Visionary, maverick director Francis Ford Coppola began his film career in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Three times he won a screenplay Oscar for a film which also won Best Picture (Patton, The Godfather, and The Godfather Part II), an accomplishment as yet unequaled by any other screenwriter. His career, for all its twists and turns, has been marked by an ability to utilize the apparatus of studio-based filmmaking to create deeply personal work.
Born in Detroit in 1939, Coppola moved with his family to New York, where his father, Carmine Coppola, was a featured flautist with Arturo Toscanini’s celebrated NBC Symphony Orchestra. When he was ten years old, young Francis developed polio, which forced him to spend a year in bed. It was during this time, playing with puppets, listening to the radio, watching television, that Coppola developed his long-standing interest in technology. “I became obsessed with remote control.”
Coppola studied at Hofstra University on Long Island in 1956, majoring in theater arts and producing and directing plays. There he saw Sergei Eisenstein’s Ten Days That Shook the World, “On Monday I was in theater, and on Tuesday I wanted to be a filmmaker.”
In the autumn of 1960, Coppola entered the burgeoning film department at UCLA, which included among its faculty French director Jean Renoir, and Dorothy Arzner, one of the few significant female directors in Hollywood up to that point. It was at UCLA that Coppola edited together footage from two separate films—his own short and footage from someone else’s nudie Western—to form the nudie-cutie quickie Tonight for Sure (1962). During this time, he was also writing at a furious pace, winning, at 22 years old, the prestigious Samuel Goldwyn Award for his script “Pilma Pilma.” Soon, like many young filmmakers at the time, Coppola fell into the ranks of those working for exploitation king Roger Corman, learning Corman’s brand of fast, guerrilla-style production.
For Corman, Coppola edited and dubbed Russian action films for American release, worked as dialogue coach, and on The Terror, was associate producer and shot second unit. While in Europe shooting The Young Racers, Coppola pitched Corman an idea for a horror flick which could utilize much of the same cast and crew. Always looking to save costs and cut corners, Corman liked the idea of getting two films out of his European sojourn instead of just one. Dementia 13 (1963), Coppola’s debut as writer/director, was the result.
While working on Dementia, Coppola met his lifelong partner, Eleanor Neil, and the two married in 1963. At this same time, based on the strength of the scripts he wrote at UCLA, Coppola began writing for Seven Arts. He wrote drafts of This Property Is Condemned, Is Paris Burning? and an early draft of Reflections in a Golden Eye. He wrote numerous unproduced scripts such as “The Disenchanted,” “The Fifth Coin,” and “My Last Duchess.” He also used his own money to buy the option on the David Benedictus novel You’re A Big Boy Now. He originally approached Roger Corman with his script adaptation, but due to contractual complications involving Seven Arts, he was obliged to make the film for that studio. Coppola used his ownership of the script to leverage his own hiring as director for his first studio-financed film.
A “nutty comedy about a young male virgin,” as the review in Variety read, the film was entered in competition at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival and garnered a Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination for Geraldine Page. The jazzy, meandering manner in which Coppola shot the Times Square sequences of the film became the inspiration for similar footage in Midnight Cowboy. Coppola also submitted the film as his thesis at UCLA, and received his Master of Arts degree.
Just prior to the opening of You’re A Big Boy Now, Coppola completed his screenplay on the life of General George S. Patton. Even though other writers worked on the script for Patton during its long production process (it wasn’t released until 1970), it was Coppola’s draft which star George C. Scott and director Franklin Schaffner referred to most definitively. Coppola’s next assignment was to direct Fred Astaire and Petula Clarke in an adaptation of the stage musical Finian’s Rainbow.
Years earlier, while studying at Hofstra, Coppola wrote an original script then titled “The Old Grey Station Wagon,” inspired by a childhood memory of his mother’s two-day disappearance. After meeting the actress Shirley Knight, Coppola was inspired to revise the script, which focused on three housewives, into the poignant story of one woman’s journey away from her husband and family and toward self-discovery. Coppola directed the film, re-titled The Rain People (1969). Legend has it that Coppola secured financing for the picture while awaiting the 1968 release of Finian’s Rainbow by spreading a rumor around the Warner-Seven Arts lot in Los Angeles that he was working on a secret project in New York and then dropping out of sight. The strategy worked, for the head of the studio, afraid of losing the project, signed Coppola to a contract without even seeing the script. The Rain People was the most personal of any project Coppola had undertaken so far, and he sank much of his own savings into the production, buying equipment which would form the basis of his own San Francisco-based mini-studio, American Zoetrope, which he founded in 1969.
A four-month on-the-road shoot that traveled across 18 states, The Rain People brought together numerous actors and technicians who would work with Coppola in the coming years, including actors James Caan and Robert Duvall, sound engineer Walter Murch, editor Barry Malkin, and associate producer Mona Skager. Filming a documentary of the production was a young USC student named George Lucas, who had met Coppola during shooting of Finian’s Rainbow. Coppola produced Lucas’ first feature, the sci-fi thriller THX 1138.
Having established a reputation as a talented writer and director, Coppola was approached to adapt Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel The Godfather, an exploration of a multi-generational Mafia family. In juxtaposing Mafia gangsters with a rich familial sensibility, Coppola created a classic work. While the film has, over the years, grown in stature to its present position as a cultural landmark, the process of the film’s production was a difficult one. Coppola faced extreme pressure over his casting decisions and had to fight hard for the actors he wanted, most notably Al Pacino and Marlon Brando. Despite the headaches of production, The Godfather went on to become one of the highest-grossing films of all time.
When The Godfather was released early in 1972, Coppola was already at work on numerous other projects. He executive-produced George Lucas’ second feature, American Graffiti (nominated for Best Picture in 1974), and this one made money. A million-dollar cancelled check hangs framed on a wall in Coppola’s Napa Valley office, and across it is Lucas’ handwritten note: “Thanks for the start.” During this time, Coppola also staged a revival of Noel Coward’s Private Lives in San Francisco, formed The Directors’ Company with Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin, and began work on his next feature, The Conversation. He had been working on the script on and off for several years, dating back to 1967, and had originally hoped to make it after The Rain People.
The Directors’ Company was a production experiment whereby each member would make two films for the company and produce a third by one of the others, all to be released by Paramount. As it turned out, only The Conversation and Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon came out of the venture.
Production on The Conversation began in December 1972, with a modest budget of $1.9 million. When shooting was completed, Coppola needed to begin pre-production on The Godfather Part II, so the sound mix and editing process for The Conversation took nearly a year. By the time the film was released, the Watergate scandal had hit, making the project surprisingly timely. “A devastating study of the moral and psychological consequences of cold-blooded professionalism,” wrote Stephen Farber in The New York Times. Despite winning the Palm d’Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, the film did only moderate business at the box office.
The Godfather Part II, which featured Robert DeNiro in one of his first major roles, was an unqualified success. Working mainly from his own story ideas, Coppola crafted a sequel which built upon the previous film, the two interweaving like a tapestry. “They were siblings,” said Coppola. “One film hangs over the other like a ghost.” At the 1975 Academy Awards ceremonies, where Godfather II won Best Director, Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, Coppola’s main competition was from The Conversation, nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.
By this time, Coppola had also purchased for himself The Little Fox Theater, City magazine, and a radio station, attempting to create a self-contained Zoetrope media empire. Coppola believed that journalism was rich ground for story ideas, hence the magazine, and that theater and radio doubled as good testing grounds to workshop film ideas.
His next project, Apocalypse Now (1979), based on a script by John Milius which Coppola rewrote, itself an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, was more than five years in the making and almost drove Coppola to the brink of personal and financial destruction. The troubles which beset the production have been well-documented by Eleanor Coppola in her book Notes and in her on-set documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. In many ways, Apocalypse Now ushered in the scorecard fascination which now plagues Hollywood and entertainment journalism, as the film’s spiraling costs and substantial box-office returns received as much coverage as the film itself. The film, a spectacular metaphysical exploration of the madness of war, won the 1979 Cannes’ Palm d’Or and garnered ten Academy Award nominations, including those for Best Director, Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Coppola’s next film again revealed his fascination with technology. One From the Heart (1982)—shot on film but using live video techniques, including “video-assist,” now used on all films—was a lavish, experimental, soundstage musical, but was a box-office disaster and caused the financial ruin of the fledging Zoetrope studio. Despite such financial setbacks, Coppola continued to work at a fierce pace throughout the 1980s. He filmed two S.E. Hinton adaptations, The Outsiders (1983) and Rumble Fish (1983), back-to-back in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Next, he directed The Cotton Club (1984, which he also wrote), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and Gardens of Stone (1987).
With Tucker: A Man and His Dream (1988), the story of an independent car manufacturer doomed for being too ahead of his times, Coppola seemed to find a perfect analogy for himself and his place in Hollywood—the idealistic dreamer railing against the confines of a system hostile to outsiders.
Next, Coppola took on The Godfather Part III (1990) and the formidable task of continuing the storyline of what had by then become his signature work. Godfather III earned Best Picture and Best Director nominations. He subsequently directed the visually stunning Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Jack (1996), and John Grisham’s The Rainmaker (1997, which Coppola adapted from the novel).
Over the years Coppola has also executive-produced filmmakers he has believed in, beginning with Lucas and including Paul Schrader (Mishima), Akira Kurosawa (Kagemusha) and Wim Wenders (Hammett).
He has also continued to have a wide range of ongoing projects, turning his attention toward his growing family of Zoetrope interests: the Coppola-Niebaum winery in Napa Valley, CA, the Blancaneux Lodge in Belize, and Zoetrope: All-Story magazine in New York City. Zoetrope: All-Story sponsors an ongoing screenplay submissions site, where aspiring screenwriters can, once they’ve evaluated the work of contemporaries and colleagues, submit their own work for critique. All can be found at www.zoetrope.com.
Was one of the early challenges of the script for The Conversation how to balance the thriller aspects with a character portrait?
The Conversation, in truth, was, just as one might think, inspired from seeing Blow Up, to the extent that I saw Blow Up and I thought, gee, that’s the kind of movie I want to make. I was there, in Hollywood, between the two poles of the studio films that were being made, and the auteur films that we had seen when we were younger, in the ’50s and ’60s. Blow Up was successful, and I said, look, there’s a film that’s a very interesting personal film, so just as a goal, I thought I’d like to make a film like that. I like the component of it where it dealt with revelations of information in razor slices. I was beginning to think it would be interesting to make a film that used repetition as a motif, in that we repeat the same thing, over and over again.
Like a music score.
Yes, it would be like a musical composition. So I was interested in working with repetition. I was walking down the street once with the director Irvin Kershner, and we were talking about technology. He was saying that now they have microphones that they aim with a sight, and that you could aim it on a person’s mouth and be able to hear what they were saying. I thought, that’d be curious, what if someone walked in front of it and there was a part you didn’t get? Out of that, and wanting to make a film more like Blow Up, an art thriller, as it were, I started working on the opening of The Conversation. I began to get intrigued with the idea of a very mundane conversation that wasn’t about anything at all. Like, “What are you doing?” “I don’t know. Nice day.” “I saw Joe yesterday . . .” And then you began to realize that someone was going to great trouble to record it, through a number of means. Through these high-distance microphones, and through people trying to get close enough to get what they wanted. And so then the conversation was starting to become important, clearly not for what they were saying, but for the efforts that people were going through to get it. So that’s how I began to write the script.
My pattern with original writing has always been the same—I write the script up to a point, maybe halfway through, and then I just hate it and abandon it. I’m convinced that writers have a hormone that’s secreted when they’re working which makes them hate what they’re writing. But the hormone does, in time, go away. So I began it, abandoned it, and I picked up another screenplay that I had been working on years before that I had also abandoned about halfway through. I think it was called “The Grey Station Wagon” then, but it became The Rain People. So I then looked at that, and I thought, gee, this wasn’t so bad, this is interesting. So I started working on that again, and I ultimately made the film. By the same token, I was starting on something else when I got discouraged and found the fragment of The Conversation. Once again, I picked it up, and the hormone was gone, so I read it and thought, gee, this is promising. So I finished it. That’s been the pattern for me, with original material.
You were also reading Hermann Hesse at the time?
I had read a number of Hesse novels, so the mood of Steppenwolf, with the solitary guy, was in there. I’ve always believed it was fine for younger artists, or any artist really, to do that. My father used to say: “Steal from the best.” Especially when you’re young, and you don’t know exactly what your so-called voice is. With an original screenplay you don’t know where you’re going. You’re in uncharted territory, and that’s terrifying.
There’s an almost prescient anxiety about technology in The Conversation. Was that a personal thing for you, because you use cameras and gadgets?
Personal, yes, but I’ve never had anxiety about technology. Since I was a child, I was always very comfortable with technology. From the day I was a little boy I always had a workbench [gestures toward a workbench] and have one to this day, where I can go to take something apart and fix it. So I didn’t have anxiety, I had fascination and comfort with technology. But after a while, working on the film, I realized that what I wanted to do was to make a film about privacy. Sometimes it helps, when you can say what your film is about in the simplest possible terms.
We let technology into our lives, but there’s a moral ambiguity there, certainly with surveillance technology. Surveillance was partly born out of a journalistic impulse, the desire to uncover truth, but your film explores the ramifications.
Well, I wasn’t really thinking in those terms. Although, when we were making The Conversation, the news on the Watergate break-in happened. I remember we were shooting, and we said, hey, isn’t this weird? This is sort of what we’re about. But I didn’t approach it that way. Wiretapping and surveillance were, quite honestly, something that appealed to me. Partly because I was paralyzed as a kid, and I was very good at technology and science, so I knew how to plant microphones in things and hear what people were saying. I remember we threw a party once and we bugged the bathroom so we could hear the girls talking. [Laughs] And this was in 1952! I was a friend of technology. And surveillance, I think, is another aspect of remote control. When you’re paralyzed, remote control is everything. That’s why boys like Lionel Trains.
Technology becomes an appendage, an extension of your will.
Yes, when you can’t walk. And in those days they didn’t have remote-control television. So as much as possible, by my bed, when I was about nine, I had my projector and I had my tape recorder and I wished I had remote-control so I could change the television stations. So I saw technology as something that extended me, and wiretapping as something that extended my ears. So I was on the other side. I was on the wrong side of the tracks. [Laughs] I didn’t come to The Conversation in any way as a social critic, or to be critical of that. I began to be interested, of course, in the story and in the consequences of it. The plot turned on [electronic eavesdropping], because Harry was someone who felt ashamed of and responsible for what his information had done in previous cases.
“With an original screenplay you’re in uncharted territory and that’s terrifying.”
Which dovetailed with his sense of guilt. He tells that story of how he punched someone in the stomach who later died. He feels responsible—that’s a profound sense of guilt.
Well, I made him Catholic. I used things from my own childhood. I did, in fact, punch someone in the stomach and he did later die, and my father always said, oh, it was because of the punch. I know it wasn’t, but that always stuck in my mind. So yes, I used a lot of personal things, because it was an original screenplay and I understood that that’s your opportunity to dredge up things that happened to you or that you felt. The girl in the room in the beginning of the film is a dream that I had, over and over. I still have the dream, but without the girl. I’m in some place, and it’s always a tier or two down, in a crummy neighborhood, or in a crummy South American country. In the dream I have a place there. I own it or have access to it or have the keys. I used to dream there was a woman in it. That very scene, that’s it.
So when Harry sneaks like a thief into his own life, in a way, into the room where Amy is, that’s from your dream?
That was the dream. And what’s interesting is that after I made it into a scene in a movie, I never had the dream again, not with the girl in it. [Laughs] But I still have this real estate kind of dream. That there’s some tract house somewhere, and I go in and I own it. It’s empty, and it’s mine. My feelings about it are very . . . I don’t even understand what they are. They’re not positive, but they’re not negative. In a rudimentary dream interpretation, I take it to mean it’s some aspect of myself.
An empty room.
Yes. I had the dream recently, and it was in Latin America, and it was rundown. It’s never a classy place. That’s interesting, because when I first found my little place in Belize, it was like that—very rustic. It was a case of living out something. Since then I’ve made it into a luxurious resort. But it’s funny that I still have the dream. At any rate, it’s only pertinent to The Conversation in that that one scene is, in fact, from a dream. There are a lot of personal things in The Conversation. I used The Conversation as the alternative to what my career was becoming. I wanted to write my own movies. I wanted to write stories, I didn’t want to just adapt something from a book or a play. I feel, in movies, we so rarely get a work that’s just personal. So I deliberately set out to make that kind of film, as opposed to the other, like The Godfather, which was adapted from a book.
And once you decided that the film would be a very subjective portrait, were there choices to make? Other than the opening shot, which is like God’s eye, we stay with Harry. Did that create interesting limits for you? The viewer could only know as much of the mystery as Harry did.
Yes, although I don’t exactly remember making those kinds of decisions. Opening The Conversation the way we did was a consequence of how I had shot Union Square [in San Francisco] with so many cameras. When I looked at what I had, that seemed like a great shot to open with. I remember I had this idea that you wouldn’t know who the main character was. There was that mime in the beginning that was imitating people who came by—then he imitates Harry, and then you go with Harry.
“I thought it would be interesting to make a film with repetition as a motif.”
Also, introducing Harry with someone mocking him, that he doesn’t know is there, gets to the heart of privacy, right away.
Exactly.
One of my favorite moments was when Harry is alone in his home and he takes his pants off. It’s so subjective, you really feel the privacy of the moment, and then you see something at the window that he doesn’t—is it a construction worker?
They’re tearing a building down. You can’t see it too well, but that was interesting, how we did that. They were tearing the walls off, and you know how you can sometimes see into all the rooms? That was the idea. It isn’t exactly clear, but we chose a set across from a building that we knew was going to be demolished.
It’s very effective, again it turns the table on his voyeurism.
We also shot the sequence as though it were with surveillance cameras. That’s a motif in the film—you see him, and then he just walks out of the frame. The camera doesn’t follow him. Then he walks back in. That was, again, trying to see if the camera could behave like a surveillance camera, for this theme of intrusion on personal privacy to be constantly present. And the landlady, who wasn’t supposed to have the key to his apartment yet was able to leave him a little birthday present—that really disturbs him.
Harry shuts the lights off when he’s with Amy, and then in the next scene he’s on a bus and the lights shut off. Things Harry does are done to him—most of all the surveillance. There’s an almost Old Testament feeling of an eye for an eye.
In the beginning he’s a kind of predator, he’s the operative, he’s the professional. But in the end he’s the subject. The film is doing to him everything he’s done to everyone else. But when you work in a theme, when you’re writing and utilizing stuff, whether it’s from your life or from other work that you like and want to appropriate, there’s a reason why you’re choosing that. You’re choosing what somehow feels right to you. That’s creation, basically.
In an interview some time ago you mentioned a few ideas for original scripts. One was an idea that relates here, the idea that a film editor spends six months editing footage of a movie and falls in love with the leading lady, whom he’s never met. I thought that was a great idea for a film.
That’s precisely one of the elements in The Conversation, sort of. He becomes fascinated with this girl, while he’s working, and he sees her only in that context. It was probably an idea that came out of that, maybe. An interesting thing about writing The Conversation is that a lot of it was dictated. I write, pretty much, on a typewriter, but I also write in longhand. In those days I used to just alternate, depending on whatever mode I was in. On an original screenplay, you don’t know where you’re going, you get bogged down. So I started dictating it, and there was this really beautiful girl, she was like an airline stewardess or something, that someone had arranged would type my dictation. She was beautiful, so I started dictating a lot. [Laughs] It was sort of like The Conversation, it was a way of talking to her. She looked like Dominique Sanda. Although I would only see her for a minute, and she would give me the pages. So a lot of the script I dictated for that reason, and in that way. And a funny thing happened with the famous name, Harry Caul. The way I intended it—of course, I took Harry from Steppenwolf—but I just thought “Call.” When she typed it, she typed “Caul.” Like a caul. So when I saw it I left it that way, in honor of her, but also because I saw the meaning to that. So a lot of that script was dictated. She always used to tell me, “Oh, this is so interesting, this is so exciting.” So I would get excited to work more, from her positive reinforcement. I was writing it for her, in a way.
And once you started thinking in terms of the word “caul,” did all the elements like seeing him through glass and wearing the shroud-like raincoat fall in place?
The raincoat was deliberate. There was a metaphor of seeing through things, seeing into things, the building being torn down, the shower curtain. And then the idea of him running around in this raincoat that you can see through! [Laughs]
So it didn’t really have anything to do with a birthing caul.
No. Although later, when she misspelled it, or rather she spelled it correctly, and I kept it, then I realized that it was relevant.
Because there’s a sense of the film as a parable of someone struggling to be born into the moral world, about gaining a conscience. Although it backfires, which is a dark thing to say.
That’s the switch. It shows how you never know anything. Here he was, building this whole idea of what was going on, when in fact it was nothing like that at all. He was sure there was some jealous husband that was going to use his information to punish his wife, who Harry had started to feel connected to. It turned out it wasn’t at all that. It’s the idea that you never know anything. That’s what The Alexandria Quartet is about, you never know what’s going on.
In the film, when Harry Caul walks with her, in his dream, you feel like he’s trying to replace, Mark, her lover. It mimics the Union Square walk. In the script, he actually follows her.
That was the original ending. It was funny, why that happened. I just got fed up. Gene Hackman, a terrific actor, was very kind and supportive, but he was going through something. I don’t remember if it was a divorce, or if he just didn’t like playing such a weird guy, but he was always on edge. Not towards me, but just in general. It was grueling, to be all day with someone who’s not feeling comfortable. So near the end, I literally got fed up. I just wrapped the picture without ever really getting the end. We were trying to make this fog, as it was San Francisco. You know, I wrote “San Francisco fog,” and then there’s no fog. So we were making the fog, and people were complaining to the police, and then the news teams were coming down and photographing. I got fed up and I wrapped. When we cut it, I knew more or less we could end it, but it wasn’t going to end the way the script was written. We chose to make the footage that we shot into that kind of dream where he talks about his personal life.
Harry’s such a paradox—he’s so private, yet he invades privacy. He’s a master of communication devices, yet he can’t communicate. So when he finally talks to her, it’s perfect that it’s only in a dream.
What it was supposed to be, if I remember correctly, was that he knew her so well, since he’d been looking at her, just like that idea of that film editor. I think at one point he gets on the bus with her, I don’t know if that’s in the movie, but the idea is that he’s right there, and she’s just so close to him, and he feels so much about her, and yet to her he’s just some weird guy on the bus. I don’t remember much about the original ending, but it had to do with that feeling.
One of my favorite scenes, in the script, which didn’t make it into the film, was when he goes to Amy’s apartment, and she’s gone. He stands in the empty room and he’s listening to the tapes in his head—he’s hearing the other couple’s goodbye scene, the goodbyes that he should have had with Amy but didn’t. The two things displace and layer so beautifully.
I was interested in how you can use repetition as an element, where you take something and repeat it, repeat it, repeat it, but every time you repeat it it’s different, and in a different context. That was the genesis of the idea of having this conversation which wasn’t at all interesting, but each time you heard it, it sort of had some other meaning to it, in context of both the case, the real mystery, and in the end, with his own life.
Ann looks at a bum in the park and says: Oh, how sad. That line is playing later on the tapes when Harry’s lying on the cot, and the model from the convention, Meredith, is talking. Suddenly he’s the poor bum, and Meredith’s words and those on the tape become interchangeable.
Right. There are some things, in a film like this one, that are by design and some things that just happen. It’s like the oranges in The Godfather. Everyone makes a big deal about the symbol of the orange in The Godfather. I mean, we kept using an orange, but we didn’t see it as a symbol. We’d say, well, have him come in and bring an orange, because he’s from Florida. It wasn’t in my mind as a motif. Editorially, we started to realize that it was a motif. In your high school creative writing class, that’s always the discussion. The idea of analyzing a scene, seeing something in a piece of writing, and then the author says: I didn’t intend it. But that’s all right, because you did intend it, but in ways you don’t know. Or you gravitated toward it or it was part of your psychology. Just the fact that you chose it means something.
“Harry is hoist on his own petard. He does it to to others and now it's turned on him.”
In contemporary thrillers, the hero tends to solve everything. Your film, and other ’70s paranoid thrillers, had integrity in that there was no solution. In The Parallax View, the Warren Beatty character ends up the victim of the very conspiracy he’s trying to unravel, much like Harry Caul.
That’s interesting. It reminds me of something in my daughter Sofia’s film, The Virgin Suicides, which is a beautiful film. It’s the story, basically, of boys who grow up to be men, and are remembering this extraordinary incident that happened when they were just 14-year-old kids, with these five beautiful sisters of their age. Probably the first girls they were in love with, and the girls had all committed suicide. The movie is told in a metaphorical way, or a cinematic way, so that you understand it is clearly an act that means something else. So people were talking about why, really, did the girls do it? But the point is that the boys are never able to understand why they did it. Which is similar to what you were saying, about not needing to solve everything. That you can’t know. People today want to know everything, want it spelled out. Why did they do it? They did it because the world that was being given to them was not the one that they particularly wanted to live in. It deals more in loss, and because it takes place in the ’70s, I think Sofia’s intention is that for the boys it’s the loss of being kids, it’s the loss of the neighborhood, all the trees are cut down because they have some kind of mite. So that even when you have a movie in which all the elm trees are being cut down and five girls commit suicide, it’s clearly about something beyond just the loss of these five girls.
Did you help your daughter with her film?
Not really. She wrote the screenplay, it’s based on a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides. Sofia wanted me to buy her the movie rights of the book for her Christmas present. I looked into it, but someone else owned it. She wanted to write the screenplay anyway. I told her, don’t do it, you’re going to just break your heart. But she wrote it anyway, I read it, and I thought it was a terrific script. So I said, why don’t you just take it to the people who own it? Because we had heard that no one had been able to lick it. And they liked it so much that when she said she wanted to direct it, they said yes.
“When Watergate happened we were shooting, and we said, 'Hey, this sounds like us.'”
Have you seen Enemy of the State?
No, I haven’t seen it. But I heard that Gene Hackman’s in it, and that it’s a lot like The Conversation.
Many details are inspired by your film. It’s an update, in that surveillance culture has become even more nefarious and invasive. The original script is dark, the “Harry Caul” character dies, but the film has a lighter tone and ending.
Well, I know that commercially, people are very concerned about the so-called “down” ending. As we know, the so-called “unhappy” ending can also be very good. People say, again, regarding The Virgin Suicides, just right off—oh, that sounds so sad. Well you know, in a funny way it’s not sad. Because it’s not exactly intended that way. Romeo and Juliet is sort of about suicide, in a way, yet their love is the thing you remember.
At the end of The Conversation Harry Caul is destroyed, in a sense, he’s stripped back to someone new. But it doesn’t feel so sad. It feels compassionate, more like an absolution.
Well, there’s an enigma. You’re not quite sure what to feel. He’s kind of hoist on his own petard, because he does this to other people and now it’s turned on him. I didn’t intend it to be a black thing, but there’s definitely that drama.
There’s a melancholy feeling to the whole film, so there’s something liberating about the ending. He’s alone with his saxophone, finally playing without a record. Of course, then you wonder, is the bug in the saxophone?
People are convinced that I know where the bug is. [Laughs] There’s a thing around his neck, that’s where I thought it was.
Really?
Oh, no, I don’t think it is. But if I had to guess.
Could it be that he’s made the whole thing up?
Yes, that he’s read all of his own guilt and personal stuff into this innocuous case that perhaps didn’t even quite happen that way.
So there’s no bug. . .
And perhaps no murder.
Was there a version of the script where there was no murder?
No, that was obviously by design, because I figured that was the only way I was going to get to make it, that it could be a thriller. I knew, of course, Psycho, and Diabolique, had that.
From Psycho, you liked the element of the sterile bathroom?
Yes, but also Diabolique, Clouzot had the bathroom. That, for some reason, reinforces the murder. Then there’s the toilet. Everyone has that nightmare of flushing a toilet and having it all come up.
It’s like Harry’s Catholic hemorrhage or something.
[Laughs] Exactly. And also there’s the clear plastic. I seem to remember that, when they clean up the room. Were those images in there? I shot those images.
Robert Duvall has clear plastic over him, again like a caul.
I don’t remember the film too well. I like it though. It’s certainly, probably, the best of all my films. But I don’t see my own films. When my films are done, it’s like they’re really done. And it’s been said, and it’s totally true, that Walter Murch, who cut the film with Richard Chew, and was the sound artist on it, the sound designer, he really was a collaborator on the film. He didn’t work on the script with me, but in the final cut he made a big contribution, especially on the sound mix.
The sound manipulation is so integral to the film. [POV on Murch, page 5.] And the portrait you created of the surveillance guys at the convention, did you do research for that?
A little. I had a lot of fun with that. That was very enjoyable to do. I had read an article in a magazine that there was a wiretappers’ convention. It just seemed so outrageous, to just go from booth to booth, like—Oh, here’s the new pin mike thing . . . But it turned out there was such a convention, and we shot there. We modified it to have some products that we wanted to have.
In the ’60s, I think wiretapping was still legal, but in ’68 or so, legislation made it illegal, supposedly, but they got around that by calling the same gadgets “security systems.”
Right. So they still had them, and this was a real convention. And the whole idea of these guys going out, and getting the women, the models from the convention, to come over to some hokey party in Harry’s warehouse, I enjoyed that part.
The image of a surveillance guy before that was the sexy cloak-and-dagger myth. And here are these ordinary guys . . .
They’re like salesmen.
The character Moran seems to be an uglier version of Harry.
He’s also someone who’s really making it into a business, kind of like a shoe salesman, the way that guy played it.
Surveillance went down a conscienceless road, he’s almost representative of that future. It’s a very prophetic movie.
It turned out to be. When I first thought of it and wrote it, you didn’t hear about this stuff at all. When Watergate happened, as I said earlier, we were in the warehouse shooting and we were all looking at the newspapers, and saying, hey, this sounds like us. Gordon Liddy even looked like Harry.
And then Nixon goes on and bugs himself.
Yes, it was all pretty funny.
Back to the repeating tape, it functions almost the way the classic Greek chorus would, repeating a symbolic refrain.
The idea of repetition, of hearing something over and over, is to hear the same thing in many different contexts. A lot of the things I do, I’ll say, well, I didn’t even know I was doing it, but some things are deliberate. The fact that the line about the bum on the bench later applies to Harry, that was deliberate. That was the idea. The exercise that I was interested in was: can I make a movie about privacy and use repetition as the driving element? Rather than a plot where you’re advancing the story by giving new information, here you’re giving the same information.
As opposed to traditional exposition.
Yes. But mostly, I was very anxious to try to be a writer, to try to be an artist. I was aware that The Godfather was a really awful experience for me, and it’s totally ironic that that movie is considered a classic movie, because it was such an uncomfortable experience for me, I hated it. I liked the actors, and I thought I liked what I was doing, but everyone hated it so much at the time, and I got such bad feedback from it, from everyone, that I just associated it with failure. So when it was over I wanted so much to be a real filmmaker, and use The Conversation as the vehicle to try and do that. I didn’t feel secure about it at all. So I said, I’ve got to have some new approach. What can I offer to the vocabulary of film? What can I do that’s different? So I hung on this idea of repetition as a possible way to find something that would be my own.
And then you started to add in your own memories?
I thought that was another way to do it. To be a real filmmaker, you have to advance the form somehow, like conceptual artists do. They suddenly say, well, my art is that I pee off a ladder. There was a guy that actually did that. So I knew I had to find some idea that would be different for film. So I said, I’ll explore repetition. At the same time, I knew it had to reveal feelings that I had, my own feelings, memories, fantasies. You either observe the characteristics of people you know or you try to use yourself.
The portrait of Harry is very cumulative. All his little mannerisms build to something. Details like how he says no when offered a cookie, but when alone, he picks it up and sniffs it.
That was another kind of privacy thing. He could have just taken it, but somehow he had to do it when no one was looking.
Also, the moment when he throws the folder, he litters, then has to go back to get it. His conscience is constantly after him.
People do that kind of stuff, I do stuff like that. It’s true, what you say about cumulative. You do things and you don’t know why you’re doing them, and that’s why you feel bad when you’re writing, because you don’t understand that you really are laying brick after brick. I feel it’s like what they call a dry heave. Or you’re scratching at something and you don’t know what. You’re trying to climb up a glass wall with your fingernails and you’re not getting there. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable, so unpleasant in a way. But then you read it over, and you realize there was something being laid, brick by brick, or that it’s cumulative. That’s why I’ve been working on this new thing for probably fifteen years, albeit not straight. This is the second half of the script [lifts a thick manuscript] which is also an original. It’s a very ambitious one. In fact, look here, it’s 239 pages.
I read somewhere that once you cast a film, you like to get the cast together and have them create some memories, that then, even subliminally, will come out in the film.
That’s part of a whole way of rehearsing. If you have the actors for two or three weeks, you don’t want to just sit there and read the script over and over and talk about it. They become sick of it. There’s some value in trying to stage it, but I’d rather use the time to help them evolve their characters and the relationships between characters. The actors, when they arrive for rehearsal, they don’t even know each other so well, for the most part. So it’s a chance for them to meet each other as characters, rather than as who the actor is. There’s a great chance to do improvisations and acting exercises that are designed to slowly let them become who they’re going to play, and also, as you were saying, to create memories. Let’s say in the movie, we’re married, but the script doesn’t deal with how we met. So we would do improvisations about how we first met, why we liked each other, when we broke up, what was our first argument. All the things are in two people, even though they might be 60 years old at the start of the film. By helping the actors play out situations, even surprise them with things they don’t expect, see their reactions—it’s like making bank deposits into them. So later, they’re shooting a scene, and all of a sudden he says, well, I’ve never done that. And she says, yes, you have. And they look at each other and you realize that they’re both remembering something. That’s not something you could really direct. You couldn’t tell them to do that, because it’s a sort of reality.
“To be a real filmmaker, you have to advance the form, like conceptual artists do”
You have to help actors to prepare, and program them. Actually, the rehearsal for The Conversation was unique. I promised Gene that we could do the rehearsal almost like a play and he got excited about that. So we rehearsed and rehearsed. One day, we did that entire scene in the warehouse as a play. In order to facilitate all the scenes, we decided we were going to pantomime all the props. For instance, if you were on the phone, the actors would pantomime. But they had rehearsed so much with the props, that when they did this play, the work with the imaginary things was so real, because they knew the objects. Even to the point where, if Gene was on the phone, and then he hung up, ten minutes later when he walked by he stepped over the cord where it would have been. Because he had rehearsed it. On one level, all directors try to do is to get the actors engaged and working at full capacity, thinking and struggling with the various things you lay before them. It’s like a workout. It’s like exercise. So that by the time you shoot it, they’ve already got the muscles in the right places. Also the potential fireworks, because you can lay seeds for that. For instance, if I got you prepared for a part, I know that if you see this color orange you’re going to freak out. And you don’t know why. Then in a key scene, you see that orange, say, draped over the body of your love, and you react. But you didn’t realize why you were being made to react to these things.
So you try to startle an actor, for a response.
Totally. You do millions of things. There’s a very good documentary that my wife made on The Rainmaker. They wanted her to make a typical behind-the-scenes thing, but she made it about acting. You see all these tricks on how to work with actors, on how you try to fool them or prepare them. It’s a very good 20-minute film on this subject. I get calls from directors sometimes, and they ask: I know you rehearse a lot, but tell me, I have three weeks rehearsal, what do I do? Because they instinctively know that you don’t want to just read the script. The worst thing you can do is sit around and talk about the characters. If you were going to play a role, rather than say, well, I think she does this and she does that, it’s much better if you personalize it, and say, I do this and I do that. I always make actors stay in character, I never let them step out of character. It’s
like exercise. You don’t want to do it. You’d rather say, let’s talk about sit-ups; I think they’re good, but they’re not so good for your back. Wait a second—stop talking about sit-ups, do the sit-ups.
What’s your new script about?
It doesn’t have a title, but it’s been referred to it as “Megalopolis.” It’s set in a Manhattan-type city, but it’s not science-fiction, it’s the present. Although, I’m realizing it’s a lot about time. No one’s ever read it, I never felt it was good enough. I got through to the end last year and when I read it through, my wife Eleanor said, well? What did you think? I said, well, now I think I know how to write it. So I started all over again. There it is. [Gestures toward a bulletin board covered in rows of index cards.] It’s starting to come together now that I know what I’m doing, which I haven’t known, except in an intuitive way, or a blind radar way. A story like this, the specific characters, how they interact, whether the events really happened, the arenas involved . . . I knew generally what it was going to be, but I never knew all the real characters. I would invent more characters, get rid of others, fuse them. I find it a lot of fun. It’s kind of like the classic irony of virginity—as long as I never let anyone read it, it’s mine and it’s wonderful. [Laughs] And there’s a lot of mystery from people about what the hell this thing is.
So it has a private life.
I think this is true about writers in general. It’s true about me. [Lifts script] If I didn’t have this . . . I mean, things go badly, things go well, but this is always my ace-in-the-hole. Even if it isn’t good, and for many years it wasn’t. I would read it and say, oh, this is awful, but the fact that I have it means everything to me.
It’s like that little piece of real estate you’ve got in your dream.
Yes, and no one’s seen it but me. No one’s read it. No one’s said it’s bad, no one’s said, oh, they’ll never let you make it. No one’s said it’s good, but . . . [Laughs] I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have it. When things don’t go well and they don’t like your film, you think, someday I’ll do that [Indicates script] and it’ll be great. I know other people have done that, worked on something for fifteen years. “Oh, yeah, I’m working on my big book.”
So it can have a delusional aspect as well.
It does. I know one well-known writer who was working on a book for years, he was doing a lot of research. I read that book, and I swear he wrote that book in four months. I could tell.
It’s funny, I don’t feel any sense of accomplishment or any pride about anything I’ve done in the past. If I didn’t have this script, I would just be totally deflated. My wife is amazed. She’ll say: You’re so famous, everyone adores you, you made films that people say are great . . . but somehow, that doesn’t do it for me. What I live for is the idea that I’m going to make this beautiful film, not that I’ve made a few good films.
You live for the work. To be challenged.
Or maybe the things that I did make didn’t really live up to what I would love to make.
You have high standards. [Laughs]
[Laughs] But I really feel that way. If I didn’t have this script I could not hold my head up. I would be crushed. But, and I think this is good for writers to know, it’s that I can be pretty low, and then I have to start from the beginning again. And then I say, now I know how to write it. I read somewhere that Tolstoy wrote War and Peace ten times. It’s sort of what I’ve done. My problem is I never have any time to write. If you’re writing an original, if you steal ten days somewhere, that’s good. I’ll say, I’m going to go to Rome, I’m going to write. It happened—I went to Rome, and I’m sitting in a piazza, and there’re beautiful girls walking by, on a summer day, in summer dress, and that’s all I wrote. “A beautiful girl walks by.” [Laughs] Because it takes a few weeks to even start to get on any kind of track.
I always call the thing I’m working on “The Secret Journal.” Look at the date on this—1989. I even did this script once in the form of a radio play, a bunch of actors read it. For a long time I wondered—maybe I’ll do it, maybe I’ll never pull it off. But now I really feel I’m going to make it. I’m being offered movies and it’s always a dilemma because they’re studio movies where they can really pay you but they’re the ones that you don’t really want to do. But there’re a couple that could be good, so I’m thinking, well, maybe I’ll do it. If you haven’t made a film in a while, you start to want to just do it again. But now I’m even at that point, which is not a point I’ve ever been at before, where I’m wondering, should I not do it? Should I stick with this script? I know it’s going to be hard. It’s a big film, like Apocalypse Now, in what it would cost today. But I think I have the money to do it, with what I have and what I could get from distributors. I’m making money in the wine business like I never did in film. But it’s tough.
A risk you probably would have taken 20 years ago.
Well, I always balanced it. I’d try and do a job, so to speak, to do a film where they paid. But it’s more than just getting paid. If you don’t do that, then the studios, or the professional distribution business, will write you off after a while. Not if you’re Stanley Kubrick, because he doesn’t make many films. But someone like Peter Bogdanovich, he’ll make a couple pictures that don’t do well, then not do anything for a while, and right away they start to forget you. You work, not only to make money, but to not have happen to you what happened to Orson Welles. He wanted to make films, but no one wanted him to.
And this is such an ambitious story. This script takes the position that modern New York, which is to say modern America, is amazingly the counterpart of Republican Rome. I’ve taken a very famous and very mysterious incident in Roman history from the period of the Republic, not the Empire, called the Catiline Conspiracy. People who read Latin always have to read Cicero, and all the speeches in which he denounces Catiline. No one knows too much about who Catiline was, because all we read about him is from the people who were ultimately his enemies. I’ve taken the characters of the Catiline Conspiracy and set them in modern New York. I’ve told the story the way I imagine who he was. So in many ways what it’s really about is a metaphor—because if you walk around New York and look around, you could make Rome there. Say you’re downtown, around Wall Street, and suddenly you come across a Roman temple. You’ll see that sensibility in the way it’s staged and shot. A taxicab will be from modern New York, but you’ll feel like you’re in Rome. The story is a very Roman story but it’s also a very modern American story. What it’s really about are the different factions of the city—the patricians in those days, the social register of New York, and Cicero, he was a guy like Mayor Koch. Ultimately what’s at stake is the future, because it takes the premise that the future, the shape of things to come, is being determined today, by the interests that are vying for control. The future, in other words, is now. What the world is going to be like, how people are going to live together, what society is going to be like.
So in overlaying an historical incident with the present day, you make people aware that they should be paying attention to the players of their day?
Yes, in other words, we already know what happened to Rome. Rome became a fascist Empire. Is that what we’re going to become? So it’s an ambitious script, I have many levels I have to deal with, the different segments of a society. And I use a New York as it was ten, fifteen years ago when it was in a financial crisis, because the big issue of the day, in that period in Rome, was debt. It was the beginning of the credit system, so it was the first time people were really in debt. So debt and wealth and money were the primary focus of everything. Sound familiar?
[Laughs] So you’ll have a pantheon of imperial characters? The Donald Trumps?
Well, more like Robert Moses. He’s the only guy that could have cut it back then.
He’s the guy who either saved or destroyed New York with highways, I can’t tell which.
My Catiline is many people, but he’s got a lot of Robert Moses.
And then there’s the level of the Bacchanal, the decadent underground culture of old Rome and modern New York.
Oh, yeah, it doesn’t stop. That’s like Clodia and Clodilla, the Clodius gang of these wild young jet-setters just getting into trouble, and then all these beautiful married women who were kind of a clique.
And then the Roman courtesans of the time, who were highly educated, refined women. Is there a modern equivalent?
The mistresses of kings, the daughters of financial families. Today, you wouldn’t call them prostitutes. There’s a whole world that exists today of cultivated, beautiful women that sort of sell themselves. They just disappear for three months and no one knows why: Oh, I went to Hawaii. That’s a whole other story. But women are, of course, a big influence on the way things play out.
Will the Roman elements be subtext, or will you have obvious manifestations of both the ancient and the new?
You just won’t be able to avoid it if you look at modern times, through those eyes. Just a scene coming down from the steps of the New York Post Office—it’s Rome. Or Wall Street—the guys have suits and they get picked up in limousines and they’re involved in a hostile takeover, but it’s the same thing. Rome is here, this is Rome, it’s two thousand years ago. There are lists of similarities.
And do you carry the imperial aspects through to a fall?
Well, Rome didn’t fall for a long time. But how does an Empire die? It dies when its people no longer believe in it. But that could take 800 years. The Ottoman Empire was 800 years old. But, partly, I’m doing this to try and understand what’s going to happen.
I had a good idea yesterday. My idea is this, it’s interesting—start a new political party that is different from other political parties in that its only function is that it spend a lot of time, resources, and a lot of bright people to view all the various people in the country. Then it drafts whom it feels would be the best president and the best senators. In other words, you don’t make yourself a candidate, this party is the draft-and-recruit party. It spends time looking at organizations like the MacArthur fellowships, hearing about what people are doing. Not politicians, but finding, say, a guy who runs an interesting company in Des Moines. You study all these leads and then come up with a list of what would be a slate of the most talented, the most capable leaders, and then you draft them. Of course, some would say, well, I don’t want to do it. But what’s different from any other political party would be that your candidates are arrived at by really trying to find qualified people. I think this recent experience with Clinton’s trial was that it was shocking for the public to see on television what idiots they have in the Senate. You saw them on television, you saw who they actually are—the caliber is so low.
The Emperor has no clothes.
Yes, so imagine a party that put up candidates of people who could conceivably be talented!
What a radical idea. [Laughs] Now, are there young filmmakers that you’re watching and like right now?
I must say, I stopped going to movies several years ago, because there was nothing I wanted to see. But I saw To Die For, I really liked that one. I’d never seen a film quite like that. I like to see things I’ve never seen before. Last year and this year there are films that are interesting. Elizabeth was a good film. Shakespeare in Love was adorable, although nothing like the real Shakespeare. Affliction I found interesting.
What about Rushmore?
Well, that’s my little nephew in that one. Jason [Schwartzman], he’s the star. He’s a great writer too, and a poet. And a drummer. I think he really makes the film. That character, that was me at that age. That’s what I was like. Here, look at this [shows a picture of himself as a young man]. Doesn’t this remind you of Rushmore? I was only 18 there.
In interviews with you from the ’70s you had some prophetic ideas, many of which have come to pass—the idea of entirely digital movies. Movies that would be sent up to satellites and beamed back down. Ideas about small crews, multi-media film communities, and working independently . . .
That’s why I kept going broke. The worst thing you can do is have the right idea at the wrong time.
Like in Tucker, with Tucker’s car.
But I’ve long felt that the so-called independent film was going to become the film industry. The rest of it would just fall away.
(Francis Coppola was interviewed by Annie Nocenti at his vineyard home in Napa Valley, California.)
