, after being struck by lightning, miraculously returns to his youth with a new chance to continue his life's work and rediscover lost love. The film also stars Bruno Ganz and Alexandra Maria Lara.

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer here.

[modage]

ATTN: NYC
Youth without Youth
With Francis Ford Coppola, Tim Roth, and Alexandra Maria Lara in person
Monday, December 3, 7:00 p.m.
At The Paris Theater, 4 West 58th Street, Manhattan

i was going to this, for free too.  but now i'm not.  i think i'm ok with that.

[Pubrick]

i was going to this, for free too.  but now i'm not.  i think i'm ok with that.

you're a fool.

this is why PTA didn't wanna come to your house.

[MacGuffin]

Coppola's Youth Movement
Legendary director just wants you to enjoy his years-in-the-making mindfuck
By S.T. VanAirsdale; The Reeler

"I know that recently I've come out to speak to people, and usually they're playing the theme from The Godfather," said Francis Ford Coppola, greeting the capacity crowd that gathered Monday at the Paris Theater for the Museum of the Moving Image's preview of his new film Youth Without Youth. "Or Wagner [from Apocalypse Now], which really makes me think that yes, those movies -- The Godfather, certainly -- were collections of talented people, and I'm so pleased that those films are remembered."

Here Coppola slumped a bit and elided a wince before continuing. "But I beg the audience to allow me to go on into new areas and find new ways to express myself."

Be our guest, Francis. Of course, the whole point of Youth Without Youth (opening Dec. 12 in New York) -- beyond its mind-cramping interpretation of writings by Romanian philosopher and historian Mircea Eliade -- is that Coppola needed neither permission nor outside backing for his first release in 10 years. ("I'd like to see a show of hands: Who has ever had a bottle of wine from Coppola Vineyards?" he asked the crowd, prompting hundreds of enthusiastic replies. "You are all executive producers of this film!") Legitimately independent and utterly impenetrable, Youth follows the travails of 70-year-old linguist Dominic Matei (Tim Roth), whose life's search for the source of human language is interrupted by a broken engagement, a lightning strike that restores him to his 35-year-old self, Nazis chasing him as the planet's most coveted specimen, the return of his lost love (Alexandra Maria Lara) in the form of another lighting-addled atavist who relapses into Sanskrit and Sumerian when not aging at a rate of a year per day. Do they share a curse, or is it all just a dream? Moreover, as the first hour's exposition folds into the second hour's metaphysics, do you get it? Do you even care?

For his part, Roth met his director halfway. "I didn't get it," he said in a post-screening discussion with Lara and long-time Coppola editor Walter Murch. "But I really think film is a director's medium, and in my initial foray into this, I decided to place that aspect of it -- the conscious and subconscious -- in the hands of Francis. He read all the books, and I hadn't. I had to really make sure with my arc that I was getting what he wanted of that day done. It was way, way, way too much information and way too difficult for me to understand or for me to take that on day in, day out. So I stopped doing it and would just talk to Francis very specifically about what was happening in this specific conversation or dialogue or monologue."

Coppola has held the company line all along, responding to Youth's cool reception at the recent Rome Film Festival by insisting that a second, third or even more glances will aid nonplussed viewers. Indeed, Youth will have its defenders, just as cult appreciation for Coppola's 1981 folly One From the Heart inches closer each year to surmounting its chaotic, insolvent legend. But I've seen it twice now and actually liked it less after Monday's screening. Sure, as unalloyed passion projects go, it's not unrecommendable by any means: A perennially cagy, clever physical performer, Roth hangs in nobly as the tormented Matei; whatever confidence his restored youth initially supplies has nothing on his simmering futility. Framed and scored like a '40s melodrama, and still as Ozu, Youth channels Coppola's influences more intimately than cynically.

The overriding inspiration, however, is Eliade, and Coppola's glee at adapting to his "new," independent, uncompromising style reflects his source's own emphatic idealism. "He used to write these really intriguing, Borges-like stories based on the myths and parables he learned in his more serious work," Coppola said. "When I read this, I thought, 'My God, every three pages something amazing happens. It's like stories grew out of stories grew out of stories. I had a wonderful experience reading it, and I thought that if I could transfer what Eliade wrote -- if I could understand what he's talking about -- I would be a much better person."

Of course you give the guy the benefit of the doubt; you surrender to the experience with the expectation -- or at least the hope -- that it will translate. But for viewers, translating Youth Without Youth requires a dispassionate investment in theories that defy the abstractions of romance, politics or memory; basically, it requires the abandonment of known cinematic modes. An appealing challenge on its face, except that among the principal ironies of a film so resolutely about the vagaries of language, you'll find that the consummate craftsman Coppola paraphrases more than he explores. SPOILER Why exactly is Matei's love doomed, for example? She leaves, he leaves, his work threatens them both. Ultimately, though, they can't communicate. The audience suffocates in that vacuum as well. END SPOILER

Whatever. Depressing as they are, Coppola's missteps admittedly invite more intrigue, discussion and reinterpretation than most of his contemporaries' mere adequacies. (Charlie Wilson's War, Mike Nichols? I mean, really?) I suppose you could call him an apologist for himself, but not only does Coppola apparently know this -- he's counting on it.

"Films do a have a tendency to live a long time, and sometimes they even change the audiences so that [viewers] 10 years from now are affected by more unusual films," he said. "In fact, I can remember in my own career reading the reviews of the first Godfather film. Even our friends here at Variety gave it a terrible review. [Variety co-sponsors the Moving Image screening series. -- Ed.] I won't even talk about Apocalypse Now. Pity the reviewer who has to make a fast judgment call that night and come out with a review of something that took maybe three years to make. So it's understandable.

"But certainly at this stage of my life -- I'm 68 years old -- I want to be a young independent filmmaker," Coppola continued, winding down his introduction. "I want to write all my movies, and I want them to be about unusual subject matter. I hate to say it, but I want people to enjoy it just as when I cook dinner, I want people to enjoy the meal and not say, 'Well, I have to go home and think about whether I like it or not.' I want you to enjoy it."

[Pubrick]

Whatever.

modage, maybe it's good thing you didn't go. sounds like the kind of movie you love to hate.

i hope my inevitable defense of this won't be as futile as those who've taken the task of defending INLAND EMPIRE.

at best, this is destined to be rediscovered in 10 years like HULK.

[Stefen]

Wow. FFC is making another movie?

What's it about?

[MacGuffin]

Apocalypse then, auteur now
After a 10-year break, Francis Ford Coppola, one of the greatest movie directors of the 20th century, is back with an experimental film - the kind, he tells us, he always wanted to make before getting 'sidetracked by Hollywood'
Source: The Observer
 
At 68, his hair and beard now almost completely silver-grey, Francis Ford Coppola looks like Fidel Castro's jollier younger brother. He is holding court in an expansive hotel suite in Rome which looks out over the Spanish Steps and the dome of St Peter's beyond. We are here to discuss his new film, Youth Without Youth, his first in 10 years, but the talk has turned almost immediately to the melancholy subject of growing old.

'At my age,' he says, 'you start to think about stuff you didn't think about before. One of the big questions that keeps coming up is "what if?" What if I'd done this instead of that? What if I'd become the experimental, avant garde film-maker I always really wanted to be?'

Well, for a start, I say, you wouldn't have made The Godfather. Or, for that matter, Apocalypse Now. And you wouldn't now be regarded as one of the greatest directors of the 20th century. 'I guess not,' he says, sounding not that worried one way or another. 'But, I would have made more personal films. Films of ideas. Like the guys who were making movies when I came of age - Godard and the New Wave. Which is what I wanted to do in the first place.'

Why didn't he, then? A long sigh. 'I became successful in Hollywood,' he says finally. 'I got sidetracked.'

He says this with wistfulness rather than deep regret, but it is still an astounding thing to hear from one of the great masters of 20th-century American film: the sense that he considers himself to be artistically inferior to a chancer like Godard. Now, though, as if to assuage this long-held regret, Coppola has finally got to make an experimental film.

Youth Without Youth is based on the philosophical novel of the same name by Mercia Eliade. It stars Tim Roth as Dominic Matei, an ageing Hungarian linguist who, having made preparations to commit suicide, is struck by lightning on a street in Bucharest on Easter Sunday, 1938. Like Christ, he rises again, and, while recovering from his ordeal in hospital, his body mysteriously begins to regenerate. His youth returns, but he retains the memories and regrets of an old man, and is haunted by the long-lost love of his life, Laura, played by the wonderful Alexandra Maria Lara.

'I was on holiday on a beach when he rang me up,' says the young actress, who has previously played Hitler's secretary in Downfall and Ian Curtis's mistress in Control. 'I was so shocked, I immediately cut him off just so I could compose myself. But he was so generous in his way of working. It's a complex film in many ways but he was very patient with all my questions and talked me through the most demanding scenes. I kept thinking, "This can't be happening to me, I'm working with a legend."'

Youth Without Youth is a film that forgoes thrills and spills for endless rumination. Its pace is slow and stately, its tone regretful. I put it to Coppola that today's cinema audience may find it demanding.

'Well, it's essentially a fairytale and, as such, it's not that hard to understand,' he replies, sounding slightly testy. 'I guess it may appear weird to people who want me to make The Godfather or Apocalypse Now over and over but, you know, when Apocalypse Now came out, everybody said, "Wow, this is so weird". That was the initial reaction almost across the board. It took five years really before they stated saying, this is not so weird. This is just different.'

Coppola has travelled to Rome for the city's annual film festival, and it is clear that the Italian-American director is revered here. The following day Youth Without Youth will receive its world premiere. He has brought the entire Coppola clan along with him: his wife, Eleanor, a documentary film-maker who made the brilliant Heart of Darkness about the fraught filming of Apocalypse Now; his daughter, Sofia, a celebrated director in her own right (Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette); and his son, Roman, who co-scripted Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited. (Another son, Gio, died in a boating accident in 1986.)

'It's a family affair,' he says, smiling. The celebratory atmosphere has been punctured, though, by a story that has just broken in the press in which Coppola seems to accuse Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, who both starred in the Godfather films, of growing old and lazy and 'living off the fat of the land'. One headline reads: 'Coppola launches blistering attack on three of the biggest stars in the film business.' Another claims: 'Coppola mocks Godfather stars.'

On the page, the quotes look pretty damning. Of the man who played Michael Corleone, Coppola is quoted as saying, 'Pacino is rich, maybe because he never spends any money; he just puts it in his mattress.' Even Jack Nicholson gets it in the neck for having a 'mean streak' and being 'always wired in with the big boys, the big bosses of the studios'.

Coppola shrugs. 'How outrageous,' he says. 'And how funny. I mean, it's not so much what I said, which is what I would say to them, it's that it's been taken totally out of context. It was wrapped up as if I was attacking them. I didn't attack them. I love and respect and admire them. The headlines were, "Jack Nicholson is a waste of talent". I mean, what kind of schmuck would say that?'

So, what happened, exactly? 'Well, right at the end of a long interview, this guy from CQ [sic] magazine asked me what I thought of them. And I said, well they're not the same guys they were when they were young and hungry. Now they are rich. Deservedly so. Thank God, you know. Then it all gets twisted. I mean, I'm a friendly guy, right? You ask me this or that, I'll tell you.'

So, for the record, what do you really think about them? 'What do I think of Bobby De Niro and Al Pacino? Well, for a start, I don't feel I made them, I feel they made me. That's how highly I regard them. And Jack is a huge talent, one of the greats. These are my friends,' he says, sighing. 'And that kind of stuff can hurt friendships.'

As he approaches 70, Coppola seems oddly vulnerable. It is not just that the avuncular and effusive gentleman sitting on the sofa opposite me bears only the slightest resemblance, physically and temperamentally, to the driven, larger-than-life character who made those grandiose American films in the Seventies. It is more that, even as his legend has grown, the movies he has made since then seem to have mattered less and less.

It is 10 years since his last film, The Rainmaker, a solid, well-crafted take on a John Grisham thriller. It was not a commercial success. Neither was Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), nor Gardens of Stone (1987) nor the entertaining but oddly empty Fifties period piece, Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). They were all perfectly well-made films but lacking in greatness, devoid of the visionary scope and bravura direction of his great early masterpieces. You have to go back to the early Eighties to the likes of One From the Heart and Rumble Fish to catch a glimpse of the greatness that was announced so dramatically a decade earlier with the first two Godfather films.

Of late, too, it has often seemed that Coppola was more content to tend the vineyards on his vast California estate than make movies. (He has two wine companies situated in Napa Valley, one small and traditional, the other big and globally successful, as well as a thriving pasta company in Brooklyn.) Having bought the legendary Inglenook Chateau in 1995 with the £4.5m profits from Bram Stoker's Dracula, he is now using some of the vast fortune he has made from his vineyards to make films.

'Everything is genre-driven these days, and that's not what I'm interested in. Some of the greatest directors we have get sucked into returning to the same subject matter, and essentially making the same film over and over,' he says, perhaps referring to his friend, Martin Scorsese. 'Whereas I'm in the fortunate position of having become wealthy though the wine business. That is the reason I am able to make the films I want to make.' How much did Youth Without Youth cost, then? He pauses. 'I can't tell you exactly but, let's put it this way, I can make any film I want for around $20m (£10m) or less.'

The film was shot on location in Romania with a small crew. Coppola insists this was because he wanted to make it the way his younger self would have made it had he not been 'side-tracked' by Hollywood.

'I very consciously tried to make it the way a student film-maker would. I put all the equipment in a truck and went to Romania. I didn't have any of the great collaborators that I've had the pleasure of working with in the past. In fact, I worked with a 28-year-old local cinematographer. Which was kind of apt because I felt like I was a 28-year-old director all over again.'

This, of course, could simply be Coppola putting a brave face on things. Another way of reading it is that his commercial cachet in Hollywood is now so low that self-financing his projects is the only way to get them made. Whatever, he seems remarkably calm about it all, even mellow. This is after all a man who, while recreating the excesses of the Vietnam war in the jungles of the Philippines for Apocalypse Now, collapsed on the set just after his lead actor, the young Martin Sheen, had a near fatal heart attack.

'Oh man, all that stuff was exaggerated, greatly exaggerated,' he says, not altogether convincingly. 'I read the other day that I had three nervous breakdowns. I maybe had one little one. And that was through smoking, not overwork. But three breakdowns, I mean, come on!'

Nevertheless, his younger self seems close to meltdown more than once in Heart of Darkness, his wife Eleanor's documentary, which I watched again recently. I also reread her great book, Notes, on the making of the film. In it she writes of her husband's collapse: 'Francis said he was as near to death as he has ever experienced. He said he could see reality coming down a dark tunnel and he was totally scared that he wouldn't get back.' Was she exaggerating, too?

'Well, Heart of Darkness is obviously accurate,' he concedes.. 'I guess I was a little - what's the word? - manic back then.' He chuckles like a guilty child. 'Then again,' he says, 'you have to be manic to get through something like that.'

One of the funniest and most revealing anecdotes in Eleanor Coppola's book describes a row she had with her husband in the driveway of their San Francisco house when the making of Apocalypse Now had all but taken over his life. They were shouting at each other across the roof of their car when their daughter, Sofia, who was just a toddler back then, wound down the window and yelled 'Cut!'

Now Sofia is a successful director in her own right, as calm and laid-back on set as he was histrionic and overbearing. 'Sofia has a signature,' he says, proudly, 'We call it terroir in the wine business. You would know you were watching one of her movies even if you hadn't seen the credits. I hope it's the same with me.'

I wonder, though. For all his greatness, Coppola's movies are not really united by a signature style. It would be difficult without prior knowledge to guess that Youth Without Youth - or, indeed, Peggy Sue Got Married or Rumble Fish - was directed by the same man who made The Godfather. He once described himself as 'a sloppy filmmaker'. What exactly did he mean by that?

'Well, making a film is like cooking a dinner. I guess I'm a sloppy cook because I do it out of enthusiasm, essentially. I don't measure everything but I have a good feel for food. Same with movies. The bottom line is I'm emotionally sloppy. That's why I need a great cinematographer. They're the opposite of emotional and sloppy, they're precise. You need both to make a good film.'

Does he still enjoy filmmaking as much as he did when he was younger and bolder? 'Well, it takes longer these days. I do other things now as well - it's not just one film and then another.'

Someone - it may have been Werner Herzog - once said that making a film was governed by fear. Does he agree? 'Oh, yeah. Every day you are in a total state of fear. It's one of those jobs where you go ahead in an attitude that would probably stop other people from going ahead. That's the nature of it.'

His next film is called Tetro and stars Javier Bardem. 'I want,' he says, 'to make a great old-fashioned movie with Elia Kazan-style acting.' He has written the screenplay himself and will soon be taking his truck of equipment to Argentina to begin shooting. 'It's about fathers, sons and brothers, a bit Tennessee Williams, a bit Rocco and His Brothers.' He pauses for a moment and looks out across the domes and spires and red-tiled rooftops of Rome. 'I guess the way it has turned out is that when people go to see a new Francis Ford Coppola movie, they hope it's going to be another Godfather. There is always that hope even in the face of the impossibility of that actually happening.'

That's quite a weight to carry, but by acknowledging it you sense that Francis Ford Coppola has finally made it lighter. The twinkle in his eye when he talks about Tetro makes me think that he may yet surprise us. I really hope so. As he has grown older, cinema has grown safer. 'For a movie to be great,' he says just before we conclude, 'someone has had to have taken a risk. If no one is willing to do that, the movies will not be good. That much I do know.' He seems ready to take that risk at least one more time.

[MacGuffin]

The Return of Francis Ford Coppola!
Source: Edward Douglas; ComingSoon

It's been ten years since legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola graced the silver screen after helming some true film classics like "The Godfather" trilogy and Apocalypse Now, but his new film Youth Without Youth might seem like a daring move and possibly the least commercial film of Coppola's long career. Based on the metaphysical writings of Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade, the film follows Tim Roth as 70-year-old linguistics professor Dominic Matei, a man haunted by his lost love Lara while languishing in Bucharest, and after being struck by lightning, he goes through a process of rejuvenation that reverts his body back to that of a 40-year-old. Things get even more interesting when he meets the beautiful Veronica (Alexandra Maria Lara from Downfall) who is the spitting image of his ex and channels an ancient spirit named "Rupini" while speaking in ancient tongues. (It's probably mind-blowing stuff for those who are able to get it.)

While Coppola's production on the film traversed the globe from Romania to Geneva to Malta and India, ComingSoon.net had a chance to grab some time with Mr. Coppola during a stop in New York, before he returned to South America to continue filming his next movie Tetro.

ComingSoon.net: Do you think you would have done this movie when you were younger?
Francis Ford Coppola: No one has asked me that question. I think yes. I think the Twilight Zone aspect would have appealed to me. That kind of metaphysical, Faustian parallel, you know? I was a theater student of course. The real career I had in mind perhaps was more... did you ever see a film I made "The Rainmaker"? It was more personal stories. I was a theater student of the days of Kazan, Brando, and Tennessee Williams being the gods as they still are in my mind, so I would've loved to continue in that kind of career, but "Youth Without Youth" would've intrigued me I think because of the hocus pocus. One of the great things of making movies is you tend to learn a lot about that subject matter. You're making a film about the Vietnamese War, you read a lot about it. Mircea Eliade, man he was really more of a philosopher of religion, but he wrote these stories to entertain himself to play around with things he was deriving out of, Hindu, early Buddhist because he was a "Sanscritist" and he specialized in India, but in Oriental religion. So he wrote these fables to play around with the ideas that he was doing in his work.

CS: How long ago did you originally read his novella? Were you aware it was going to be a challenge from the beginning and how did you approach that challenge?
Coppola: I was working on this project which you've heard of which was "Megalopolis." When I got myself out of debt around the time of "Dracula," I don't know how old I was, I was in my late fifties or something. After ten years from age forty to fifty of just making a film every year--because I had this enormous bank payment to make--I said, "Well now I'm going to use all I've learned and write a great screenplay and it's going to be big, and I know people would like something erratic from me." So I cooked up this "Megalopolis" as an original screenplay. I got time, it could take years to do it. Maybe that's not best to have years to do it because it took years. Ultimately, it was a movie in a nutshell about a utopia. The idea that maybe the human species is so talented and so ingenious that we could at this point build life in the world that would be so exciting and great for everybody. I set the story in New York and it had a kind of archetype of master builder, like a Robert Moses, but an enlightened kind of character and it was all on grandiose terms. Right in the middle of it, we were shooting in fact the second unit, and right in the middle of it the Twin Towers tragedy took place. Suddenly I was thinking, "Well how do I deal with this?" because it changed for good the idea of any story you might set in New York in contemporary time. Everyone knew the mayor and the circumstances, so I basically couldn't figure out how to write my way out of it. I even have footage. Have any of you seen that movie, the documentary made called "Coda" about the making of "Youth Without Youth"? It has footage from "Megalopolis" when we were shooting. We actually shot there two days after the tragedy.

What happened is I didn't know what to do. I was working on this and my feeling was that it would be Christmas, I would see my kids and New Year's. The next thing I know it was July and I wasn't any closer. Two or three years just went by like that and you know, I was frustrated. I've said this but it was misunderstood is that I wanted my place in the movie world, not my place in history, but just like what kind of movies could I work on? I didn't want to do jobs anymore because I had done ten years of that. I felt the big movies that could afford to hire a regular director were getting more and more... you'd seen them already. The little independent films, which were and still are the exciting films, even that was getting hard, so I kind of didn't know what to do in a way.

I felt pretty vigorous and I was sixty-five, but I didn't know exactly how to function given what was changing in the movie business. Finally, I was working on this "Megalopolis" script and it dealt with time in a funny way because obviously when you are going to build a utopia, it doesn't happen in a weekend. A friend of mine gave me this Mircea Eliade story because it had some very interesting quotes. First I read the quotes about time because time is essentially unreal. The future doesn't exist. It is the present and that's all that there is. We as humans can think about the future as a concept, but there is no such thing as the future nor is there such a thing as the past, because we are always in the present. At any rate, I read these and thought, "Oh that's very interesting." Then I just got the story just to read the story. When I read the story I thought, "Wow, this is like a hell of a story. Every two pages something really strange happens." It's a real trip. It's like an intellectual Twilight Zone. Along the way, you're learning about things I didn't know about from Indian myth and stuff like that. I just found it interesting and I became enthusiastic and since I had a lot of money, I went off and made a movie and paid for it myself.

CS: Could you talk about casting Tim Roth? I'm curious what you saw in him as far as playing the role of an everyman?
Coppola: I cast Tim Roth because I wanted to cast an actor who would go with me and freeze in Romania for six months for not a ton of money which I didn't have. Also, I wanted to cast someone that I'd always liked in films and felt he'd never gotten a day in the sun. I think Tim Roth is someone we've seen as villains and he's clearly a very bright guy, and a very talented guy, very bright, and very savvy about movies. I wanted someone who hadn't gotten the chance to be the star above the title and to be the romance and to play old and play young. Playing young is really hard. It's not so hard to take a 45-year-old guy and make him eighty years old, but to take a 45-year-old guy and make him be vaguely believable as a 24-year-old guy is very hard. He had lots of challenges and he was very good to give me his time. I remember when my nephew Nicolas had made so many movies, but finally after, I don't know how many films, he did "Leaving Las Vegas" after being wonderful in a dozen films, finally they all said, "Oh, look at Nicolas." Obviously, you hope that the actor you can afford to have with you would get that kind of chance at being celebrated.

CS: Can you talk about working in Bucharest and recreating the city pre-Ceauşescu?
Coppola: The beauty of Ceauşescu is that he didn't destroy the entire city although he came darn close and that's unforgivable because it was always a beautiful city. Intellectually, Romania is very vital, with great composers, poets, and great theater. So I went with the attitude, you know I'm a Roger Corman trained filmmaker, so I know the most expensive thing on a movie when you really get down to it are plane tickets, hotel rooms, transportation, and meals. So I said, "I'm gonna go there alone," which I did. "And pick everyone from Romania. Because then I don't have to fly anyone there." If I brought along a standing photographer or something like that, then they'd want their camera operator, they'd want their gaffer, and the gaffer has to have so and so and the thing just balloons into plane tickets and hotel bills. So I went and said, "I'm going to pick everyone just from the young Romanian people I met." I say young because anyone from Romania under thirty-five spoke English. I was very happy because I picked a twenty-nine year old cinematographer who was just fabulous to work with, a sweet young man, very serious. You don't know when you see the movie, I'm expecting you don't know how it was made, whether it was digital, film, or what because of these beautiful images. And of course it was shot digitally.

CS: In the notes it says that "Youth Without Youth" is at once a poignant love story, political thriller and a lively philosophical quest, but I also saw elements of horror and science fiction in there. Can you talk about that?
Coppola: Of course I have a great affection for the horror movie because the horror movie was always the friend to the young filmmaker, because you could make it and somebody would give you the money because they'd get it back. Also, a horror movie allows you to have style in the film. You could do something a little far-out, so it's a very forgiving genre. It's the only thing you can do when you're young often. That's why we all started with Roger Corman. But certainly, this has elements of that as well, and I think Eliade was having fun with it. As I said, it was fun for him. If you've read his other stories, they're quite remarkable, and they all take elements from his serious work. Indian myth is really where all of our traditions of Aesop's Fables. They all come from Indian traditions, but they are all little exercises to show how perception isn't quite what you think and time isn't quite what you think. They're all little fables that are very similar to "Youth Without Youth" really in a way which is where he got it from.

CS: Could you talk about one of the themes of the movie which is that "Love is stronger than knowledge"?
Coppola: Love is stronger than knowledge. That's a very interesting statement. For human beings, knowledge is pretty intoxicating, but love seems to be the thing that we get our definition from. I can understand his decision. Imagine being with a beautiful young woman. I love the irony in the story, of he was old getting young and she was young getting old. It is full of science fiction, you are quite right. For me, the theme was very much like a Faustian story. He had always been a bookish man, and here he was getting increased intellectualism and speaking languages he couldn't speak, but when you are able to love a second time, that's got to be the ultimate dream. Why would anyone want to be young again if not (for) that?

(SPOILER WARNING!!!!!)

At the end of the piece it came down to, ironically, he had been given this opportunity to go back to the origins of language which is what he always wanted, even as a young man. If you recall when he was talking to his professor, he said he wanted to get at that moment when human beings first spoke because he thought that was the beginning of consciousness. Through the gift of this far-out story of this girl existing on another life as the Indian woman, she's taking him back to the moment when humans first spoke. He realizes that she's becoming ravaged and losing her health and her beauty, not willing to lose his love a second time, he sacrifices himself and doesn't ever get back to the origins of language where she was taking him.

(SPOILER WARNING OVER)

CS: You've mentioned that you have an admiration for Japanese director Ozu, so did you decide to use some of his techniques in this film?
Coppola: There are many great Japanese directors, but yes, when I made movies before, I would always experiment with the style because I wanted to learn about it, but also I feel the style should be chosen based on the theme. I made films with moving camera. "Apocalypse Now" is moving camera. I'm now at an age where I kind of want to harvest what I've experimented with all those years. I have to say that I prefer the cinematic style without the moving camera because when the frame is static, all the movement is accentuated. When people make an entrance, or go out, or come in, and also the structure of the shots. Every shot you cut to brings more information. A lot of times you're shooting, and okay she's over there and she gets up and she walks up over there and I started to find that every shot has all the information in it and it's hard to cut it. You have to choose, "Well do I use the shot where she is over here with him? That wasn't even such a great shot because we were just at the tail end. Or do I use the one that was set up?" And I've now come to wanting to have every shot set-up and know if she were to get up, I wouldn't tilt up with her, I would let her go out of frame and get another shot so I'm not looking up her nose. A lot of things like that.

CS: You've done big films that have gone over-budget and movies on a tighter budget. There are filmmakers who feel that limits, whether they be financial or artistic, are actually good for creativity, and other people who chafe at that idea.
Coppola: In a way it's the same thing as the limit of not moving the camera... I only went over-budget on movies that I was financing. I was always pretty savvy on production and I never went over budget, well "Cotton Club" I went over budget, but that was such an interesting experience. But no, I'm capable of making a movie modestly, and in fact, on "Youth Without Youth" it was my money. It wasn't a little movie. We had period costumes, we had Nazis, we had India, we had all kinds of stuff. I did a good job on making the money count.

CS: Can you talk about your next movie "Tetro"?
Coppola: "Tetro" is starting right away. It's the guy's name and it's another personal film. This movie was the bridge for me. "Tetro" is more like the film after "The Conversation". That was the kind of career I was going for, "Rainmaker," "The Conversation." "Youth Without Youth" had always been a strange episode because it's such a strange story, but "Tetro" is more my Tennessee Williams drama of my own life. Not autobiographical, but certainly themes that were present in my own life.

CS: Would you consider "Youth Without Youth" autobiographical?
Coppola: Only to the extent where I said, "Oh, here I am and I want to have a career like an eighteen-year-old and make experimental movies. If I get hit by lightning, maybe I can go do that." So to an extent, it was more that I saw the parallel and said, "Well that's a good sign. That tells me I ought to go make it." People will say it had to do something with me personally.

Youth Without Youth opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, December 14.

[MacGuffin]

Interview: Francis Ford Coppola
The Youth Without Youth director discusses his return to filmmaking.

Along with venerated greats like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola is one of a very few 1970s filmmakers whose name continues to enjoy household familiarity long after the decade ended. As opposed to his colleagues, however, Coppola's output in the 1980s and '90s was considerably more sporadic, making a handful of great films and several other less-great ones. But 2007 sees the return of Coppola, as he considers it, in his artistic wheelhouse. His new film Youth Without Youth is not only a return to the screen after a hiatus of almost a decade, but a return to the passion and ambition of his earliest work.

Coppola recently spoke to IGN in Los Angeles during a roundtable interview to promote the film. While his answers provided at least as many philosophical non sequiturs as the film itself, Coppola talked at length about his newly-restored passion for directing, and offered some of his insights on the business after working in Hollywood for more than 40 years.

IGN: What about this material made you want to return to directing after such a long hiatus?

Francis Ford Coppola: I don't think it's such a hiatus because most directors make a film and then three years later they do a project and they can't get the money. It also depends on the director's need to earn money. You'll find that they wait three years or so. Of course, I was older so I wanted to sort of rediscover my place in movies. I didn't want to be -- what can I call it -- a studio director. You know how they do it. They have four scripts being written and the best one they take and do and they produce the others and they are always looking for the project that can pay them a lot of money and have the big stars. They might be my age, but they want to make the big movies and be number one and stuff like that. I didn't particularly feel that so much. I wanted to make more personal films. I want to make the kinds of films that I wished I could have made when I was 20. But when I was 29 I made The Godfather, so my life changed. I had this big career when I was young and I was hoping maybe I could have this more personal, I'm not allowed to say art film, but more personal film. You know, real movies that are about ideas and feelings and real things and not just to make a lot of money to make the same film over and over and over every time. Plus, I also felt that the cinema itself can change. Who said that all the ideas of how you tell a story or express the cinematic language were all in the silent era? Why aren't there new ideas that are changing the language of film now? It's partially because film is much more controlled. In those days guys went out and made movies and no one knew what a movie was so if they wanted to invent the close shot the producer wasn't going to argue with him. Today, what is he doing? We want to make money on the film. We can't just make experimental films.

So I was working on a bigger project but I wanted to explore consciousness and how in movies you are obviously looking at a whole person, with feelings and ideas. And everyone is. How do you express that in film? How do you just get inside, beyond just a wonderful actor who was able to give you that, or the use of metaphor, which is what film does because film is sort of like poetry in that it does beautiful things with metaphor. So I wanted a subject matter that enabled me to learn about consciousness and the difference between so-called reality and dreams and imagination. And in the [Mircea] Eliade story, who was a great scholar, I felt if I followed in his footsteps I would learn a lot about these things and I found the story fascinating and it was different than, "Oh, I get it. He's wanted by the Nazis and they are chasing him." This story just kept blossoming like a flower into other things. [The main character is] an old man and he never finished his work and he's heartbroken because he lost the love of his life and he stupidly didn't marry her when he had the chance. And then he lost her and he spent his whole life wishing he hadn't lost her. Then he gets the chance. It was like Faust. He becomes young, but then he doesn't only become young. He gets an increased intellectual ability and he can finally speak Chinese and he can read books and he can go to bed at night and say, "Oh yeah, that was good." Then he splits into two personalities and he's in a debate over the future of mankind with his double. Then the Nazis discover he has this almost immortality and they try to get him and they try to shoot lightning at him so maybe he can do that to Hitler.

The story just kept taking fascinating new turns and I thought, "Well, you can make this movie and if you just enjoy it as a fable story, you can enjoy it. But if you want to think about the other issues, you could think about that later or just as we all live our normal lives." We've got a job and so and so and so. But sometimes we say, "What is life? Where did I come from? What is going to happen when I die? What's really important?" All those kind of ruminations should also be in a movie, I thought.

IGN: How did that influence your visual style?

Coppola: I thought because the move goes from 1938 to 1960-something and has occasional references to 18-something when he was 25 and was in love with this girl, that I wanted to be very classical in my style so that I wasn't just taking so many interesting ideas, but also putting it in a jumble of weirdness. So I tried to tell the story in a more classical, more like The Godfather, but more extreme -- more like Ozu where the camera never moves. When a camera doesn't move then movement is more accentuated because every time an actor walks in, the next movie you see look at the corner of the frame and you'll see it's always doing this. It never stops. In this movie the camera is that and that's it. Everything is accomplished in a classical shot to another shot, which then gives you more, which is one way to make a movie. But I felt that was appropriate for this because by giving it a very classical style then you could relax about that, and not feel, "Where am I? I can't see anything because it's cutting so fast." And then you might feel more comfortable to follow the story, but then ruminate. That's interesting. It's a dream and in the dream he's reading books. So I made the style very deliberately classical and also got to do what I've always wanted to do, which is to make a movie without any movement just to see what happens.

IGN: What about people who don't understand the story?

Coppola: That's good! I think the problem is that the story itself is sort of simple. A guy gets hit by lightning and he gets young and blah, blah, blah. All of that is interesting stuff, but the problem is that you know it all means something. And what it means, just like I said, your life is or my life is very mundane. I wake up and have a banana and coffee. Our lives are mundane, but at the same time something happens and you wonder, "What does that mean? Where do I come from?" All of these big questions, which of course as you learn more, are dealt with in Oriental myth or Sanskrit. The Orientals understood that life isn't quite as up and down as we think it is. So when you make a movie that isn't quite as up and down as movies are supposed to be, which you have to realize have been influenced incredibly by 60 years of television. So the audience is like little kids: "That's not Goldilocks and the Three Bears. What are you telling me here?" So movies are at a big disadvantage now because everyone sort of wants them in a way to be like the last movie they saw just because, "It's entertainment and I've got enough problems at work. I don't want to have to think about [anything]." I tried to make a movie you don't have to think about, and you can enjoy it as a work. But later on if you want to see it again or you want to think about it you'll get more. And you can see it over the years just as you can see...isn't that what happened with Apocalypse Now in a way? Everyone said, "This is weird." But that's good, I think. I don't like to go to a movie and say, "I already saw this movie."

IGN: Do you think about those big questions each day on set?

Coppola: Yeah, I was trying to tell the story of what happened to Dominic Matte, who was as great a scholar as Eliade was, who spoke Sanskrit and Indian Myth and who understands that the great amount of Oriental philosophy is very different than Western thought. They don't believe that there is good and evil, up and down. We believe that because it's useful to survive. If you've read [the philosopher Immanuel] Kant, the world of our brain is very much wired for humans. Probably the world as it really is, we don't even see. So I felt the Orientals are a little like that. Buddhists, they say, it's like that wonderful thing she talks about, "Well, what I just said is so, but it's also not so, or it's so and not so combined. Or it's neither so or not so." And that's a perception of understanding more -- so many little fables from India. Or like the story of an emperor who dreamt he was a butterfly. If you can try to look at life, certainly in a practical sense, because we all want to not get hit in the car when we are driving, but at the same time realize it's much more interesting and much more beautiful in a way. That's all the film has underneath it.

IGN: So it's a movie about a man and his consciousness?

Coppola: I thought of it as a love story wrapped in a mystery like in Vertigo, except in Vertigo the mystery is some guy is trying to kill his wife. In my movie, the mystery is the real mystery that we are really all in.

IGN: You introduced all these philosophies into the story?

Coppola: I wanted it to be a banquet, but when you make a movie it's sort of like when you cook a meal. If I were to cook for you I'd certainly want you to enjoy the meal. I wouldn't want you to say, :Tell me what this weird meal is?" I didn't want that. I want you to enjoy it. But later on I wanted you to savor other things, other flavors that were there. And I wanted you to want to go see it again. There are certain movies I love to see again. And certain other movies I don't care if I ever see again, that are good, that I enjoyed.

IGN: What about the casting? Your film features an international cast.

Coppola: As I said, I wanted it to be a European co-production because it helped me to be able to do this because I financed it all myself and it's not a little picture. People say, "Oh, it's a small picture. It cost $5 million." That's not true. The $5 million was how much the guarantee was between Italy, France, and the UK. That's the guarantee, after I made it. Variety said it cost that. It didn't cost that. It bugs me because it was my dough, because they wanted to say it's a little picture. It's not, and I admire John Sayles very much, but it's not like a John Sayles movie. This is like an epic production like if I were making The Godfather and I didn't skimp. It has costumes and sets and shots and all the lighting and I think beautiful photography. But I very much wanted to work within the Euro treaty rules because that protected me. Alexandra [Maria Lara] was German, Bruno Ganz is German, Tim [Roth] is UK, and it helped me to be able to organize all that. But I was looking, I thought Alexandra was an actress who had a wonderful ability to know what she's feeling just by looking at her face, and that's a big thing in a movie. And Tim, the demands on him to give me the time to stay and all the languages with the makeup guys to convincingly try being some guy who is 80 and a guy who is 25. It's not so hard to be old, but to be young is hard.

IGN: What age would you like to go back to, if you could?

Coppola: I've been a six year old all my life because at six I just thought everything was just so beautiful and just so wonderful. As a kid, I went to many schools. I wouldn't say I was a lonely kid, but I was a lonely kid so I never really lost how I felt about things being five or six. So I've always looked at the world with that kind of mentality, I think. And I think I still do because I'm enthusiastic, which is why I get in so much trouble. I don't do what I do to make money, although I've made tons of money. I never tried to make money. I never tried to be a success. I always tried to do films of things I love and when I got in trouble, when I owed all that money after One From the Heart, I ended up having to make a movie every year to get the check so I could give it to the bank. I've been in those kinds of pickles, but always my enthusiasm... I think I have a good imagination, I have a lively imagination and I have a lot of energy and that's all I have.

IGN: How has the robbery in South America affected your next project?

Coppola: Anyone who's gotten robbed, it's always depressing and I did lose some data. I didn't lose the script. They said the script is gone, but I have other copies of the script. Obviously, I had to send it to actors and stuff, so no. I was astonished that that got such news coverage.

IGN: So what's your next project?

Coppola: The next project is exciting because I've used Youth Without Youth as a crutch to get into a world of personal filmmaking where I'm not subject to the notes of studios. You know, I get the notes from my colleagues, [like] Walter Murch. It's not that I don't want notes. I do want notes, but I don't want so many notes that they start contradicting themselves or that they start turning it into the typical movies that come out every Friday. So basically part of my work now is that I can create the money I use to finance the movie. And in this case the film, it's called Tetro, the name of a character. It's very personal. It's kind of like Tennessee Williams' period. I want to make a passionate story about brothers and fathers and all of that tumult that I've seen in different times of my life. It's a little bit the stuff I've seen in my family, but it's not. It's totally fiction.

IGN: Have you cast the film?

Coppola: Yeah, I have Tetro completely cast. I already mentioned Matt Dillon. Did I name all the actors or should I make a press release of it? I have the whole cast. What's been announced already is Javier Bardem, but his part is not a huge part. Matt Dillon, a very exciting young new actor who you wouldn't know anyway. But to give you one tidbit Maribel Verdu, the Spanish actress who was in Y Tu Mama Tambien. Do you know Maribel? She's wonderful. So it's going to be an interesting thing. I was supposed to start filming next month, but because of the opening I'm unable to. So I have to start right after Christmas, which is a drag, in Buenos Aires, in La Boca.

IGN: Is it a more typical narrative or more like this one?

Coppola: I think Youth Without Youth is a narrative. I believe cinema is more like poetry than the narrative so it works on metaphor and stuff. Whereas I see this as, you'd call this as a more traditional narrative like [Luchino Visconti's] Rocco and his Brothers or something, but I hope it will have poetry and metaphor in it as well. But it's got as its theme trying to investigate the notions of existence and consciousness.

IGN: Is restlessness and panic part of any creative and intellectual pursuit?

Coppola: I don't think so. Panic is like, there's a fire, I better get out of here.

IGN: Isn't panic a through-line with Dominic?

Coppola: You are right. Dominic was like a bookish little professor. Even when he was forlorn he was going to commit suicide, he went on a train to a park in Bucharest and took his things [because] he didn't want to make a scandal with the housekeeper. So I would say when this started to happen, my and Tim's interpretation was that was this gentle little Jimmy Stewart older kind of professor who never even had the courage to take the woman he loved because he was so bookish and sweet. So suddenly when the girl has the swastika lingerie and the Nazis are trying to capture him and he's realizing he is like a science fiction man. He has powers and stuff. He panicked. He wasn't like, "A ha! I'll take over the world!" Although maybe he fleetingly thought that he could. It was more like, do you remember a movie called The Man Who Could Work Miracles with Roland Young? It was a beautiful film made in the '30s. Roland Young played him and he was this gentle little man who could suddenly work miracles. He could make the cup go like that and he was very timid about it. I think there is an element in that, being that he was a professor for his whole life.

IGN: What about Dominic's conversation about the devil and eliminating humanity?

Coppola: It has to be this way because he is a humanist and let's face it, Eliade -- he'd been through two wars, the Cold War. He's saying by 2010 it's inevitable. There is going to be an atomic deal. And he said, "How can you say that? People will be killed and we'll lose cultures and we'll lose languages?" He's an archeologist. We'll lose our beautiful heritage. He says, "The devil says there is no other way. There is no other way. The people left will have been radiated by the electricity. They'll be smarter so they won't do those stupid things." I can't say to the world, although I believe it, that if you start dropping atomic bombs on each other there still will be a human race 300 years from now, and probably a better one. But I can't say that because it's too heartbreaking to me so that part of me is Dominic saying, "I don't accept that. I'll break them." But [Dominic's] double says this is nature. The species that survives survives.

IGN: Can you discuss the metaphors in the film?

Coppola: The rose is a classic Buddhist metaphor. I read [that] the rose is a metaphor for the Buddha himself. But it certainly is a metaphor for the unfolding of existence. For me, I also used the rose as a metaphor for grace because I remember when I shot the movie and he was lying in the snow, this old man, and some Romanian said, "Oh, he dies like a homeless." And I thought about it and gee, we all die alone. You could be surrounded by people, but you die alone. What's the difference, and the difference, I think, is if you've loved in your life, or you've been loved, or both. And I wanted to express that although he died just an old man in the snow he had loved that woman for so long and in the end even gave up the very thing that lost her in the first place, that maybe the third rose could even be in his hand as an old man. So that's a metaphor. I think filmicly the film has a lot of beautiful imagery and photography and there are lots of metaphors, but I can't think of them. We've got to see the movie again.

IGN: Tim said there is a five-hour version of the film.

Coppola: They always say that! There isn't a five-hour version of Apocalypse Now. Usually there is a three-hour version and you squeeze it to two hours, but there isn't a five-hour version.

IGN: Are there things you'd like to use in another edit?

Coppola: No, because since I really made this movie as the boss, or as the financier, which is the boss. It was my dough, in other words, and I got to make it the first time through as I wanted it, but in Apocalypse Now I pulled out some of the French sequences because I had sort of promised the distributors it was going to be like a big war film and poor Japanese distributors came and they looked at this and I felt guilty that the movie had gotten so surreal so I did say we better make it shorter and a little less weird. But in this film, maybe I am getting weird, but I don't think the film is so weird or the narrative is so strange. I think the narrative is very clear, but the implications are very inviting of thought.

IGN: What do you think about the studio system?

Coppola: Because the cinema and movie and studio system are all owned by big corporations that only want one thing, they want more profits than they made last year. And that's all it's about. The aim is not for movies, it's for money. And that's great, that's fine. I think movie companies should make money, but I think they should use their profits to produce movies that are surefire entertainment delightful movies to enjoy and a little bit they should make films like The Best Years of Our Lives or films like William Wyler used to make that are also very rich and beautifully [artistic]. There is no variation in movies today. They just want to make money and that's all.

IGN: How ultimately do you differentiate a film like this from other ones in release?

Coppola: It's a little sad because I realize that so many people, not only in the audience, but people who write about film think of movies as being a certain thing that it has to be. And if you want to make a real success, make a movie like a classic story in a way that everybody expects, but do it very well. And that will be a wonderful success. But if you want the film itself to be alive and follow the story and the themes and the kind of movie I like, then it has to be [different]. One of the movies I hated, I'm in there 20 minutes and I said, "I saw this movie already." But that's most of them. And even movies you may not think are the greatest movies... I remember I went to see Punch-Drunk Love and I said, "I never saw a movie like this before." For that reason I loved it even though I don't know if it was good or not. All I know is that I never saw a movie like that. And that's why I like, even though other people were disappointed, I liked The Life Aquatic because it was weird. It was the first time I saw that movie. I like movies to be the first time -- kids telling a story, they want to tell you a story about a tulip that wanted to be a, no no no, I want Goldilocks and the Three Bears. But you know Goldilocks? I like it. So you have to tell them, and I think that's because of 50 years of TV, that's what's happened to our cinema. They don't understand that, sure it's great to do a beautifully done entertainment film and by the book and by the rule and it has character development. Marie Antoinette is a good example. She made a totally non-verbal poetic film and she made it about the first part of Marie Antoinette's life. It didn't get into the French Revolution and the guillotine and neither did Abel Gance's Napoleon, he didn't get into Waterloo and Elba. And Sofia made Marie Antoinette without dialogue. It was all, if you look you can see what she's saying. But because she didn't follow those rules, although she was appreciated by many people, she was lambasted by others. So that's the danger in the cinema today. There is this whole group, but it's any kind of political movement. Movies have to be this! Well, movies don't have to be anything except beautiful and in some way illuminate life and get you thinking and stuff.

[MacGuffin]

Francis Ford Coppola Explains Why There Is No 'Godfather IV'
Director hopes new film, 'Youth Without Youth,' will make audience 'speculate on what the reality of life is.'
By Josh Horowitz; MTV

Film fans have been denied the talents of Francis Ford Coppola for far too long. His last feature film, 1997's "The Rainmaker," certainly didn't seem like an appropriate swan song to a career that included "The Godfather," "The Godfather: Part II" and "The Conversation" (those were all made in succession, by the way).

Since that unprecedented early 1970s trifecta, Coppola's career has ebbed and flowed. Bombastic successes like "Apocalypse Now" and "Bram Stoker's Dracula" were matched by stunning commercial or critical failures, like "One From the Heart" and "Jack."

Now Coppola says he's reignited his passion for moviemaking thanks to "Youth Without Youth," an experimental meditation on philosophy and mortality starring Tim Roth as a linguistics expert made young again, thanks to a lightning bolt from above.

Coppola visited MTV News to discuss his heady new work, why he's always been plagued by self-doubt and what he and Mario Puzo had planned for "The Godfather: Part IV."

MTV: This film seems like a departure for you, relative to films like "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now." The subject matter is a bit less accessible.

Francis Ford Coppola: It's funny that one would say that "Godfather," "Apocalypse" — someone today mentioned "The Conversation" — those movies are as different from each other as could be. ... Of course ["Youth Without Youth" is] not like "The Godfather," it's not like "Apocalypse," and I beg the audience to allow me to not spend the rest of my life trying to imitate things I've done in the past. [What] it represents more is me being sort of the more personal-style film director that I wanted to be when I was 19, when I was seeing the great films of the Italian directors or the New Wave or [Ingmar] Bergman or [Akira] Kurosawa, that's what I wanted to be.

"Godfather" was an accident. I didn't expect it to happen to have a success like that. I'm thrilled with my life, but if anything, I would love the chance to still be the kind of filmmaker I wanted to be when I was 18 or 19, and write unusual subject matter and explore the meaning of life or try to shed illumination on life ... and I think that's what "Youth Without Youth" represents.

MTV: You've said before that a movie is like a question and that when you make it, you find the answer. What's been the question and answer of "Youth Without Youth"?

Coppola: I wanted to learn a better way to express the miracle of human consciousness and understand what it was. What I learned in making the film is that it's the introduction of language that seems to blossom into this thing called consciousness. They called me "Francie" when I was a kid. When was I Francie? When did I first have this conscious personality? It had to be at 3 or 4, and that's when I had a little bit of language.

MTV: Do you worry that an audience conditioned to consume mass entertainment won't be so willing to engage in a film like this?

Coppola: The young audiences have been brainwashed as to what a movie is. [Movies] have been made because it's a business, to be simple to understand, and that's made [them] formulaic. We're all capable of understanding this kind of stuff. It's good to have a movie that makes you think about your own life. It's fun to speculate on what the reality of life is.

MTV: I was surprised to learn that you are often filled with dread on a set.

Coppola: "Totally. ... It was always based on embarrassment. ... I went to 20 schools before I got to college, so it was always, "Oh, here's Francis Coppola, he's the new kid," and everyone would laugh 'cause my name was Francis. I think being on the set and then suddenly everyone looking at me like I'm supposed to know what I'm doing, sometimes my brain freezes and it's like a panic attack.

MTV: I would think, though, that in the early '70s, when "Godfather," "The Conversation," "Godfather: Part II" ... [did] you feel bulletproof at that time?

Coppola: To all you artists out there, young and old: Artists are filled with self-doubt. All of them are Marlon Brando was. ... It's just part of being a creative artist, that you are feeding on stuff in your personality, of which self-doubt is a part. That's why you achieve.

MTV: "Godfather IV" was talked about, it seems, at one time. You and Mario Puzo — is this true? — went to Paramount and said, "We're interested, we'll do it," and they said, "We're not interested."

Coppola: I never thought making a second "Godfather" made sense to me. ... I thought the end of the first "Godfather" film was the end of it. Michael has become what he's become. He's paid a terrible price for it, and that's the point. The last shot of closing his wife out was the end. So when they wanted a second "Godfather," it was just to make money. ... It was the beginning of this franchise mentality, so I resisted it. ... But I was working on an original idea of ... telling a story of a father and a son at the same age ... two stories paralleling. They prevailed on me so much that I said, "Well, I'll do it, but I'll have total control, and I'll make it be this story and work it into 'The Godfather.' " When that was done — miracle of miracles that it was well-received; like anything, it could have gone as bad as gone right — then I was done with it.

Many years later, after "One From the Heart," after [accumulating] huge debt, unbelievable debt for a young guy, the chance to do "Godfather III" was a chance for me to get out of my problems, and I did it as best I knew how. ... And then there was talk of a fourth "Godfather." And I had an idea of how you could do it, oddly enough, again paralleling two stories because it was a big part of the book that had never been made — it was the period sort of between the old period in "Godfather II" and when you see Marlon Brando in "The Godfather." Mario called it the "happy years" — when we killed them and they didn't kill us. [He laughs.]

And Mario was very concerned to make money because he was getting older and he really wanted to leave his kids well-fixed, and I said to Paramount, "Look it, we have an idea of a structure of this thing. Pay Mario Puzo a million dollars to do this first draft, and I'll help him and work with him. You don't have to pay me anything. But he's getting old, and he's not entirely well." And they basically didn't do it. And then he died.

MTV: To hear you talk about "Youth Without Youth," it sounds like you're more content making these smaller films on your terms for now.

Coppola: I don't know. After I make this film in Argentina ["Tetro"], it's about a lot of personal demons. When and if I exorcise them by making this film, I'd be curious what I would want to tackle.

[MacGuffin]

Francis Ford Coppola
Interview by Steven Zeitchik; Hollywood Reporter

AWARDS: 1975 Academy Award, Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for "The Godfather: Part II"; 1973 Academy Award, Best Adapted Screenplay for "The Godfather"; 1971 Academy Award, Best Original Screenplay for "Patton." CURRENT CREDITS: Although he's been busy executive producing films like 2004's "Kinsey," after a 10-year hiatus, Coppola returns as a writer-director-producer with Sony Pictures Classics' "Youth Without Youth," based on the Mircea Eliade novella about aging, identity and language. Next, he'll start shooting "Tetro" in Argentina. MEMBERSHIPS: Screen Actors Guild. Academy member since 1970.

The Hollywood Reporter: "Youth Without Youth" is not only the first movie you've directed in 10 years -- it may also be one of the most ambitious efforts in your career. Why did you choose this as your comeback film?
Francis Ford Coppola: People ask me, "Was reading the (the Eliade novella) like getting hit by lightning, and did it make (you) into a filmmaker again?" The truth is the bolt of lightning that hit me was (1972's) "The Godfather." That changed my life, because I was 29, but it gave me the career of an older filmmaker. Even then I tried to take on more risky projects, but having become wealthy with my other businesses (as a successful wine producer and hotelier), I've been given the chance to be the filmmaker I wanted to be when I was 18 and saw all these great movies from (Michelangelo) Antonioni and (Ingmar) Bergman and (Akira) Kurosawa.

THR: This movie has a European feel that hearkens back to many of those filmmakers. Why do you think there aren't more movies like that now?
Coppola: In the regular movie business they seem to have eliminated risk from what they do. You can't have art without risk. So I'm obviously going to move in a direction where there is risk.
   
THR: Arguably the riskiest time was the 1970s, when so many great filmmakers were given freedom by the studios. Do you think that's ever possible again?
Coppola: I think it is. Look at who's out there now. We have a roster of independent film directors in this country, not to mention the rest of the world, that is enviable. We are wealthy with talent. What's happening, however, is that there's starting to be a bottleneck in distribution. The public has effectively been brainwashed by 40 years of network television. And Hollywood is emulating television in that movies have to be an experience that don't provoke thought, that are familiar, that don't have risk.
   
THR: So you think it's a question of the audience as much as of the business model?
Coppola: Even people who read books at night expect movies to be different from literature. Literature can have ambiguity, can make you scratch your head. And yet films are expected just to be entertaining. I love entertaining films. But there's room in cinema for a lot of different kinds of films. You can have a movie that you have a hell of a time and you laughed the whole time, and then you can have a movie where you come back at night and you think how much it taught you about contemporary life. You wouldn't expect poets all to be making the same poem just because it goes down easy. Cinema has that job, too. Just because it costs a lot of money to make an extremely good film doesn't mean that it shouldn't be tried.

THR: It would seem that technology would take care of some of this problem because it's so much cheaper to make a film these days.
Coppola: There's no question that contemporary equipment can offer people a chance to make a movie that looks great and sounds great and is great for very little money. But still so much of the cost of making movies has to do with airplane tickets and hotel rooms and cars and being able to attract actors the public wants to see. It's still expensive in a lot of ways.

THR: You've directed several movies that changed not only your life but the face of cinema. Nearly 40 years later, how do you feel about "The Godfather"? Does anything about the effect it had surprise you?
Coppola: It was remarkable that it all came together and it hit the audience at the right time. There's never been a film like that. I got lucky. But even a few days ago, I walk out onstage at the Kennedy Center, and they play the "Godfather" theme. And I want to say to everybody, "I'm happy that you love 'The Godfather,' and I'm proud of it, and I beg your permission to go on and do other things."
   
THR: Another seminal movie, of course, is 1979's "Apocalypse Now," which in addition to being one of the most significant war movies ever made, is also notorious for problems on the set. Would you do it differently if you were shooting it today?
Coppola: The experience of making it was overwhelming. But I love to make movies that are what they're about. I allowed it to get a little out of control, but in doing that I captured something that was a little out of control.
   
THR: The WGA strike has captured a lot of people's attention. Where do you fall on the issue?    
Coppola: In the old days when a movie just had a record (soundtrack), it was considered ancillary rights, and it was agreed that the studio would take 20% and put it in the pot, and the other 80% would remain with the studio. But now ancillary rights include the DVD and the Internet and everything else, and the truth of the matter is it's no longer ancillary rights -- it's the profits of the movie. The studios want to remove the 80% (from the pot) that they are using to cushion the studio system. They couldn't pay those executives the bonuses or run the type of wasteful operations they do unless they were stealing 80% of the real wealth of the film. That's what the writers strike is really about.
   
THR: You'll finance "Tetro" independently through American Zoetrope. Can you see yourself ever returning to the studio system?
Coppola: No, I'm too old to have 20 producers on my movie and get notes night and day. I don't see the most important thing in my life for everything to be risk-free. I want to be a poet. Does a poet worry about the risk when he writes something? He just wants to catch something beautiful.

[squints]

Why not Mircea Eliade's Youth Without Youth?

At the end of the film the first credit that pops up is "Story by Mircea Eliade"

Dissapointing and messy. Fails in many of the ways I felt The Fountain failed (and they have their share of similarities).

I didn't feel like it was messy. Convoluted yes. But messy, no. The film moves at an incredibly fast pace. The film shares a lot of similarities with The Fountain but i don't see this as any kind of failure. I loved The Fountain though so maybe I'm being somewhat biased. What it has most in common with the fountain, I feel, is that it so closely resembles a graphic novel. While watching the movie, a friend of mine remarked that the story definitely feels like its unfolding like a GN and I totally felt that. Tim Roth in this is absolutely amazing and I feel we really should either A) count this for 2009 or B) re-evaluate the '08 'xax awards. But i doubt the latter option will happen. In many ways the experimentation and surrealism of the film reminded me more often than not of David Lynch. It's an absolutely absurd movie at times but when I looked at it as an extremely intelligent "super hero" movie it made it a lot more fun (in the vein of Unbreakable but miles away from something like Iron Man, which is the film I saw just prior to this).

I need to see this again and it would help if I were to learn Mandarin, French, German, Sanskrit, and...well every language ever spoken then maybe there might be little more light shed on the story. After seeing this film, The Fountain's narrative seems simple in comparison. Maybe I can understand why so many critics were disappointed in this but I absolutely loved it. Its no Godfather and its definitely no Conversation but if you're willing to accept the absolute absurdity of it then you'll be treated to a film that is a visually stunning, complicated yet engrossing mindwarp. After seeing this and reading a few reviews I guess I'm just a natural fan of misguided and messy failures.