The story of Francis Ford Coppola’s career arc over the last five decades is so wildly improbable, even the man himself thinks it makes for quite the yarn.
“It’s a wonderful story to think that this guy has a whole career as a movie director and he makes a lot of films, some of which are very much beloved and others not,” says the venerable director in a recent phone interview from his office in San Francisco. “Then he loses his money, and then he has it back and then he’s bankrupt again and then he has it back. Then he makes another fortune in a totally different business and once again is making movies — it’s like a fairy tale.”
Indeed, the movie version could be a companion piece to other Coppola films with indefatigable heroes, such as Tucker: The Man and His Dream and the financially calamitous One From the Heart. Of course, it’d be a more hopeful affair than the ’70s masterpieces on which his reputation still rests, The Godfather Parts One and Two, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now.
It would be closer in spirit to Tetro, Coppola’s second work in the “second career” that he recently began after a decade-long hiatus from filmmaking. A bold, bustling and big-hearted family drama set in Buenos Aires, Tetro may not stand with Coppola’s classics but it’s rich with wonders. Besides some lovely homages to the musicals of Powell and Pressburger, it’s distinguished by a tightly controlled lead performance by Vincent Gallo as the title character, a frustrated writer who must contend with his past after his much younger brother Benny (Alden Ehrenreich) lands on his doorstep.
Whereas Coppola’s 2007 romantic fantasy Youth Without Youth was too wonky to qualify as the heroic comeback effort that would’ve provided another high point in the filmmaker’s saga, Tetro is closer to the mark. At the very least, it’s a far more distinctive work than Jack, The Rainmaker and the other pieces of hackery that filled his later Hollywood years.
One big reason he’s been able to do this is his success in the wine business. (The resorts in Belize were a good investment, too.) Having the means to finance and distribute his own work has allowed the now-70-year-old Coppola to reconnect with the reasons that got him into filmmaking. However, he jokes that this is not how most people spend their retirement. Says Coppola, “A lot of people leaving their sixties would think, ‘Well, it’s time for me to retire and just play golf.’ But in a way, this is my kind of golf: to try to make little art films.”
He suggests that his second career is more in line with how he imagined his career would unfold when he was making smaller-scaled films in the late ’60s, back before he ever heard the name of Mario Puzo. “I didn’t think I would be good at being an industry director,” he says. “But The Godfather changed everything and there were so many opportunities. After all the ups and downs, it occurred to me that I haven’t done what I originally thought I wanted to do, which was make these more personal films.”
Shooting Youth Without Youth in Romania convinced Coppola that he could make movies with modest means and still make them look like “real movies.” With Tetro, he hoped to exploit that new freedom further by penning an original script. He says the resulting tale “was partially motivated by the emotions of that time in my life when I was much younger — I wanted to understand why my feelings were still heard about certain things and use it as a little bit of a self-exploratory thing.”
Gallo conveys the film’s array of fraternal and paternal tensions with such sensitivity that his performance is a vital reminder of just how good an actor he can be. Coppola agrees that his onscreen talents are too good to go wasted. “He is a very striking guy with an iconic look and he’s very intelligent,” says the director. “He’s got a real sense of humour, albeit very weird, which I think is what gets people annoyed with him. He’s outspoken and a lot of people don’t realize that he’s sort of joking when he says some of the things that he does.”
Having intended to cast Matt Dillon in the part — which would’ve given Tetro another connection to Rumble Fish besides its lustrous black-and-white cinematography — Coppola didn’t know Gallo’s work when his name came up. “People said, ‘Are you crazy? This guy is a nightmare.’ But I just did it and I have to say he was a pleasure to work with.”
In fact, nearly every frame of the film testifies to Coppola’s eagerness to delight and surprise not just his audience but himself.
“At the age I am now, I realize the real pleasure of life is in learning something. You can’t eat too much, you can’t drink too much, you can’t run around with girls because your wife will get mad at you. None of those earlier pleasures make any sense. So learning and music are the two things that you can indulge in that only have positive implications.”