Francis Ford Coppola Explained His Current "Film Student" Mentality at Tribeca 2016

the most quoted works in all history are the Bible Shakespeare The Godfather and Apocalypse Now the first was arguably from Shakespeare the second arguably from God and the others from a God Francis Ford Coppola it's uncanny how moments in princesses films become metaphors for our own quotidian challenges experiences and warnings but then everything about Francis's films are uncanny Francis brings the passion we so clearly see in his movies to every part of his life under the Francis Ford Coppola presents spanner he markets his films and videos resorts cafes a literary magazine a winery a line of pastas and pasta sauce leading today's discussion is Jay McInerney a prominent writer in fiction journalism and film he's currently writing a wine column for Town & Country magazine in 2006 he won the James Beard MFK Fisher Award for distinguished writing for his Food & Wine work they have an awful lot to talk about I also have to say that both these gentlemen were part of the very first Tribeca Film Festival in 2002 and I will always be grateful to them for for joining us then and joining us now thank you thank you all very much and now please welcome Francis and Jay thank you well I I had a lovely and witty introduction to you written um I'm not sure if I should think Jane has obviated the need for that very gracefully but um let me uh let me start it more or less in the middle if I can find my glasses I told them over there I said you know I have absolutely no idea what we're going to talk about so I love that because then I'll really talk it's true I did the urge to send Francis the questions but well let's start in the middle more or less and by that I mean Apocalypse Now at a press conference and con after the release of that film you said something very well you said some very prescient things about moviemaking for instance you said cinema is the most potent force of modern times and it's going to radically change world cinema will be electronic it will be digital and it will bounce off satellites and it will create the dreams and hallucinations of the future and it will change the world this is 1979 or maybe 1980 how prescient do you think you were well you know as a former boy scientist I always was interested in technology and of course art depends always has depended on technology from the first paintings to of course the cinema is was impossible until they invented the camera and the other means of recording and I just knew it was going to be electronic for reasons we could talk about if you would want to but I was positive it was going to be electronic and I saw that once it would be once picture became electronic because sound was already electronic or then subsequently digital which is another way of saying electronic I guess but I knew you know we as young filmmakers knew that the soundtrack was very malleable and you could manipulate it and you know since the 50s when we saw Les Paul and Mary Ford you could have sound on sound recording and you could make one saxophone sound like 20 saxophones it was so such a magic promiscuous form whereas picture was of course still photochemical and so you had to cut pieces of film together and I knew that once the the picture became also digital and would become as promiscuous as was the soundtrack then the film you wouldn't cut a film you would compose a film but I also knew I was sure that in the future and I said as much as some Academy Award ceremony when I think we gave the award to Michael Jimmy no and I said but before we give the award I want to say a few minutes about the future of the something is coming that is going to change everything I knew that once every projector and every theater in the world was basically an electronic projector instead of a film projector that then you wouldn't bring film cans to the projector you would just supply it with digital files and it could play a different movie in a different place it could it could be totally changeable in fact it could be a live performance a cinema live performance so to me coming into the digital age meant a real evolution of the form well I spoke to you a few months ago in in Napa and one of the things you told me then was that when your career was starting there was there was it was talk about the the threat to to the movies from television that you know certainly television was a new medium which would seem to pose challenges and when I start when I was writing my first novel everybody there was a lot of talk about the novel being dead being threatened by other art forms and being obsolete and obviously both the narrative film and and the novel have have survived and continued to find their audiences and but at the same time it doesn't seem to me they've changed all that much in the last 30 or 40 years I think the novel has changed a lot and the novel is what about 400 years old I mean Don Quixote or Goethe and so much has happened in the novel the manipulation of point of view never I mean we could talk and talk about the changes no but I mean let's say in the last 30 years I mean not you know not modernism and post-modernism and there's uh yeah I'm even in the last 30 years I think you get into the younger writers what's-his-name Infinite Jest what have you there it is but the form is continually you know evolve and a went on big went through a big transition with the French flow Barre and and and what's-his-name who wrote the Charterhouse of Parma stand out stand all and then and then of course went through the James Joyce Virginia Woolf period of great so so I think as a literal as a form the novel has gone through many many exciting transfers oh yeah but I mean Alan Rob green but there was there was talk of the novel being dead I mean they're always wolf was the most famous proponent of this theory and then he went on to become more famous by writing a novel but called the bump are the vanities but I mean as but has how would you say you know how would you say that these changes that you quite rightly predicted have changed the form of storytelling you well unfortunately you know unfortunately what I had in mind did happen but aspects of it were a brace then used to make the superhero movies because of digital effects and and I knew that in the in the realm of the digital cinema anything you could dream up would be possible but I fail to adjust for the fact that what they dream up is something that make money by you know doing things in a way that that maybe is titillating or exciting by me you see some of the spectacular things possible in the in the big buck Buster movies and you look at them and you sort of shrug a little because you know it's a form of animation really that it's not really happening but prepared well those beautiful capabilities could and have you know that what's happened today in the movie business there's a split between the so called studio pictures which have too much money which are basically the franchises of you know my Iron Man pictures and five Spider Man pictures and the independent cinema made by our very talented young younger filmmakers by we can include Woody Allen with that group who are just love the form and it is to keep pouring it out and and they don't have enough money to you know that there's their budgets are very very miserly so but but but this is a time as always of great transit to transition and and the cinema as well you know all our institutions seem to be changing right in front of our eyes marriage journalism religion politics who would have imagined politics would become reality television you know so so while our very you know institutions are the bedrock that we rest on and so since they're changing this becomes a quite an exciting quite quite an exciting time but with the cinema I'm sure that what I what I'm sure is going to happen is the only the focal ownership the establishment of the cinema which is now in the hands of cable cable companies and telephone companies is going to shift because I don't believe that the internet social media companies can can have their industry founded on social media they're going to have to have content at some point I mean anyone who goes through one of them like a Facebook or something knows that after while you become bored with it and you don't even want to go back anymore being on grandparents seeing their grandchildren pictures so those companies have so much money that ultimately I think they're going to they're going to want movies they're going to not movies but content they're what they're going to want to have something to look at Yahoo you know they're wondering well who's going to come to Yahoo we don't have anything really we can offer it was really a search company originally so I feel that the ownership of the cinema is going to change also one thing we've seen is cinnamon television has become the same thing those those wonderful long television like starting with Sopranos and Breaking Bad those are those are movies so it's all cinema excuse me there is no more television as such there's cinema and it can be seen in the home it could be seen in the theater it can be and will be seen in both the home in the theater and it could be a minute or less or it could be 90 hours or more so now we have this new exciting category of cinema which is about to have new ownership have you ever considered long-form television I hate that word long term of long-form television but I loved what you genial would O'Neil would call a cycle of plays dad that's a turn-on you know morning morning becomes a lecture was for plays I guess or back to Methuselah was more so I don't even know how many plays that was so yeah I become very interested in a particular corner of what I think the future will be and I've been at age 77 I've sort of assigned myself a five-year project just for sure get me into my 80s so that's what I'm doing these days and it's related to what I think is one aspect of the future of cinema well as long as long as you brought us there let's talk about it because we're not going to talk about why I'm no well I we can get to one but but we could be getting to whine while we're talking about the future let's let's talk about distant vision distant vision is actually was an old phrase used to describe what is essentially television back in the 19th century people don't realize that what we call television really came about in different levels and experiments probably around the time of the invention of the telephone so it's really possible that television could have emerged and become a medium that the public used before cinema which would have been very interesting because when television did come on the scene in Europe in the 30s and in America in the 40s it used the language that cinema hadn't invented but would have been very curious had a television come first which was technically possible it existed and then you wonder what it would have been like because it would have been it wouldn't have had this extraordinary vocabulary and language that cinema evolved and which television borrowed so you know it would have been used by English couple looking at a screen and saying hello to their daughter in salon what what is the thing Apple does with the camera it's called it would have been used like that you know the detectives in New York would have seen the perpetrators of the crime in Chicago because it couldn't record so it's very curious I think what might have had that would have influenced them the cinema when it was born so it was called distant vision distant electric vision distant vision and even in the 20s there was an American named Frances Jenkins who who was broadcasting to home radio ham operators a little television box called radio vision radio vision I think it was called in and so the history of television goes way way way way back and the urge to see at a distance of course was probably an ancient fantasy so what I what I'm doing is I'm writing a long piece a cycle of plays you could call it called distant vision which is a little bit like Budin Brooks it's the story of an Italian family much like my own three generations so the you know for marriages the grandparents marriage the parents marriage and the younger people's marriage and just as just as boom Brooks was told over great changes in Hanseatic Germany in the merchants and what was happening in Germany my story of four generations of a family like mine takes place over the conception and the birth and the ultimate dominance of television over the period of time that those family so so it's about a family like not unlike my own although it's fiction and and and it's about the story of television and try to understand how television has impacted us as we know you know I was thinking when I was being kind of dream up what I would write about I was thinking you know what my era I was born 1939 so my heir is there the end of World War two if we said to someone a little older what was what really what was your era what was your time about they would say World War two but I'm just after World War two and I thought well what is mine mine is the 40s or 50s you know the changes in civil rights the Vietnamese war and I realized this television everything we did or saw or thought about somehow was was determined by television and our into reaction with it so I thought I wanted that as a subject matter but formally it sounds like you're trying to do something very different from a conventional film script which you subsequently direct yeah well what this is is synthesized about that subject I thought well I should the form itself should be live cinema and I said well what's life cinema and I so I don't really know because no one has I know what like television is life television when they do the sound of music and they have a lot of cameras and they sort of produce the sound of music and it looks like a television play and but cinema doesn't look like that it doesn't look like the young and the restless' it looks and and so I I you know in my career I've always been in a situation when I'm doing something big and ambitious and I'm trying to sell people to sponsor me like with Apocalypse Now and the truth is I had no idea how I was going to do what I was saying I was going to do but when I got there and how am I gonna destroy villages with helicopters and all this stuff I had no idea how to do it but step by step we learned and so when I talk about live cinema which is something I'm sure of that you will be able to see something that looks like a beautiful movie and yet it will be being performed live for you I wasn't exactly sure how I would do what I had in my heart and my imagination so what I what I began to do is take like 20 or 30 pages and do a kind of a proof of concert concept experimental workshop somewhere and try to find some place where I could go so I add a couple years ago I went to Oklahoma and where I was welcome at a film school in Oklahoma and they said well we'll give you students and all these facilities and so I did like a 50 what will happening it was 50 minutes excuse me of what was basically an experiment to try to express what live cinema was and I would take notes every morning I'd write to myself and I was you know watch how it was going I had some repertory actors from the Oklahoma City Dallas area and they were they were working with me on this material and I would say well this is definitely last theater and it's definitely not television and it's definitely not movies so what is it I said I don't know why is it not those things like and it's because the basic unit of life cinema just as the your work of the novel the basic unit of the novel is this sentence you have a beautiful sentence and then you have a few beautiful sentences you're on your way to a beautiful paragraph and ultimately that's the basic unit in in the in in television the basic unit is the event it could be a ball game it could be the sound of music it could be when they do the opera that's basically a kind of live television they have the Opera with the sets and they have a lot of cameras trying to stay out of each other's way but cinema the basic unit is the shop it's shot based as the shot and we've learned from the Masters Eisenstein and the pioneers that the shot cuts to another shot and it makes a meaning that neither of them could make so you build cinema out of shots so then I realize well that's totally different than the way they do live television it's it's more like is if you had a storyboard a Pixar storyboard and the actors are running through and they're performing those shots and somehow you're able to cut them and show them on this projector and the people are seeing a movie but it's a live performance and I guess what I felt was that why should we give up performance just because we have this beautiful cinema that now has existed for a hundred and some-odd years wouldn't be great if you could still have performance like you know when they were doing opera at Dresden in 1850 they were big elaborate productions they had choruses they had and the maestro who's the director of the Opera House was like a movie director because he was involved in everything but at the moment he got up in front of you the audience and he raised his hand and they performed it well wouldn't it be wonderful if we could do that I thought being an old theater student if we could perform cinema and of course with it all being electronic it is possible could be all around the world everyone could see a new film by whomever and see it live with the thrill of the actors doing the timing and not the editors so that was sort of the Holy Grail I started to go and I and I experimented in Oklahoma and I did about 50 minutes and we broadcast it you know my wife saw it in Paris my friend saw it in New York my daughter and and I I believe it's definitely it will not be the entire cinema of the future but that there will be live productions that are cinematic and and and and look like movies and behave like movies but is this an ongoing project and do you have a you have a script that your I am continuing to work from yeah I think I'm doing it again I'm going to do it at UCLA and each time I do it I have a different experiment and in Oklahoma my first experiment is how do you get it to look not like just like the young and the restless' the reason it looks like that is because they are concerned that the cameras that photograph themselves so they tend to shoot it all with zoom lenses so that they can come in close zoom lenses those kind of camera zoom lenses are very there's a lot of glass so they need a lot of light so the lighting is all done from a big grid and that combination of this big grid that illuminates everything and these long lenses which eat up the light gives it the live television look that Peter Pan had or even Greece had Dublin they did it recently but movies are lit from the floor movies are lit from the lamp in the room or through the window and the lenses that use in movies are much much more efficient so they don't need a lot of light so we shot in Oklahoma with those kind of lenses for the most part and didn't use the grid at all just had lights that we could you know because a lot of actors running around scene after scene after scene we were pushing lights and things around but it looked like a movie didn't look like so that that experiment confirmed to me okay that's how you would do that you would you would you would like from the floor and at a much lower light level so in Oklahoma now I'm going to experiment three other things so each time I do it I try to learn another knotch of how to do and then i'm going to do the whole thing the script is almost 500 pages long so it's like six plays oh because but right now it sounds like filmed theater not at all okay why does it show why I want you to clarify because because it's shot based in other words it's a theater is you have a set like they're going to do a live production what was the movie that Jack Nicholson did it was a play Jack Nicholson did with no was a movie with military human they're going to do that on NBC so of course they that's perfect for them because it's a courtroom drama so they have a courtroom and then they have a lot of cameras now that's a film play if they ask me would you like to do something experiment I would say yeah I want to do Lawrence of Arabia yeah like I think that that's a joke but it's the difference is the difference between telling a story through a quanta of images and on the other hand a set a set that has you know positions and you stayed to do which is not how I do it but it's its shot base and it was it goes from a design shot to a design shot to a design shot and it looks like also you know you have to realize that a lot of evolution has happened since the great days of life tellers or Playhouse 90 but it's happened in sports they've invented all kinds of technology to facilitate sports and just to learn I mean if you ever wondered how in a baseball game someone hits a home run and the guy runs around and you get the reactions of the people but they always have the shot where he goes into the dugout and everyone gives them high-fives and he goes and he gets some Gatorade now how is it they're always able to get that shot because what there were there was an argument and the umpires were arguing couldn't it have happened that they're stuck on that and so when they get to the dugout it's two ladies already drinking the Gatorade they always have that job because they have equipment in this case it's EVs that enables them to control time they can isolate time while the sports are going on and they can show you and it's happens in real time but they're able to manipulate that so I said well what happens if I use that for storytelling purposes if I have control over time and that's one example of some of the advances that have been made for sports that you could use in an enterprise like mine so it sounds that you've touched sometimes about the the outside influence that editing has in shaping film and it sounds like you're sort of somewhat bypassing the editing no you're still editing but you're editing a little more as they do in the movies anyway before the faculty goes your I mean cinema has this wonderful property which they only have because the pioneers were able to experiment I mean I often talk about the guts it must have taken from an early film director to you know because at first it looked like a play they had the actors full you know more cut at the knee or full form and and someone had a close shot and it always occurs to me how gutsy that was and how would be how would they be sure that the audience would accept that suddenly I'm looking at a great big close-up of someone and of course you know how would we we know that the audience would just happen look what he's thinking in the scene but the mind of the audience makes that work or the girl is tied to the railroad track and the villain is tying her and then you cut to a locomotive how did they know that the audience would put the locomotive shot which is just another shot and saying that girl is in danger this is the wonderful invention in the language of cinema that they did aided by this extraordinary human mind that puts these things and and each of you make that work story-wise so so if you don't get to experiment do outrageous things like that how can you how can you move forward how can you discover what the rule of a of electronic of life cinema is what you have to do is you have to pre imagine as you do anywhere when you make a movie the effect that going from this shot to this situation to that shot and that's why Pixar just spends years drawing storyboards and trying to figure it all out beforehand so a little bit in life center you have to figure it out beforehand because there are no real sets as such there are shots if I what I learned in my Oklahoma experience and I want to continue with the the next one I'm doing is that when instead of having a scene okay here's the drawing room and there's actors are getting drinks and by I'm not going to do that I'm going to say okay here's the shot give me put a put a piece of so the liquor bottles in the left on the frame and make there be a door over there and there's a window and let there be like in other words I would build the top shot out of the frame rather than an existing set that's there and then go to the next shot do the same thing piece it together out of the malleable elements of the actors in the furniture and the tools that I have so that when you see it cut it performs like cinema rather than a play that's being covered you know or an opera in the movie theatre in the afternoon it's very different looking effect it looks like a movie you talked earlier about a commercial studio filmmaking versus independent filmmaking it seems to me that you came of age and partly helped to shape an age when that line seemed to blur for a moment I I mean The Godfather was conceived up in many ways as a commercial film and yet many people consider it one of the greatest and most innovative films of all time I mean was was there a moment there an open window when when commercial and independent filmmaking were not so dichotomized as their today I think the important factor was the den the timing that myself my generation were raised with the twin influences of the European cinema and Hollywood cinema we so I was you know nineteen in 1959 or whatever we were seeing these great Italian films and the great Japanese films and the French films and the Swedish films a bird but those of you who haven't seen Marty Scorsese beautiful documentary called viaggio in Italia that has anyone seen that Marty gives a lecture on the Italian cinema from Rosa libera before Rossellini on very very wonderful and but the you know to think what the Italians had they had they had 40 great film directors at once it's never happened again so we were knocked out by these extraordinary films at age 16 age 17 and then to throw in Orson Welles and John Frankenheimer on television to boot and then there was the American cinema there was William Wyler's great the best years of our lives and John Ford and and George Stevens a place in the Sun so there was beauty hitting us from two angles so that when we came to our opportunity in the 70s the studios were a little bit in disarray as they are now they weren't quite sure what movies to make you know some little the success of Easy Rider really threw them didn't it I mean the success of Easy Rider definitely was a saying well maybe we should make films but for young people and so what's that well Easy Rider definitely showed it so we got our chance the appellate rater said after that they gave you guys the keys for a while well we should have swiped they didn't really give us anything but but what the films we did were doubly influenced by Kurosawa and Wyler or or Billy Wilder and fellini so i think was a very unique very unique time and the same thing happened then later when these talented writers and directors who wanted to make that kind of cinema and didn't have the chance to the guy David Chase who made the Sopranos he wanted to be making films in the seventies so he made his television in that so that that you always use the opportunity you have to try to fulfill your dreams and that's that's that's all we did I mean you know when you're a film director like on a movie like The Godfather all I was trying to do was not get fired every week yeah in truth I mean it was it was I was so scared I had three kids or two and one eminently on the way and when the baby was born that was the baby in The Godfather turns out it was Sophia wasn't even a boy or Sophia so yeah I was pretty scared yeah and they didn't want Marlon Brando they didn't want Marlon Brando and you know the story either we don't have to go over but it's true so you know I mean and Apocalypse Now I was terrified I had a thirty two million dollar loan that 29 percent with everything I had amassed up against it which is why I owned Apocalypse Now at this moment it's because no one would do it no one wanted to do it and I was able to borrow the money and at that kind of interest but I'm curious after all the turmoil of making that film the typhoon and the heart attack of Martin Sheen and you know and all the negative press while you were making it I mean eventually I think the critical assessment of film was very favorable you once again won upon the Palm D'Or lowly the critical success of Apocalypse you know it improved over time people kept seeing at people now but there was the Palm D'Or relatively early on yeah I mean but does all of that turmoil the difficulty of making the film when you look back on it did do you do you feel do you feel all of that storm and wrong or is it or is or you know more I feel more relief I mean I was so scared to be honest with you I mean I was so frightened but I didn't know any other way to do it you know except fumble my way through it when I look back and and you know and I had my share of bad reviews for all those pictures but I realized that I made I made Godfather 1 the conversation Godfather to an apocalypse now one after another in about four and a half years but I was so depressed I had won five Oscars and no one would let me do Apocalypse so I took the Oscars I was so mad and I threw them out the window of my house and they landed that down and the garden all mangled in there just draws by the way all broken and stuff so my mother went and picked up all the pieces and she went to the Academy she though my son's Oscars the maid was dusting them and they fell down there there my angles being all of it but that was my sentence what do you have to do to be able to make the films that you have to make that you you know because film was inexpensive medium I mean you can't just go out and do it you have to have the resources so not my my youth that young period cuz I was you know before I was 30 and then after 30 I was I was sort of tortured in you know what have you I'm much more stress-free now and it's a hybrid thanks to the wine business not to the wise as you say at the height of your success I believe in 75 you went up to Napa and you bought this beautiful historic estate home yeah it was a home a beautiful mansion up in the Napa Valley and and and when it went along with a very important vineyard which he which Francis subsequently added to and he completed and reclaimed the inglenook vineyard which is probably the most famous and most historically important a 19th century you know vineyard created by a Finn a Finnish American gentleman who was one of the wealthiest men in the country Gustav niebo yeah so it wasn't you know mostly new world wineries are immigrants go to Argentina or go to America and like mr. the gallows or mr. Mun Davies father and they make wine for other immigrants because many Europeans of course consider wine something that's at the table I never saw a table in my life that didn't have a glass of wine on it because it was just something people drank with dinner but knee BOM was different he was so wealthy actually he was wealthy because he was finished which was part of Russia and he was the administrator for Alaska so when Alaska was bought by the Americans he knew all what was there and he went made a fortune in shipping and taking seal pelts and other resources so he made you know I mean one load of those seal pelts would be worth a half a million dollars in 1860 so what was a half a million dollars in 1860 was very rich and he married as an older man his wife wanted him to quit traveling so rather than go to France and buy up all the first growths he he bought this beautiful property and invested in very advanced benefi culture and minification process and made the single look which one all of these awards back turn-of-the-century so it's really a American treasure his I had a I had in 1955 inglenook with you the first time I met you and it was quite a sensational well they were among the greatest wines of the world a bottle of 1941 Engel look you go to auction you pay twenty five thousand dollars for it so back you know for the 40s they were so at what point did you realize that you wanted to start making wine at this property I just was living there with my kids and it was such a pretty place and I got you know we again I like to have a glass of wine with my dinner like my father before me and and I began to get the idea a little earlier than maybe the others that it was not going to be good for movie directors as you know that you wouldn't be able to make the project's your dream projects that it was they were the studio's were getting wise to us and you know we're what they call vetting you they would taking the keys back they were taking the keys back after Heaven's Gate and so and it's true because today a movie director what do you do if we some of the Great's like like Marty and Steven can still but it's an effort to do a personal film they've more are in the pressure to do what what but is commercially viable so I wanted to get out of that my livelihood was based on making movies and and I was very fortunate in that I from England look actually the young lady I guess Jane was wrong I have three wineries one makes those wines that you see everywhere that the Coppola Clara door the Coppola and then recently we've started once again for you older folks Virginia there remember Virginia there I always loved Virginia Deckard had this pretty blonde girl like a fairy tale on it and there was a song say it again Virginia there so we started the Virginia their winery revived it and the wineries thanks to all of you do very well and I often joke that you should all be credited as the social producers of what films I do because that's what's paying for it and you should all visit the winery if it's very rare in your knapping I don't more than welcome not only do you get a lot of the history of wine there but also the history of but Francis's films and well just to wrap up the live cinema thing because I don't feel that I've been very the reason I can't describe the process too well is because I don't know how to do it and I it's like someone invented a beautiful new musical instrument and no one's ever played it so I want to try to learn how to play and so right now I'm doing it with these little workshops but eventually I it's my dream to do it and you know those of you who follow this stuff know that there's a big argument between the theater owners and the producers and filmmakers asked who they want you to go to the theater to see the film six weeks before you can get it at home and when in fact the truth is that you're going to be able to see it in the theater or at home or wherever you want to because it you you are the boss of that you are the patron and and the theater owners can't make those kind of stipulations if the audience so I you know to me to go to the theater is a wonderful experience I'd love to go to the movie theaters although I yell at the screen when you go there I go with my wife in Napa and I yell at the screen because they show commercials in a movie here and that's what you know back when Pat Weaver started the first attempt at pay TV the theater owner said oh you'll pay for it but they'll show commercials on it and they used to have you sign a what do you call a list of your names to protest that pay TV will show you ads which indeed they do but now the theaters show you ads too so that really really bugs me but it's wonderful to go see movie in a theater with the you know at the full big screen and it's also wonderful nowadays with the extraordinary home screens that you can have but it's all cinema it's no more television but do you think that there's something to be said for the communal experience of the theater because it seems to me we're headed to a world in which where he's sitting even in the same room watching different things on different devices oh the theater experiences my little granddaughter tells me that when was she's 29 but when they go the movies they always go the first night because they want the excitement of seeing it with an audience before someone tells them whether it was good or bad you know that's why people like live that's why people you know like I guess rock shows it's tough because there is a hunger I mean we're looking at canned entertainment some of its great but nonetheless it's can and there is a thrill to go and those I'm sure there are those of you in the audience tonight who were there on the first night of seeing streetcar named desire or or long day's journey and young you'll never forget that your whole life or Aida or God knows why so that that's one of the human thrills is to sit in a great performance with your fellow audience and and that can that can be for the cinema as well and it will be I mean I don't think all films will be created live but some will and there you know the cinema there I always like to think well gee I wonder what their grandchildren's grandchildren will make if I could get a glimmer to see that what the what those little kids are going to make it'll be something we can't even imagine but I know it will be thrilling I know it will be thrilling well I have 37 other questions to ask you however I've been told that I have to turn the you're going to give me a half attorney up the mic over to the audience at this all that's above the or and I'm so wet where it's time for your questions how do we do it the young lady with glasses yeah um I have a few questions actually um let's try let's try and keep it to a minimum here yeah no no I have just just to actually um specifically um I study at um Sarah Lawrence College which is not really a film school but we have like a small community we're very dedicated to everything that we do over there and I think that your project is something that will work very very well for our community um so if that's something you're interested in that would be awesome and on top of that I was I was wondering for your project for light I had a completely different question in my head when I was when I first came here but um what was the name of that school because maybe I'll pick along with you Sarah Lawrence oh I I visited Sarah Lawrence he's in New York cut do you know that Brian De Palma that genius went to Sarah Lawrence when it was a Widow's all-girls school because they would accept the couple of men in the drama department so he was one of like three men in all of Sarah Lawrence good deal I could have done that I was a theater I was a theater major ass cubing yeah so it's a great school it's in Bronxville we're a very very small community but everyone is super dedicated over there to film craft in general but my second question is you were talking about making the future of television more life based and I was wondering if you ever considered doing anything interactive enjoys of having the audience kind of have their choose-your-own-adventure with like a stream of different like a tree of different hot lines that can kind of condense into one thing in the end well you know if I were to talk to you about the five possible ways the cinema would change the idea of performing cinema live is just one of them what you're talking about is the one I can have know the least about which is where we're making the cinematic experience through some sort of connection on the internet or even involving the oculus I mean more what what online gaming is although I can't quite put it in a dramatic contact yet you can she has it well we're going to all we're all going to make you rich shortly yeah which is that such great shakes but um no but yes definitely that's one of the five things I would tell another one since you're a young lady that I that I think is is the whole idea of the documentary I could talk about a lot of different ways the cinema can be new you know but one of it is when the documentary form which is so interesting and such a beautiful form is used to become more personal the way Sarah Polley did on that her film called stories people tell did you see that you know Sarah Polley yeah see that that was beautiful film but so there are many there are many exciting avenues and you can personally say the interactive experience and more learning about how gaming works I mean gaming online is extraordinary think there are people who just go online to watch the people play the game you don't play it in themselves it's very interesting thank you gonna pick another one oh you let's get somebody over there huh just the fellow right over there hi my name is Juan I'm from Buenos Aires Argentina when they're shooting tetro yes we I really enjoyed I thought it was a perfect little bit misunderstood movie and my question is about that movie and maybe the last two or three do you feel like your film student again I mean like for the experimentation and all those things that you you try well you know I am well aware that some great artists I'll to say Tennessee Williams or certain novelists I can think of have a success very young Williams had the grout Glass Menagerie and streetcar named desire and lived the life of great heartbreak because he never could quite boy he did do some spectacular plays after that work at that but he always felt he was in competition with streetcar or grass menagerie and that that could be true of a first novel and and it seems to be a pattern and I decide who who is a James Jones that he did he he was in or the guy who did I know any rate like my agent told me that she was afraid that Bright Lights Big City was going to be in the first line of my obituary and I was 30 years ago well that's what happens I mean I I so I knew at age 65 that I was never to make a film that connected with the public in the way that the Godfather did it and I don't even see the point of certainly of trying so I decided that an artist when you have had the good fortune of coming on the scene very young it should do a sort of kind of kill yourself in a form and then come back and go back and be a student again and be reinvent yourself and work your way up again and see then what that new person so I just when I think I was 65 I used to I like being 50 very much I thought that was a wonderful age I called myself I'm I'm fifty fifteen now I'm fifty 27 but I'm always in my 50s so I decided I'm just going to be a student again and I'm not gonna and I went off to Romania with with my own money I didn't have a lot of it but I couldn't take the great photographer that I had always worked with and I couldn't you know one of the biggest costs of films is when you go to these places it's plane tickets and hotels and the family of the people you want to work with have to go and so I went alone I went with my little granddaughter just to visit him and made a film there just with the resources I had I met actors or wonderful actors in in Romania and Argentina has one of the greatest theatres the more theatre going on in Buenos Aires than anywhere I've ever seen so there's tremendous resources and I just found a young photographer who helped me shoot screen test soon and yes it was like being a student again I didn't have a look because the difference the student doesn't have a lot of money to work with and doesn't have all those fantastic cinematographers and colleagues and you're doing everything on a budget so I I decided to just try to make and of course what I really wanted to be and what I still want to be and is a writer I want to be able to write the stuff I make so I was doing that and trying to build myself up and it's very ironic because now I felt I had done that a few times whether miss under your films are you always think your films are misunderstood I mean even though people like them there's some people don't like them I'm reading I'm going to go to buy Reuter this year and see all these vogner thing so I'm reading his his book and he's just always complaining that they don't like his stuff and you know they like Mendelssohn better Wow Mendelssohn was great so it's so so funny to read the scenes where they're you know these great people are dealing with other great people that are all gods to us and they're all snipping at each other and whenever any rate I am you know you you're always insecure and that's just part of it it's it's ridiculous so I made the three films and then I thought well I'm I'm ready to do something ambitious so I decided what I wanted to do was kind of tell the story of television but to tell it in a very personal way like through my family and then of course just when I had something I could really do I said yeah but to do it alive because it's about I love I love work that is what it's about apocalypse was a little bit about that it was about madness and it was madness the way we did it you know what I mean about is what it's about if you can do that if it can both be about this thing and be this thing that's thrilling so I ended up now in this extremely difficult position of doing a thing that's really never quite been done before and and to try to do it and actually probably on my dream is in a few years to invite you to a theater like this on the first night eight o'clock and we'll be going three two one go and perform this first part of it which would be about an hour and a half for you live and then three months later do the second part and then three months later do the third part that's that's what I'm going to try to do yes hi there my name is Kim Blacklock and I wanted to ask you about how you got involved with Fred ruse he just gave of a 72 year old budding screenwriter his first movie he just produced the congressman and I was just interested in it here he is I don't know what AG is but baby new people you know early 80s I would be 81 maybe so when did you first hook up with Fred rusyn what was your relationship I made a film called the rain people back in whenever that was the 60s I guess and Fred saw it he was a sort of a talent manager and not an agent but a manager and he said well you know that I liked that film it was something I had written when my dream was to write my own stuff I didn't quite get to do it but I wrote many of them I wrote the conversation anyway Fred said well any time you want help with casting you know give me a call so then I was doing The Godfather and I contacted him and he helped me catch the Godfather that's how I met her but that's nothing I guess she's going to be mad at me through this my wife is here and my wife is that would you stand up so I can introduce you so they see huh stand up cut out my wife has just made her first feature film we all saw it last night it was quite beautiful and it was her first time this is not like a documentary this is a written she wrote it she directed it and made her first film at age 80 you know not yet it'll be 80 and faded in four weeks well that's that's a very happy note on which to unhappily end this session of thank you friends married 53 years I would I wish we could all ask you more questions but we will we'll be waiting for distant vision and thanks again thank you all

Channel: Tribeca

Views: 39,056

Rating: 4.9283156 out of 5

Keywords: tribeca, tribeca film fest, de niro, film, entertainment, new york city

Id: WdISYjTmqek

Length: 56min 50sec (3410 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 22 2016