The Impact of Francis Ford Coppola - A DGA 75th Anniversary Event | From the DGA Archive

it is my pleasure to welcome you to this edition of our year-long celebration of the dga's 75th anniversary these events embody our 75th anniversary theme of game changers honoring directors whose work forever changed the game in film and television and influenced generations of filmmakers around the world tonight is no exception francis ford coppola is one of the most influential and innovative filmmakers of our time [Applause] as a director writer producer and technological pioneer francis's body of work has helped shape contemporary cinema not just in america but around the world we'll hear tonight from three directors pt anderson catherine hardwick and david o russell as they illustrate francis's influence not only on them but of other generations other filmmakers of their generation moderating this discussion is michael laptop chairman of our 75th anniversary committee to celebrate the incomparable francis ford coppola thank you taylor i think it's fair to say that uh francis ford coppola has directed some of the celebrated films of all time godfather and godfather part two for which he won two dj awards the conversation apocalypse now and the godfather part three which he was nominated for three more dga awards francis was honored with the dga lifetime achievement award in 1998 and he's also collected a fistful of oscars but uh france's influence lies not just in the awards he's won all the films he's directed but also in the example he's set and the impact he's made on young directors even from an early point in his career francis worked to provide young independent filmmakers to gather them freedom from studio interference george lucas who we honored last month told a story here last month about a preview of his film american graffiti where the studio had thoroughly disliked the film and threatened not to release it francis got out his checkbook in the theater lobby and offered to buy it the studio had withdrew the threat released the film it was a huge hit and george's commercial career was launched so there's a bit of the godfather in france's so later on he became interested in advancing technology that would allow directors to more fully express their vision in modern filmmaking including innovations like pre-visualization electronic editing and experimentation with high definition so please welcome tonight's game changer francis ford coppola [Music] so while francis gets mike up let me introduce these three innovative directors who are going to discuss the films with francis david o russell's career was launched with spanking the monkey which he followed with flirting with disaster three kings i heart huckabee and earlier this year was nominated by the dga and the academy for his latest film the fighter catherine hardwick was a distinguished production designer with a string of credits including david's three kings before she moved effortlessly into directing her own tough depictions of life in 13 and lords of dog town she then directed the mega hit twilight and her latest film red riding hood opened in cinemas earlier this month catherine all came to prominence with film's heart 8 boogie nights magnolia and punch drunk love he was nominated for the dga in the academy award for his film there will be blood and he also has three academy writing nominations so each of these panelists spent some time choosing clips to illustrate the points they'd like to make about francis and his life and career as a director and we thank you for that my role here i'm just the old fart who keeps it moving so since the way they chose it happened to fall roughly in chronological order david will go first and uh since he chose one of france's early films as influential so he'll go first so david would you like to introduce your clips which we'll watch and then start our first discussion um are they going to play back to back yeah okay so um the first have creative control [Applause] i think the guild might have created so the first clip is from a picture called you're a big boy now which um i thought was your first picture but i understand that there's a uh an x-rated picture that may precede that no it's not true i was i had was working as a kind of editor on some what were known as nudie films in those days but but the real they were made out of different films and the director was in germany and stuff and i didn't honestly ever believe and i say this sincerely that i was ever going to see my name on the screen because it seemed so magical to see directed by someone so i just put directed by francis copeland i put music by carmine coppola because i wanted to see my father get accredited but no one was there to argue and but i've had to live that i've had to live that down ever since i was like the third editor what what was the name of that picture uh it was a german black and white picture called sins started with eve that someone bought and wanted to insert six minutes of nudie 3d nudie footage which was my job to do and the other one was a western uh nudie film called the wide open spaces and i i i had made a little uh a nudie short and and i was they bought it you know for six hundred dollars or whatever and they hired me to cut it into it and that became known as the billboard and the playgirls those that was my nudie experience so i wish we were showing that well the funny thing of it was i used to mix them at the ucla one room that ucla had to have a little mixing room and on the sunday that i was doing it very very uh you know i had the keys but uh the dean was showing some benefactors to donate money to ucla and the next day there was a big sign no unauthorized projects [Applause] so good uh so the first film you're a big boy now now i realize in retrospect actually shows some of the influence of these earlier works uh because and i think it was happening at the advent of the sexual revolution if i'm if i'm not mistaken what year was your big boy now um mid 60s it seems like yes yeah you're a big boy now yeah it was my thesis film for ucla i want to make a full-length film as a thesis and that was it well what really shocked me about it when i saw it about 10 or 11 years ago and discovered it for the first time was um to see you know knowing all of your other work i i was so surprised to see this film that was so different in so many ways and had almost it's just it felt like an independent film it felt there were parts of it that felt to me like like a spike jones film and it was filled with really cool experimental things and um so to me it was really inspiring because i just saw how many different directions you had gone and how many different plays you had in your book i kind of feel like we talked about your student film sort of i mean we can work our way backwards to it because i've been milling questions for you about that but i kind of want to start where we with the godfather pictures which they're just so i learned so much every time i watch them you know and it's such a wonderful thing it's like a singing a song that this is it's always there it's one of the best things that art can do for anybody you get into the matrix of that thing when you watch it and you feel that those feelings and the discipline and the preciseness of the work can organize your soul you know no matter where you are before you watch that once you watch that you're in the grid of that and it's a and it's a calming thing it's almost like taking a drug or something a good drug a drug that helps you or heals you a little bit that's how good art is that's what i feel about good art you know and bad art can have the opposite effect you know um so those two those two scenes are so amazing i mean they're both interestingly i think i don't even think i was conscious of picking this they're both about young men finding guns and in this first one it's michael who's the baby in the second one who finds a gun as his father did in the second one i'll just say a couple more things and i'll i want to hear everything you have to say i mean your choices are so confident and so precise as are those of the actors you know um it's just so inspiring to me for what comes to mind is the fact that we know it's like a ticking time bomb in each one and you know and you're just waiting there's almost no language and i love that you chose not to have subtitles in the first one until michael has to break that i love that family's at the core of it they're both on missions for their family because heart and soul to me is everything and family goes to right and heart and soul and every picture you've got to have heart and soul or i don't care as much i love the shot in the bathroom of michael over his back having that moment to himself before he goes it's over two doors of the stalls and you barely catch a piece of the back of his head that's just a such an inspired genius shot and so economical and you feel his entire emotion from seeing this much of the top of his head when he just puts his hands on the top of his head and in the second one you know just de niro moving across the roofs and in parallel to the other gentleman uh and and i just were you conscious of that this man was finding a gun as michael had found a gun in the first one or was that just kismet you know i i had always felt that the godfather was a one-off film i didn't i didn't think there should be a second film and and not a series but of course this is something that has happened to the film industry that they they want to own some kind of trademark and then see what they can get out of it so i was very reluctant to do a second film but i'd always thought of be interesting to do a story about a man and his son at the same age say 30 years old and how how a parallel story might work and so when they seem to be so serious about doing another godfather film i thought well let me take this as a subsidy and i'll do that idea and and uh so yes i i i was interested in in in their parallel uh lives and and you know like oddly enough that the father had vito had done that murder so his son would never have to and of course we know because it was the second film that the son had to and so then you ask us are these things that happen in families are they uh passed on i mean if your uncle had a feud with his brother does that mean you have to have a feud with your brother and that your kids have you know what's passed on aside from uh the various gifts and genetic gifts uh uh his sin passed on you know and and uh so i was aware and i you know i was very anxious that the audience know that the baby he was holding was michael but directors always writer directors film people always have the problems how do you get them to know and and inevitably often you have to say it and my friend bob town always told me that the the best line i ever wrote was michael your father loves you and i said well i don't get that that's not such a i was just doing it so they'd know the baby was michael but as i see it here maybe for the first time i understood what bob meant was that it was all done for his son and and there's something sad because we know that the son uh did get into the family business um uh but you know when you talk about the godfather you're talking about the unique uh situation where you have a legendary great photographer i mean not at the time we chose those people they weren't but when you think back we had this great photographer and this great production designer and these remarkable actors and and nino rota and in the case of the last scene that the funeral march that you heard that was all written by my father so going back to the nudie film when i put music but this was the thing so so i mean occasionally don't don't disregard the element of luck in movie making because to have that cast to have uh mario puzo who was the most wonderful helpful man uh who had written that book but even uh beyond in the collaboration and friendship he he was just just the greatest uh possible person to work with and then uh all of those talented um you know film is an ensemble you're not it's not like uh you're you're sort of the ringleader but you you all of this work is coming out of these people you work with and hopefully not only that you inspire but who inspire you to to keep looking for more so the godfather was certainly one of those happy accidents that it all kind of did fall together there were some interesting things in it in the first scene uh in the movie uh clemenza who um richard castellano who teaches him you know because he's just a well he was a marine of course but he he wasn't a gangster and he's taught a coach very carefully what to do and one of the things that he says is that when you come out of the bathroom don't fool around come out firing so i was of course interested in how can i make this suspenseful and first when he's reaching behind the bathroom and that one take there was no gun there i i did that to cow so he imagine you know you're going to do this and the other thing the other thing is he comes out he doesn't come out firing so i had hoped the audience was saying he's supposed to come out firing he's supposed to come out firing and instead he sits down and he's going to blow it with that shot where you see so much life going on and al and of course walt the merch who who was on on the on the sound part of the first godfather did the elevator train getting louder and louder and then finally he shoots them and then when he leaves he says get rid of the gun right away and he starts to walk out and he doesn't get rid of the gun in the last second he flips it so i was you know it's it's that thing of telling them what's going to happen and then playing with the fact that it doesn't happen in that uh in that in that part and that's of course missing in the scene but it was uh you know those when you give someone instructions then they don't follow it that makes everyone very very uh nervous of course the the other scene in the in the uh san gennaro festival i mean it's just as a kid i used to love those festas and my father would take us and the pageantry and of course that was in the period when when those they still have the festa but now they're selling teriyaki and uh you know corollas or whatever and and but in those days the festa was the big thing so it was a joy to be able to uh have the the ability the production the money to be able to take that street and and do that and and the extraordinary work of dean cavallaros and his team so to to to to portray that festa and the music was a big part of it interestingly about uh that first scene you know there's a lot of talk about oh the trouble on the godfather was true and we could talk about that that's an interesting subject to me uh uh what was true that you know the the idea of doing the god farther this way doing it period uh set in the 40s the first godfather that cast was the studio did not uh did not embrace that in fact the then head of uh paramount uh the company that owned it was uh gulf and weston and it was a remarkable guy named charlie have you heard of charlie blue horn i do a good imitation of charlie he was from vienna but he had this uh accent then you know they they were getting very scared about the choice that they had made i was young and they hired me for two reasons number one there weren't a lot of young directors around there was this idea that young directors you know would use new light handheld cameras and make films cheap and and and also i had started working as a screenwriter and i had some success as you know is my twenties and then also um i was italian-american so they figured you know the godfather the case there's any flack for this at least we have a italian we could say oh he's italian you know so that's how i got the job and and the fact that everyone had turned it down i mean wonderful directors turned it down i think costa cabras turned it down kazan turned it down i think um i think what's his name turned it down uh it'll come to me but so it was only after that the book continued to be a big bestseller and the project began to be more important but their idea was to do it cheap with this young director who could like script was sort of in trouble when i came on because it had been written to be a contemporary story so it had hippies in it was in set in the 70s and that was all just economics of course then they were going to shoot it in kansas city because new york was considered very you know uh they wanted to shoot it in kansas city so i became unpopular right on because i want to make it period and i want to shoot it in new york and the budget was 200 two and a half million dollars for the golf the first like the first budget and and uh so so needless to say i was in big trouble every week and i was going to get fire and it's true but what's not true is that then i'm told by people that into the picture later on they saw this scene the one with michael and they were very unsure of al they had seen him finally what finally pushed them into because he they had said no no no no no no no and we shot screen tests absolutely everybody and they said no no no and finally uh bob evans uh saw panic needle park or a rough cut of it and he saw something of al in that that finally made him relinquish but they were very very not happy with the cast in fact i did all these screen tests and charlie blue horn who was very active saw them all and he said these actors they're all terrible every act i've seen is terrible how is it possible that every actor in hollywood is terrible no they're not terrible it's the director that's terrible you know and that was sort of the mood of it and and then finally this scene was what would prevented me from getting fired but what the truth is is this scene was the third day of the shoot in other words the very first day day one of the first week was uh al and dan keaton buying presents and then the second day was uh uh uh uh bobby duvall getting toys and a sled and some stuff but that week the wednesday and thursday was the scene it was two days so this idea that that was you know uh that this scene that has solidified my employment happened later and they were it's not true it was the first week they didn't they you know it wasn't it didn't save me they were still firing me the third weekend and this scene had already existed and then the friday was the scene where we were at the hospital when sterling hayden punches him and al slipped on the running board and they twisted his ankle so we couldn't shoot anymore they took him away and so i had lost the day and i was in big trouble for having lost half a day so that was the first week of the but this scene was already done i've thought a lot about this subject of uh you know a lot of my films uh most of my films and the successful they weren't like such big hits in their time they were very controversial not so much the godfather because the godfather really had this wonderful cast and and it was a big success it was the only success like that i can remember the rest were very shifty and shaky and apocalypse [Laughter] i read recently that this writer named frank rich left the new york times and everyone was saying oh he's such a wonderful yeah frank rich i said he's the one who said that apocalypse now was the major disaster in 50 years of hollywood history on uh when the film came out that was his his review and i kept saying gee you know wasn't there something else that was bad too was apocalypse really the worst film could it be just one of the low 10. so so so a lot of these movies that later on gain respect uh or or don't get it at first and and i was thinking about this recently i recently saw a picture called snake pit with olivia de havilland was about a i think was a big success in its day i remember her her performance i always loved olivia de havilland but uh and so i i wanted to see it for for various reasons and i watched it you know it was uh you know how when you see a movie that was thought of very well in his time but when you there are many that don't feel this way but that one just felt very old-fashioned and dated and the kind of acting and the thing and then you wonder um gee if some of those movies in those days that were lauded and considered wonderful films now we view as sort of dated and and old-fashioned that's that's because there are these other movies that come along that everyone reacts to negatively but slowly over time they embrace them and it sort of takes the audience step by step to a point where then when they go if you go back and you look at some of you know classic war films or not the great ones because the great ones are immune from being old-fashioned you know but there is a process i think that happens where the new work the the the work that isn't embraced right away that no one likes i read recently um that uh what was it what was the lawton film the great what in film uh knight of the hunter that was terribly that no one liked it and it barely got released and everything and yet we look at it and see it today and we're really impressed with it you know so there is this journey that happens with art that uh that these chances you take and maybe sometimes unpopular sometimes you fail or and later on they look at it as lawton didn't even know how much his film he didn't he never got to direct another film that because of that and we look at it now and think how beautifully he made it so so that if you're going to be out there on the edge of things you got to be prepared that you're not going to have the the success in your time or if you're lucky 15 years later they look at it and and speak well of it but but there is definitely this process and and those films that go against the norm or try to fight for something even without the filmmaker necessarily knowing what what they're doing did you know what you were doing when you made punch drunk glove [Laughter] no i was just trying to get through every day and it started to feel it's horri was horrible for the first three weeks just felt terrible like i didn't know none of it looked good none of it looked right and stopped and started again and and then um somewhere along the way everything started to feel better and it felt better and then and do you notice as years go by people say oh i love that that was so beautiful and that was so unique yeah no and i thought i thought and then it turned out that everything i thought was terrible was was really good well just with some distance it felt good and then i edited together and i thought i think i made a film that every single person is going to see and is going to make like 500 billion dollars you know i finally did it and and no one saw it and people really like it but i mentioned it because each of these uh wonderful directors each has made a film if not more than one that's one of my favorites and punch punch drunk glove not to mention the others and certainly boogie nights but punch i always loved because i when i go to the movies i had to go outside i never saw anything like that that's my favorite thing to say you know and that leaves you that filmmaker in a tough spot for a while you know unless then finally it tends to come around though eventually and these these uh these movies that are are so tough uh over time and then the other films seem old-fashioned because you know we always talk about art in general i mean you know the the avant-garde art of today becomes the the chair upholstery and wallpaper of tomorrow because it changes the way people look at things and it happens so much with films is that what you felt when you saw you're a big boy now that this was something that no you're a big boy now i was in love as we all were with richard lester we loved richard lester we just thought he was so neat and and not just the beatles film which were pretty terrific but the knack and and and just richard lester and he by the way he is a he's alive he's a wonderful man and and if you go to england you can go to twickenham studio and the odds are he'll he'll chat with you if you if you uh he's a very very nice man but at any rate he was the uh i was so impressed with some of those british films although he's an american as you probably know and um uh and even films like morgan or uh there were other lowliness of the long distance runner so that was uh me as a i was a ucla student when pretty much i made that film you're a big boy now and i just want to make a richard lester film and i wanted to uh it had one of the early rock and roll scores they'd had uh love and spoonful we just talked about your dad really quickly because it was on the godfather and you mentioned him how that collaboration might work or uh my dad was a um very of course anyone who's lived in the household with a a man who is frustrated in his work and feels that he's not being able to have the opportunities or or and my father i felt was you know such an a a talented man but he was a great uh flutist and so he was a classical flutist i say flutist because that's what he did there is flautist i asked him once of course what's the difference between a flutist and a flautist he said fifty dollars a week but he uh he was a very important figure in our our lives and his career uh he was the solo flute for the nbc symphony with arturo toscanini and when he left that his curve just went slowly down all through all of the kids my sister's here tally and she probably got the worst of it because he really got depressed and when i was gonna do the godfather he hatched this idea with my mother that he would go along and they paid their own way and they just showed up and he he said listen i can write you know when there's the wedding and you need a little six piece combo i'll write all that stuff and uh he knew about publishing [Laughter] because my mother's uh my mother's father was a publisher and a musician so he just they were like this funny couple uh there paying their own way they were not officially but when we did the wedding he organized and wrote all that music all that and all the tarantellas and things and um just sort of snuck it in and when the film turned out to all come together and be successful uh he had all that music in and that sort of helped start him and then on the second one nino rota who was this wonderful italian composer who we all know from the um the fellini pictures but he also did a lot of the visconti picture and the picture that that he did that made that i loved and made me think he would be right for the godfather was rocco and his brothers but that was what i wanted for the golfer although again when we went and recorded that uh because the studio had other ideas who should write the music they hated the music they wanted it out they wanted to have a new score and i said well i don't know why i said this because i don't think it has any legal basis at all but i said it i said well if you want to have it out i won't take it out so you have to fire me and hire a director who'll take it out i just said that very easily so for a week for a week we had a stalemate we would go up to the house of the you know the uh the head guy and um and uh walter merch and i would go and sit and wait waiting for a breakthrough the funny thing with the godfather is that had never really been seen uh bob evans you know i felt he had a lot at stake with it it was very you know we think of the studios as being so powerful and rich and stuff but there was some shaky days in the early period of paramount they really it was very important picture to them as because the book had become so big but it had never been seen and we were all very nervous about it i remember one night in the editing room the french connection came out and it was it was everyone was talking about it it was you know exciting and riveting and and just everyone is talking about you know there's a kind of code of honor and editing rooms the assistant editor stuff don't ever venture a comment about your picture i guess they say don't ever you know so i remember with one of the assistant editors young guy apprentice he he rode a bike he was a nice young man and and he was walking with me in beverly hills i was sleeping in jimmy khan's maids room because i had no money at three kids and i was using the per diem to send it home to be the money and uh and living in this little room in the the maids room so he walked me home and as we were walking i said to myself wow the french camera is really great and he says yeah it's fantastic it's just so exciting i said well i guess compared to that godfather is just going to be a dark slow boring movie and he said yeah i guess so [Laughter] so typical yeah and you know i went into the little maids room it was excising and you know i really really thought it was curtains yeah right it's horrible i i like to joke that mephistopheles came out how would you like it to be this very successful biggest movie and then some transaction was made so why don't we move on i want to say one thing about you're a big boy now is that actress elizabeth hartman i don't know if you remember her from hatchet blue patch of blue nominated for an act she was the most wonderful young actress and uh a lovely lovely person i'll never forget her and you know she never she thought she was homely so when i i have this weird thing of sometimes i cast them parts wrong deliberately and i had karen black who was just you know very pretty sexy girl and this and and elizabeth hartman who was just painfully shy and uh of course i i cast the sexy one as elizabeth hartman and the painfully shy one as karen black and i remember when i called up to to the first phone call to uh she had accepted to do it and she said but have you seen me because but she was she was beautiful more than beautiful in a way we've lost we lost uh that cast except uh peter castner is gone and and this remarkable elizabeth hartman did you know of her from before no yeah she was really a wonderful actress i think and she died young unfortunately i just want to mention her to everybody i want to ask about walter merch because it's so fascinating can you just talk about that relationship sounds so important and well walter is you know films real intellectual you know he's just an amazing person with a fantastic mind interested in all kinds of things other than filmmaking the alignment of theories of planetary alignment and all kinds of totally interesting stuff he's a brilliant person and he was one of the group from usc uh who are friends of george lucas we you know there was ucla and usc two film schools here in california i was from ucla and i was about three years older than everyone so when i made you're a big boy now that was big news because no student had ever made a full-length film as a thesis or even a full-length film when i say you know i put my name on the nudie films it was you didn't feel possible that you were really going to be able to have a career a lot of film students went and made usia films for the for the government or documentary uh film at that level and uh it didn't seem possible to be um but this group of young guys from uc usc we all went george had come from modesto and i thought it would be appealing to be you know i've always wanted to be an artist but a bohemian artist you know and sit in cafes and that type of life as i imagined it to be and so we all moved to san francisco and uh they walter drove the truck with the equipment that we had and and we we sort of moved on moss as maybe seven eight guys it was all guys in those days in fact in the ucla film school there was only one girl in the whole in the whole student body very nice girl melanie finkel finkelstein extremely nice but she was the only girl registered in in the in the school at any rate uh walter was a kind of general mcboinboing he was the one of the group that was known for his imaginative use of sound and he was like that he he spoke almost like in sound and everything and so uh he was involved on the early films the rain people george's uh thx 38 which had a very complex sound job but i had this idea when i did the conversation because it was also about sound and i wanted walter do but i said walter why don't you be the editor too he said well i've never i've never edited picture i said well you could probably do it and so so walter was along with a fellow named richard chu who was also a picture edited walter edited the the film the picture ended the sound and then was involved in all of these films um the godfather films mainly on sound on the first one and then on the second one he was actually a picture editor too you know as a filmmaker and his own right made a made a film called return to oz that was extremely unusual maybe too unusual for what they had wanted so he he had a tough time on that and and uh you know him now as the master editor but he's a fantastic theorist he's written several books and he's just an extraordinary person again it's that thing like with the godfather as the director works with the team and and of course you have to have some ability to pick the right people uh but i've been blessed uh throughout my career with some really wonderful people in all those areas and walter is certainly my one of my long stories can we have a look at some more film absolutely let's look at apocalypse then you can whatever you want okay thank you let's run some bits of apocalypse did walter cut that uh apocalypse was uh it's a long story but apocalypse there were three editors there was uh walter ritchie marks and uh uh gerald greenberg and uh and lisa there was a team it was a that was a tough goal for me you know that daunting task to pick a few clips from apocalypse now my first um cut down version was like two hours and 10 minutes i see why it was such a difficult task to edit this and i just went all the dazzling beautiful scenes that we love so much and then i just went i was struck so much and i picked these for character just for that deep laser exploration of character and you know that's um amazing you know what interesting about the talking about walter merch because walter merch really edited that first scene with his own style with the helicopter and the scene where he punches the mirror but also it was walter's idea that we add to the script it wasn't in it a kind of miley massacre and i thought about it i'm going back here he was not there he was in california and we had come back and he told me you know what what you need is a massacre scene and so i cooked up the uh the puppy sandpan as it became known that was so of those two things they're very much related to walter well i was um you know we you talked earlier about rehearsal and of course on the beautiful documentary how how was it to get martin sheen to feel comfortable to do that scene or well you know it's an interesting point because in the in the script apocalypse was written by john melius and much of what the character had to do was look at weird things i mean it was there's always a shot of a face and he's looking at whatever it may be but it was it was a very passive kind of a role and i i really worried about that it's one of the reasons why i wanted i'm already sheen to it because he has such a beautiful face i think well if you're going to look at this this fellow you know he bought it look nice but i thought i wish there was one scene at the beginning that established that he was a complex deep guy so the audience and audiences will do this will would read into if he's looking at something interesting that they would read emotion or thoughts in the character that's really he's just looking is very passive so i thought um if i could do something at the beginning that set that up and i had a dream sometimes dreams give you good solutions because because i think when you're worrying about something or you can't arrive at it you kind of let your subconscious work on it it works even when you think you're not working and in the dream it came to me that marty was vain not that he is but that if i could taunt him on the fact that he was vain so in that scene i told him to go to the mirror and he went to the mirror and i was talking the whole time and i was saying look how beautiful your face is look at your mouth look you really and and i kind of goaded him on his on a vanity that that i just assumed was there i i because he's the sweetest person on earth he's such a gentleman he's such a good person good father good husband but i just thought maybe there was some little flaw in them you know that was that so i goaded him on and finally he just lashed out and punched his face and that was what made the hand bleed that wasn't intended to be i mean that's real that's his blood that he wipes and i'm sitting i was sitting on a dresser up high and thinking my god what if i say cut because he's bleeding he could hate me because he's gone through all this to get this thing so i didn't say cut and so everybody else was mad how could you just let him you know bleed on the set but but that was the purpose was to try to get something memorable that then would um would make make the be in the audience's mind oh he's a complicated guy you know from that opening sequence that you chose that was the reason why i did it because there isn't a kind of personal scene anywhere else in the film to get at what he feels like or what his feelings are can you talk about the narration that's michael hare a wonderful writer was uh he wrote dispatches and that's all his again it's these other people you work with that you get lucky with but you read the book and you read his articles and brought him into it i i chose him yes i can i can click claim to that but he wrote it but um i wonder you know did you alter the picture as the dial as his narration formed or no he wrote it to the cut later on when we we were we had a narration and but none of us had really been to vietnam really you know so so he had been there so later we had the idea to choose him to to write it but the film was already cut so you went into it not knowing that you would have a voiceover or you there was a voiceover in the original emilia script but it wasn't that voice over it was uh it was less that that michael here actually having written dispatches which is that you know and he was there for so many uh he was there a long time so he really had it down and he did a beautiful job so you knew it wasn't feeling right what millionaires had read and decided to find we decided to get a a a voice over that would would nail it you know that's one of the great luxuries of filmmaking in the post-production thing especially with sound and adr and voice over you can you can try things you know it's not it's not so dire to do a narration and record it and then throw it out often in narrations or things you might do it five six times and the actor will come up and give you another version the interesting thing about the story of the uh the the polio arms is that was spread out over a longer uh the way i worked with brando was sort of it was funny because we only had three weeks with him and the first week he shows up and of course he's really big and the you run into the problem right away i said what kind of costume am i going to get for him i mean i can't get a super 4x green beret combat you know they don't make that how should i how should i do it so when i said to him well what if like you kind of he's gone because he's up there operating in the hinterlands what if he's like gone into just he's got a mango in his hand and a cute mountain yard girl and he's just this enormous fat guy and fat people uh i can tell you are are are uh don't want to be fat you know they hate it and he hated it anyone really struggles with that so he's no no no i can't i can't do that so i said well i can't put him in a green beret you know for him and he doesn't want to be shown as though he's gone to seed or he's gotten big so um what can i do and and then i said what about if we shave off your head you'd be like the kurtz in in um in the conrad uh book and he's no no that won't work so i said okay so i can't get a uniform i can't so i thought what i could do maybe is like dress them in like black pajamas and you know when you photograph someone if they're big if they have broad you know because they're brought shoulder or or even if they're fat that dimension if you then get a double who's like six foot five then it would maybe portray him as a giant so i decided to go that way so he arrived and he in the in apocalypse we didn't have trailers there were like a houseboat he had and we'd go in the houseboat and start talking and i just uh he's a very brando was like a very brilliant guy he could talk about termites for seven hours and it would be really interesting so that's the first day that's what he did he talked about termites and there'd be a knocker knock on the door say okay what should we do should we let the crew break for lunch i said yeah and then we'd talk more and more and more more and then the knock on the door is oh what should we do maybe we just go home i said yeah and so for four days that's and i only had three weeks so for four days that he just just was talking about stuff and everything and i would try to get things in and i but i was recording what he was saying and he would go on these incredible rifts and finally on the fifth day or whatever it was he shows up and he's bald and i looked and i was startled because that's the kurt's look from the heart from the heart of darkness and i said but you you said it wouldn't work you said you read heart of darkness and it would work he says i lied i never read it i read it last night so he did it but that so that scene was derived at what we would do is we would do these kind of improvisations and i would take it home and try to write something and and then he would even um uh then read he didn't like to memorize lines so he'd read it and he had a little thing in his ear with a tape recorder so he could trigger what he had said before and get the lines that way you know so but that scene was very long but fortunately vittorio had this this shadow going back and forth and it was the first scene i really cut electronically going back to when that was and what i did is i sort of cobbled that whole thing that he said but it was made out of lots of pieces and then whenever there was the cut the shadow went and hid it so it was made out of a much longer thing those are some little stories i can tell you but you know the word genius is tossed around you know i think in my life and i met some great people but i don't know that i've met five jinya or whatever you call them but orson welles was i mean uh arson wells also who but marlon brando was one and not just as an actor just as a mind the way he saw things and the way he talked i really think he was a unique uniquely brilliant man i mean did you rehearse him and stuff like that or did you just let him run well we didn't know what to do because we had only like two to a couple of weeks left with him and i knew he was gonna it was three million dollars for three weeks and i knew what he was doing is he was going to get to the end of third week and go unless i gave him another three million dollars so at one point victorio storaro said you know let's once he cut his hair off then i had something like i knew what he would look like and we thought he said francis don't worry we go step by step and we took him up in the thing and marlin was always interesting he always wanted to know you know like what the shot was he'd always go like this he'd see you and he'd go and then he proceeded to act with the part that was going to be in the picture and so when he saw that we just had the shadow he decided that you know that that character had to be dished out in razor slices so he just kind of was in the dark and he like poked his bald head and poked a little bit of his nose and he and and brando did that out of just the light and dark and we just sort of started uh just to start you know because it had been four days in the boat doing nothing and whether some studio people back in hollywood looking at this stuff having a fit well i was i was on the hook i financed it oh my god i finally i put everything up so there was no there were no studio people um just yeah eleanor what did it feel like to know that it could she was very brave but we talk about the presentation of that movie because i remember being a kid and seeing an ad in the l.a times that you must have taken out to see the film before it came out in westwood oh well it was sort of a preview it was like we were hoping to to um uh you know to survive you know it was very generate interest or to get ideas i i was in it was in the village theater i think one of those nice theaters i i don't remember exactly why we did the preview but it was like a preview i think we were showing it to some important people and the the screening i remember of apocalypse apocalypse originally was like what they called apocalypse redux it was that the apocalypse the redux version is just the original version and we showed it to some japanese distributors i was on the hook for it but i had international like i had sold it to japan i had sold it to france so he showed it to the japanese distributors and we had sold it as though firstly it was going to have steve mcqueen and be like a bridge too far and and mcqueen unfortunately was very ill and so ultimately he had to drop out because it was an arduous trip to go there but he was very into it but queen i remember so so we then got these distributors to give us the money and the japanese distributors came to see the version in the northpointe theater in san francisco and it was longer i mean apocalypse the redux is like a half an hour longer so it was a half an hour longer than what it was and it was a disastrous screening it was one of one of one of the most disastrous but i've had a lot of disasters so i mean i had all these nice crew people all these editors and they were all so i remember very vividly what i did i don't know why i did it but i looked at him and i said a good movie we haven't got a good screenplay we haven't got a good director we haven't got what do we got bum bum we've got hard miles and miles away and the whole editing room is singing this heart song and then we went in there and we cut a half an hour out and you know we had some other very funny disastrous stories which i would be happy to share with you but i don't want to overstay the schedule yes i wanted to say dustin hoffman told me that he was at that westwood screening and he remembers talking to you um do you remember talking to him i i don't remember that i was petrified i mean it was not only an immense artistic failure looming but it was an even bigger financial disaster he says what he remembers is that he said to you that um he said he didn't know that people would get the picture you know by seeing it one time and he recalls that you said well then you know why shouldn't people have to go see the picture twice to uh to get it that's what he remembers is that what i said that's what he says it was pretty dismal i mean the apocalypse really was but you got out of it didn't you get your money out of it well that's a joke because uh yes um apocalypse was a movie that didn't go away it wasn't received well and i mean it got some nominations and and what have you but um people just kept going back to the pacific dome theater just to see it with that great soundtrack that it had and and it just it just didn't go away so little by little it uh it survived and but what had happened is i was sure that i was going to be just totally eaten up by it because it was everything we had on the line so i said well i know what i'll do before we lose all that money i'll make another movie that will make a lot of money it'll be a happy musical so i made one from the heart but what happened was the apocalypse now didn't sink the ship it went on and got better and better but one from the heart did see so very often the thing that you do as the remedy is worse than the poisonous strength now now francis you won an oscar for writing patton didn't you yes yes and then and and then how would you compare that to the writing experience of apocalypse now i mean i don't know maybe there isn't a comparison well well well john melius wrote apocalypse now i mean all the good stuff in it all the lines that you all quote and the helicopter battle playing vlog that's all john milius what i did is i put this strange beginning on and i really went on the set i didn't have a script i had a little notated joseph conrad with my pocket and so i sort of took john's script and kept mating it with conrad and inventing the character that dennis hopper played wasn't even in the script i just made it up out of when i saw him how wacky it was i said you know i made it out of the character that's in the conrad so so the the patton uh job which was really a long time ago i was a kid i was you know 25 or something when i did patent and that was i was there at fox for you know whenever four or five months and really had a job and i wrote the script so it was a real script the the apocalypse my problem with apocalypse is i realized that i had started to go on a route of making the movie more surreal and i had no ending because the ending was very typical you know the the bridge you know a war movie ending big battle and what have you and i had no ending and i was very terrified about my situation so let's look at some more film paul's choices could you introduce that the conversation um i think the clip speaks for itself um i mean i remember seeing it in a high school film class was the first time that i saw the great great teacher who introduced us to it where was that uh in the valley at a school called campbell hall yeah and um the next the second clip is from youth without youth which is your second to last movie most recent movie with tim roth speaking to himself um which you do a lot through the movie which kind of reminds me there's a sort of echoes of the scene with martin sheen and the narration in apocalypse now but um i guess the questions that i have about it and maybe you can talk about later is is is the writing because youth without youth is based on a book so that you sort of see this conversation this dialogue happening i wonder what it is in the book is it internal narration in the book or how did you kind of come up with the picture well youth without youth is the work of a a man named mercier eliade and he primarily was really the founder of the field of comparative religion he was uh written many uh works on on religion and and comparative comparing but he sort of had this other hobby of writing these kind of little borgesse type stories you know these little enigmatic stories and youth that youth was one of them and i i was stumped on a project called megalopolis i decided that i wasn't going to be a working director anymore uh and that i would rather really have a period of my life where i could make personal films but megalopolis was a big personal film and and i had no idea where i'd ever get the money for it and i had never licked the script properly and it sort of dealt with the theme of utopia and was set in new york and right while we were shooting some second unit for it is when the 911 attack happened in fact we have a footage we we shot three days after the attack because it was so extraordinary and we were able so early that we were able to get permission to go up in the air and shoot the the towers still coming down and smoldering i have that footage but then i realized that i was never gonna maybe especially with my story about utopia the world was changing very rapidly and i didn't know how to get i tried to write my way out of it but i never could and i had a moment of uh you know why don't why don't i just make personal films let them be modest budgets inexpensive budgets and and learn from my daughter sophia who had learned in a sense from me in my early wonderful training with roger corman and how to make films cheap and sophia was making films you know of modest budgets and i said i could just do that and make films that i would finance myself and i i came upon the story of merce eliade and i just loved this story i just thought it was so interesting and this scene was by the way a scene that i was under a lot of pressure from many of my own team to cut out because it was you know like philosophy but i found it fascinating this idea of the the duality of you know like it's very indian philosophy of the unity of opposites that really in a way all opposites go away depending on the vantage point you look at and i thought this scene in the book was fascinating but it wasn't it was it was his internal uh he was thinking these things about the uh the the unity of light and dark of good and evil the sameness of those things and so i um uh yeah i when i wrote the script i had imagined the idea of the double appearing and using the the mirror reflection talking to him and then photographing him one aspect of his personality looking down in the other aspect looking up but i love that moment wood i really like this scene and and the fact that he he says well you know empirical proofs in metaphysical discussions are really irrelevant but anyway he said well how do i know i'm that i'm really talking to someone who is objective and and and the guy and the other the double says well you know these proofs are irrelevant how would you like a flower put in your hand you know and he's so sure and so i i i find this uh fascinating this is mercia eliade's work and uh and i i learned so much just sort of tagging along with the author who's of course passed away but learning from him and of course the film was just didn't you know it's starting to happen now every once in a while people say oh i saw youth without you that was very interesting and i i wonder you know i'm a guy we it happens to all of us i suppose are many who as they get older especially if they're associated with some really big successes when they're young they never can live they can never you know you can never do it again really at that level and um so that there is it's easy to get bitter when you're older and say you know you know as many of the greats did tennessee williams fellini there's a whole norman mailer there's always that great hit when you're young or a period when you're young that you you you feel you can't ever live up to i tried another tackle i just said well i'll just re reinvent myself i'll be a student filmmaker and i'll just make very very inexpensive films and and by doing that everything will be different especially if you're used to doing a production like godfather 2 where you have so much ability through your budget to have the best of everything so so i thought well you know i'm i think i was 68 or something and i've always felt that a man's greatest life is his 50s i unfortunately spent from 40 to 50 paying off one from the heart so i don't remember i don't remember from 40 to 50 too well except i had to have a job every year but my being 50 was wonderful so i decided i was always going to be 50 so i was i was 50 17 when i did that now now i'm now i'm 50 22. and then you just drop off like uh european currencies when it gets too big you just drop off too so i'm 22 as far as i'm concerned and uh and you know i i have to say at this age and i'm sure all of you have have made such beautiful each one of you asked me one of my favorite films which is why i wanted and as i said before more than one but no matter how old you get the cinema is just so totally magical you're just constantly scratching your head and look look how it behaves you know i take this piece from here and i put it over there and it changes absolutely everything and then like it's made of organic material because it sort of just grows together it and it becomes the new place becomes now really part of it you know like it was meant to be and then if you break it again and put it somewhere else it grow so i i um i am just continually amazed and fascinated and many of my my con my contemporaries feel the same way it's just just a magical work and and and that's the pity of in the present situation of when any kind of experimentation is so frowned upon because it is the experimentation that created the the cinema in the 20s there's a there's a wonderful quote of mar now that i love you know you know marna was really very respected as it was brought to hollywood and he made some gorgeous movies and when asked about sound he said well he said sound was inevitable he says but it came too soon because it was such a flowering of of of of what was being learned about what movies could be and how they'd behave and what the language is and it's so young that you know of course that's going to go on for hundreds of years if just we can gain the ability to um to to to not you know have to do what exactly uh makes the money right away the first year you know but uh i'm it's what i was saying about people my age you know you kind of can't live down some of the successes you had with young but i always remind people i said they weren't successes they got slowly people started to like them better so maybe some of the ones i'm doing now that are certainly not successes maybe slowly you know i won't see it exactly at all but maybe in 15 years they'll say yeah that was interesting what you were trying to do and so you always hope that that's going to be the but none of you made films that were tame or or or according to the mold so you should all be also all be proud and then do that throughout your whole careers i hope [Applause] we could talk about the conversation or we could talk about one from the heart which would you rather do anything okay um because i you i remember you you're talking about all these fantastic collaborations that you've had given so much credit to gordon willis and the authors of these books and all these sorts of things but i remember reading something that you said about one from the heart where your original intention was to make more of a live television show but that in collaboration with the people that you were collaborating with that had that you had been collaborating with that something something had changed that you started listening to them maybe too much and that they were drifting it away from your original intention talk about that slow sort of well well i have to say that many people have asked me you know what do you regret anything and i really don't uh i i don't regret well i i pretty much did everything i wanted to do i mean i've been doing it i i never but i have two regrets uh one regret is one from the heart was planned and built the sets were built uniquely in in such a way everything was on why would you build half of las vegas in a sound stage for any other reason than the fact that it was planned to be live television the concept was to have you know eight cameras and the silverfish was nothing more the famous silverfish was nothing more than the control booth and the sound uh the sound the mixer and an artist was was set up right there to do the sound effects live and i said if john if john frankenheimer can make a masterpiece like the comedian with mickey rooney and torme have you ever ever saw the comedian which is live television at the most extraordinary or do these big productions like farewell to arms live i mean to do a whatever that was an hour and a half but it wasn't just like sort of you know little room like marty and you know which was also very beautiful these frankenheimer movies were cinematic but they were live they were they were shot live and i said i want to do that i want to sit and say camera six camera four you know and do that so we i i bought that studio and i built the silverfish which was nothing more than a electronic uh control room like for a saturday night live really and uh the idea was of course the film was still 10 minutes because it was still film but the cameras all had monitor cameras on them which was really beginning kicked off the video assist uh thing which is now part of every every film although it was invented truly by jerry lewis i have stories about that too someday and um and make it as live tv and the sets were all built so the continuity of the the reason why there was half of las vegas and all the things that were so absurd to do if it was just going to be a movie shot and we could shoot in las vegas you know but as we got close about three weeks to d-day and it was scary you know to do this but it cost a lot of money to prepare it to be able to be shot live uh all of the things i was talking about the fact that every inch of it was built on a stage and that it had all this multiple cameras and all that was sort of new new kind of thinking in those days about three weeks before i started hearing from victoria francis francis you know i could do some more beautiful lighting if i could just shoot one camera at a time and i could do it very fast you know and i said but that the the whole idea of it was to try to do live live cinema which i still think will happen someone will do it and i want to see it and uh how would that work how would it work yeah like where do you see it live on tv or anything oh no you make it live in other words you don't edit it you you you say okay go here we go and we do a performance up and running right through the whole movie we could we really could only do 10 minutes at a time because there was not what there is today but the idea was to do 10 and one or two wheels and one from the heart of like that like the second reel when uh i know there's some scenes and then you have the two characters in one scene and then the scrim gives away and there's two other characters and it's like a whole 10-minute scene with one shot my idea was the whole movie was going to be made with live performances and uh live television techniques and and and not edited when it was done it would be sort of dusted off and that would be it what so so victorio basically had never done that and and it's like kind of what what you said was the people that you love and love to work with uh you know i i would have had to have the courage and then dean came to me and said oh franz we could do this we could do that why are we doing it live so i i ultimately caved in and we shot it pretty much and we had some of the the original intention but we shot it and then we so all the money i had spent to be able to do it live then i had to add to that all the money to do a regular post-production to cut it all together and ended up costing much more and and the reason i is the one thing i regret is because it was an experiment that i had everything ready for maybe i'd never be possible for me again and i didn't push the button and do it i would have had to fire victorio and and hire the guy who does saturday night live or you know be someone who knew how to do it what's the other one the other regret is not something totally my fault but it's a regret of my life is that you you the young people who we are so i mean united states not to mention the world have such a crop of talent who are there you and even coming up on your short trails of whom you mean so much to them and my only regret is that we were so s passionate and serious about it there in the 70s in san francisco and stuff and i would have wanted to leave to the next generation of film business that more embrace them and encourage them than better than what we had and what we had wasn't good but it was better than what we're leaving and that's a regret [Applause] was it an inevitable process or do you think something could have been done we became rich and famous and powerful why didn't we what was it how did it slip away that you know that opportunity to to you know it's not that i think that all films have to be experimental or off it just seems to me that there's cinema is big enough that it can have entertainment and wonderful films that people enjoy that they don't have to figure out what tim roth was talking about and you know i mean there's enough there's enough it's big enough that it can do that and entertain and be thrilling and fun and and give film for this but it also part of it has to be dedicated to personal work and somewhat experimental work or it won't grow it won't it won't change you know and it does because the young generations they just make it happen i don't know they use their uncle's credit cards or whatever they do but i would have if if i could have if i could have had more to say about what it would be like there would still be something it would be united artists would not be destroyed as it was destroyed and united artist was really when you think about it it was a wonderful institution made so many beautiful films and that you know that library is still dazzling the the that happened under arthur crim uh and his team there's there's no united artists anymore it should just one there can be seven eight companies but one should be like united artists i just that's my regret you've also given us sophia coppola and roman coppola well who knows maybe they will join together they they certainly were raised in a great tradition they just they didn't only have me around but you think of all of their who they think are their uncles and aunts was a wonderful tradition of filmmakers and and you know you know maybe it doesn't maybe you don't ever really just give it to the next generation the next generation has to seize it for themselves which i think they're doing we have we have you know i can name talented directors i would have need the ten sets of hands to name them all on it it's almost like that period in italy where there were so many great directors that you maybe there were 40 in that one period there from after the war into the you know so i i think that we have it here it's just that we don't have any you know in the studios i had the pleasure to work for people like jack warner and i mean they were characters but they were really showman and they loved movies sort of like harvey harvey harvey is a guy i mean he he's a character like they were and tough and god knows what but he really loves movies i think and they were all like that so that now that the studios are really owned by uh peop telecom companies and bigger bigger bigger deal bigger media plays as they were but in though in in even in my era they were they were they were show men they were showmen and we don't have that tradition quite now in the ownership of the studios and that was a good tradition i remember sam goldwyn sam golu was really funny i won the goldwinner prize when i was a kid and i got it and and so every year mr goldwyn would want me to come and visit him so i'd go back there in his studio on formosa and he was a little guy and he talked like i'm gonna talk i'm not making fun of him he'd really talk like that so i missed a couple of yard goldwyn scholar i really admire you i admire your talent what are you doing i said well i'm i'm now gonna i'm gonna direct direct what do you want to direct for you're either right it's hard you'll be right right right so thank you mr goldberg and i went and made you're a big boy now and i got a call mr gold would like to see you it was really sweet man and i went there went up there ah mr koppel you're a doldon scholar i'm so proud of you made this movie i saw your movie you're a big boy i liked it i liked it for its uh spontaneity he said i thought i had a lot of spontaneity thank you so what are you doing now i said well who wants to go and i'm going to write a new script right what do you want to get up for a director director you can hire 10 riders but i got to work for you know jack warner uh daryl zaneck all these these these legendary figures got to meet out of zucker and and all those wonderful people but they were they were the they were the bosses and they were tough and all that but they they were there and they and they wanted to make beautiful movies and make money at it of course but it was a different climate now you don't know who's really the stock market is were you able to have friendships with directors that you'd admired growing up that were sort of starting to get old at that time so like the dawn forge of the howard hawks people like that and they did have to communicate some were very giving and and and uh and great and and and helpful and and and willing to you know read your script even billy wilder was one he was just the most wonderful he was very funny but he was really uh he was really available and and that was uh and encouraging and fun to talk to and on the other hand frank capra who i had the pleasure of meeting i guess he was in getting in a bitter time of his own career because he wasn't able to get movies off the ground but i i remember i i you know the the cut of of apocalypse was you know i was very unsure of what i was doing as you can imagine or and the billy wilder was very encouraging and gave me some good pointers but when i showed it to frank capra he just hated it he just thought it was terrible and he got very kind of cranky on me you know and then when i told him about my idea for tucker because i thought he would like tucker because it's kind of like a frank capra story he would just put it down he said no you can't have a story like that and the guy is not a success he gets wiped out of business that's not a frank capra movie you know so he was uh i thought he would have liked it but frank capra was a great would you ever see the bitter tea of general uh yen you know by frank capra oh it's beautiful it's a barbara stanwick it's really what year is that that's got to be the late 30s i would bitter tea of general yeah did you ever see it oh you'd like it barbara stanwyck is something and i mean it's a very modern i mean a very you would not think it you know i think because i i've always loved that movie but what other direct i got to meet uh oh you know who i spent a lot of time with was who was a great man was and talk about the director's guild was king vidor i used to hang out with king vidor and he used to love to go for walks with me in paris and he always wanted to walk down a pigall and he always talked about when he was young man in peak allen and uh he was about but he wanted to make a film and unfortunately most of the older directors that i so admired including wells they couldn't they couldn't get to make a movie uh king vidor wanted to make a movie and we were trying to help him so he could make it and and i know um wells wanted to make a film and couldn't it it seems like you know that that that is part of the last act of uh of movie directors is you know the the d.w griffith end where he sat in the hollywood roosevelt hotel and get drinks from people and tell him that he used to be a famous movie director d.w griffith if you can imagine of course kurosawa was was he did have a thanks to george lucas and and to myself to some extent that curacao wasn't able to get films and and we helped to uh uh we helped especially after star wars to to get him to do kage musha and then he had a whole other period think thanks that we have those films thank you ron when we were putting this evening together you wanted to talk about jack and maybe share a clip well i i i said i said you know i said if you're going to honor a director i said you should show what everyone says is his worst film i mean you can always go and show the ones that were successful but what what about the ones and i just i i know when someone wants to be mean to me or whatever they always like say hey do you you know this is the guy who made jack so i said i just you know show that you know i should be put on spot and you should say why did you do that okay well what went wrong you know what uh i think uh the reason i i did it was that was that period between 40 and 50 where i literally had to make a movie every year that's hard to do to make this payment i had and that's how i was able to hang on to our home in napa that was what was up at stake and so i i paid off that loan it took me 10 years and i made you know peggy sue got married but jack was uh jack was the truth of the matter is that i i would have done anything that robin williams was doing because i just thought he was such a interesting guy and a billion person and very intelligent stuff and that was a project he was doing i always thought it was a dumb idea to make a movie from because it's the same idea of big which was such a wonderful movie and so successful and i never knew why they would want to do another one about a big kid but you know i had to make a movie every year and i really liked robin williams and i think you know often in the in any profession there are things you have to do and and i think you have to you have to find something to love about everything you do you know you i always i joke that if you're going to be a prostitute which often in the film business you have to be if you want to get through what you have to do but you know you know so you have to find something about what you're doing that's you know that you can love that you can like and in this case i um you know there was a theme in that story that i that i felt was uh personal uh to me and uh and as i said i wanted to but it was it was a pre-made thing i mean they had the script they had the pride i just came on as uh the director was it a matter of like i could rewrite the whole thing not that i would have known how to really to be honest with you that's how that's how jack came about but when you you've been very self-effacing tonight i'm always self-effacing what are you most proud of my children [Applause] in terms of a work a piece of work or something yeah i of course i'm more one of the reasons uh you know i'm i favor the stuff i got to write and i didn't get to write my original idea of a career back there and when we started and everything the early days of zorotrope was you know to make these more personal films like the rain people was the early one and and to to write and make films about things that i wanted to learn about because when you make a film you just learn so much about it and if it's personal it means you're going to learn also about yourself and then my i i had the interesting accident of making the godfather which totally changed my life and put me in a position that i never imagined i was really gonna be in and and then little by little i wasn't writing those personal films and i was always hoping if i could make one big success you know like then i'd have all this money and then i just spend that money making films like george always tells me he's gonna do george george lucas is a very interesting experimental filmmaker and he's gonna shock everybody because he's got the dough he's just going to go off and make a film someday and you know he's he's he has enormous talent that you know making big movies that do what they do is one thing but he has a very exotic side of him which i would love to see and he promises me he's going to do it and i believe him but um you know so i i realized i was never movie business is a terrible kind of a bit really more of a hobby financially because somehow the money all goes in the hopper and by the time it gets to you it's all gone so i i did one of my very clever houdini routines and when i realized that i slid into another industry which is a business and which and then and the irony is that the money i use now to make these little films or don't come from anything to do with the movie but it comes from the wine business so that's how i that's how i finance my films but now getting a release is very tricky you know even if you've paid for the movie then you know and the public has been carefully you know 40 years of television and and the the public is uh tastes aside from on the fringes of interesting pictures they you know they they want a certain kind of film that they've been that they've been uh taught to to why well this has been a wonderful evening isn't it so so thank you very much francis and thank you three two oh we know they're being an inspiration to us thank you and you continue tonight and thank you sir thank you all thank you for coming you

Channel: Directors Guild of America

Views: 38,964

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Id: fO7tKA6OEXs

Length: 90min 2sec (5402 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 07 2022