Francis Ford Coppola had a run in the 1970s that few directors match: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now in seven years, with two Best Picture wins inside it. He then spent the following decades funding personal projects with commercial work and periodically risking everything on them.
Apocalypse Now nearly destroyed him. The shoot ran over a year, a typhoon flattened the sets, Martin Sheen had a heart attack and Coppola mortgaged his property to finish. The result is one of the few American films that genuinely feels unstable, and the reason is that it was.
He has repeatedly bet his own money on films the studios would not make, most recently Megalopolis, which he self-financed by selling part of his winery. The pattern is consistent across fifty years: he treats filmmaking as something worth going broke for.
Francis Ford CoppolaHowell, Lowe, Macchio, Dillon, Cruise, Estevez, Swayze. After Johnny kills a Soc during a confrontation in defense of Ponyboy, the boys flee to an abandoned country church where they hide until Johnny suffers fatal injuries rescuing children from the burning…
Francis Ford CoppolaCoppola's 1992 maximalist Dracula. Oldman, Ryder, Hopkins, Reeves.
Francis Ford CoppolaCoppola's 1974 sequel-and-prequel. De Niro as young Vito, Pacino as Michael.
Francis Ford CoppolaCoppola's 1979 Vietnam Heart of Darkness. Sheen, Brando, Duvall, Hopper.
Francis Ford CoppolaDracula is one of the most extensively adapted properties in cinema history.
Francis Ford CoppolaThe Godfather is the best film ever made from a craft perspective. Not the most entertaining, not the most beloved, not the most influential, though it is all three.
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