Master storyteller who explores kinship's varied facets

At a party held in his honour in a bare, white warehouse in Seattle, Francis Ford Coppola stands aside from the crowd. Smaller than you might expect at 5-foot-10, he cuts a neat, monochromatic figure with a silver-white beard and a grey suit. A bright purple shirt provides a sole splash of colour.

I have crossed him before at these dos and, now as then, he emanates an inner detachment, looking slightly awkward, perhaps even, inconceivable as it seems, a little shy. Coppola was presenting a new work, Tetro, in the city's month-long film festival.

He has been out of this particular promotional loop for a very long time and nowadays a new film from this American legend is quite an occasion.

The reasons for the long hiatus are well-documented, not least by the director himself. Instead of the usual selective litany of career triumphs — and Coppola has enough of those to boast about: the Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, five Oscars, two Palmes d'Or — his official biography in Tetro's press notes kicks off by describing his "financial hardship" and "years of ‘work for hire' — the disdainful legal term for those who serve at the pleasure of others".

Coppola's visionary ambitions led him to the edge of bankruptcy in the early Eighties and he is frank about the humiliation this meant for a self-confessed "proud and independent soul". Today he cites other filmmakers, such as Orson Welles, who reached a point where no one would finance them.

Besides films, business is booming elsewhere for him, including a line of pastas and sauces and a hotel resort in Belize (Coppola is also that country's honorary consul in San Francisco). He has paid off the mortgage and the other debts and he is back again.

"I am an amateur filmmaker now.They don't have to pay me to work on a film such as Tetro because the payment is just to participate in the cinema, which is a magical medium and one you can keep learning about. That's my reward," he says. "I don't make films for money. Or for my career."

His recent wild, mystical movies are entirely self-funded. In 2007 Coppola directed his first film in a decade, Youth Without Youth. Packed with metaphysical ideas and dark romantic yearning, it baffled and, mostly, irritated critics though the more empathetic saw it as a film à clé about its maker's own quest to regenerate and rejuvenate himself. Coppola has never been slow to bare his soul. There was Rumble Fish (1983), about a street child growing up in the shadow of his big brother and dedicated to August, Coppola's own adored elder sibling (and father of actor Nicolas Cage).

Tucker — made in 1988 at the depth of his financial troubles — portrayed a quixotic car manufacturer crushed by big business. Hearts of Darkness, a lacerating documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now, partly shot by his wife, Eleanor, showed the director at the end of his tether (the couple are still married after 47 years).

Even the internecine warfare in The Godfather was, he says today, "inspired by my father and uncles". And now there is another supremely dysfunctional family in Tetro, a film more revealing than perhaps even Coppola intended. It is his first original script since The Conversation (1974), the keynote Watergate-era thriller which gave Gene Hackman one of his greatest roles as a paranoid wiretapper.

"Personal filmmaking is a thrilling experience — it's like posing a question you don't know the answer to. When you've made the film and it's all over, then you begin to see what the answer is," Coppola explains after the screening. "I wanted to make an emotional film and I figured the thing that makes me emotional is certain thoughts about my family, my father and his struggles.

"Writing was the hardest part. ... But the key thing is, whatever I write, I turn those pages over and never look at them because, if I did, I would get depressed. I keep going until I have got 80 pages and then one day I relax and read them. If you put in your four or five hours every day, after a while it is a trance and the characters start saying things and acting in ways you didn't expect. They wander through your subconscious."

Set in Argentina and shot almost entirely in shimmering black and white, Tetro is an operatic tale of Oedipal battles, sibling rivalries and resentment bleeding down generations. The angel-faced, 17-year-old newcomer Alden Ehrenreich plays Coppola's radiant alter ego, an idealistic Italian-American who arrives fresh off a cruise ship in La Boca, the bohemian quarter of Buenos Aires, in search of the big brother he has never known.

This brother, who calls himself Tetro (a gloriously edgy and unhinged Vincent Gallo), receives him coldly. A gifted writer, he has been crippled by the contempt of the boys' monstrous, egotistical father, a world-famous conductor, the defeated hopes of their sad-sack uncle and a tragic accident from the past.

"My father was a wonderful musician, the solo flautist for Toscanini [at the NBC Symphony Orchestra] but he wanted to compose and conduct and remained unfulfilled," Coppola says, adding a rather sad story about his own clumsy desire to help out. "When I was 13, I worked for Western Union. When the telegrams came in, I would glue them on the paper and deliver them on my bicycle. One night I typed up a telegram to my father, ‘Dear Carmine Coppola, please come to Los Angeles immediately to write the score for the film Saucers Over the World.' I knew so much about his career that I even knew the name of the head of the music department at Paramount Pictures. ‘Signed Louis Lipstone.' I delivered it and he was so happy. Then of course I had to tell him it wasn't true and I got a hell of a beating. But I just wanted to give him his break, you know?"

Even today, there is a note of apology in Coppola's voice. "Though in later life I was able to do that for him and saw him win an Oscar [for the score for The Godfather: Part II]. My father also had a younger brother who had learnt everything from him and was successful as a conductor, just as it happens in Tetro."

Coppola compares Tetro's father, played by the powerful Austrian actor Klaus Maria Brandauer, to a flawed patriarch from a Greek tragedy, or a character from the hothouse dramas of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill. "I started with that theme and although the story was fictional, like any writer, I raided my own personal life to put the flesh on the bones."

Tetro's father thunders at one point that there is only room for one genius in their family; where did that come from? Coppola shoots an unfathomable look. "All I can say is, that was really said. It wasn't said to me and, contrary to what people sometimes claim, it wasn't said by me. But it was said."

These days he is a patriarch himself, at the head of a prodigious multiple Oscar-nominated dynasty that includes Sofia, the director of three features, including Lost in Translation; his sister, the actress Talia Shire; nephews Nicolas Cage and Jason Schwartzman; and son Roman Coppola, an assistant director. (Another son, Gian-Carlo, an actor, died in 1986 in a boating accident.)

"We support each other in the Coppola family," he insists. "We love the idea of everyone getting his place in the sun."

Tetro's two weeks of preparations climaxed in an elaborate masquerade party, to which all the actors came in character, disguised in the costume their character would have chosen. There were refreshments, a buffet, a band, party games; intimate conversations were held, fights took place and Coppola waited watchfully, just as I had seen him do at his own party, later rewriting his entire third act in the light of what he saw.

Coppola's was the famous film-brat generation that revolutionised Hollywood in the early Seventies but which also precipitated its decline into overblown event movies (he himself spoke out recently against the rise of 3D).

Today some of his peers are making gaudy, hollow baubles (Martin Scorsese); some (George Lucas, Steven Spielberg) are busily tending to their merchandising franchises; others (the Johns Milius and Landis) haven't directed a feature for years. With the partial exception of Brian De Palma (with his controversial Iraq drama Redacted), Coppola is the only one to have entirely reinvented himself. At 71, he doesn't care if some see him as a has-been. In his own dreamer's eyes, he is a going-to-be, still endlessly, boyishly curious about the possibilities of his art.