“I have no idea what we’re going to talk about,” Francis Ford Coppola said with a smile as he sat for a midday chat during the 15th annual Tribeca film festival. Spontaneity, as we’d learn, is very much the current philosophy for the man behind The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now.
The legendary director, writer, producer, winemaker and innovator spoke on a number of topics for an hour. Although the 77-year-old’s discursive manner may have been as knotty as the vines that grow his celebrated grapes, it remained clear that this was a man whose passion and dedication to pushing boundaries shows no sign of slowing up.
The director lit up when trying to explain his new project during the talk moderated by author and wine columnist Jay McInerney. Coppola says it will keep him occupied “into his 80s”.
Distant Vision is, in its current form, a 500-page cycle of plays that Coppola compared with Eugene O’Neill and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. It is a multigenerational tale about an Italian family similar to his own and its relationship to what he considers the most important innovation of his lifetime: television.
“Apocalypse Now was a movie about madness but it also was madness. It’s always great when the project is also the thing that it’s about.” To that end, Coppola is “inventing” a new medium, which he calls Live Cinema.
“Television is about an event, cinema is about the shot, and the juxtaposition of two shots to create a new idea. Live Television is the broadcast of an event: a baseball game or an opera a musical like the recent Peter Pan or Grease.” Live Cinema, he continued, will have the nuance, lighting and montage of cuts and curation of close-ups like we expect with movies, but, somehow, live. “People will come to a theatre like this one to watch us put on the show and then months later they can come back for the next chapter.”
“So it’s basically a filmed play,” McInerney said, in an attempt to explain to the crowd, before being cut off. “No! It’s not, it’s not at all!” Coppola then discussed how television broadcasts of baseball games manipulate time on the fly to present images that feel seamless, like a hitter in the dugout, but are actually not linear. He also got a bit technical about the style in live broadcasts such as Peter Pan, in which cameras, afraid to get other cameras in their shot, shoot with long lenses, which necessitates a flood of flat lighting. Coppola plans to work around that although, he freely admits, he doesn’t yet know how.
“When I made Apocalypse Now I had no idea how I’d do it, but I told people I could do it and then I did it.” Coppola said to applause, before admitting that during that production he was “so, so scared”.
Coppola isn’t new to attempts at radicalising the film-making process. In 1981 he shot One From The Heart entirely on soundstages, and cutting the movie “live” with a complex electronic editing system. He essentially bankrupted his company as a result. In 2011 Coppola brought footage from his in-development film Twixt to San Diego Comic-Con and showed how he could “jam” with the audience and re-sequence a scene on his iPad based off of the reaction from the crowd. He spoke enthusiastically of taking Twixt on the road, and how each projection would then be a different show, based on the tenor of he crowd. (These engagements never came to fruition.) Live Cinema is finding its footing in unexpected places, however. Last year Coppola took a crew and his “notions” to Oklahoma City Community College and did some experimentation.
“I can’t describe the process because I don’t know what I’m doing yet,” Coppola confessed. But he added that the next big live television event, NBC’s forthcoming production of Aaron Sorkin’s script for Rob Reiner’s film A Few Good Men, all set in a courtroom, is not what he has in mind. “If they came to me the movie I’d want to do is Lawrence of Arabia.” The conversation concluded on the topic of Coppola’s very successful wineries, which he invested in when he realised his style of directing may not always find favour with the studios.
“They started getting wise to us after Heaven’s Gate,” Coppola sighed, before thanking the audience for continuing to buy his products, and therefore keeping his art financed. “You all should get associate producer credits on my new project.”
