Francis Ford Coppola

About his life and his career.

Francis Ford Coppola was born April 7, 1939, in Detroit, Michigan. Francis Ford Coppola emerged as one of the 20th century’s leading directors in the 1960s. Coppola developed an interest in film early on and studied theater at Hofstra University in New York. He first found directorial success with Finian’s Rainbow in 1968. He gained international critical attention for his screenwriting talents, with 1970’s Patton. Two years later, he released The Godfather (1972). In 1997, he stepped away from directing for a time. In 2007, he returned to hands-on filmmaking with Youth Without Youth.

Awards:

Academy Award for Best Picture – The Godfather, The Godfather II

Academy Award for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay) – The Godfather, The Godfather II

Academy Award for Best Director – The Godfather II

The Francis Coppola Style

Francis has always been the kind of director that prefers to write his own screenplays and then convert those into movies. He has done that with several of his films however, his biggest success, the Godfather, was a story he adapted from Mario Puzo.

Francis likes to say that he always describes the theme of a movie in two words. He thought of the Godfather as succession. According to Francis, the reason it’s important to have this is because most of the time what a director really does is taking decisions. You often don't know the answer. Knowing what the theme is always helps you.

Francis as a leader

Francis Ford Coppola is an intense person who doesn’t lack self confidence. He is known because some of his most famous decisions about scenes and casting have been ones that studio bosses initially disapproved of. At the end he tenaciously worked for it and got it.

He says that big part of his success is due to taking the risk and believing on what your heart says. He has said several times that he started a movie without even knowing if the studio would finance it.

Another case of his leadership was when he faced multiple roadblocks on the casting for the main role of the godfather. Francis managed to tape a small performance from Marlon Brando as an Italian and showed it to the head of Paramount pictures who didn’t support the idea and ended up backing it.

His relationship with actors

Francis Ford Coppola always was on top of every detail and always bought into the story as evidence on behind the scenes of Apocalypses Now or the Godfather.

Several actors refer to him as someone who would always trust and give confidence to his actors. He didn’t want to pull out performances out of them and that’s something he clearly believed in. Clear evidence of this is his following quote: “What you do is you come to know your actors very well. And then you go through a process in which you make the actor, of course, feel comfortable, feel relaxed, and most of all, feel not frightened, because their work as an artist is something they do just with their own self. They don’t have a violin or cello between them and the audience, so it’s a frightening type of work, I think, for actors.” “So it’s at that point the director isn’t pulling the character out of the actor but has sort of helped preside over this amazing transformation.”