Interview: Francis Ford Coppola - The Godfather is back

FOR the past few years, Francis Ford Coppola has been free to follow his heart and make small, self-funded personal films – all thanks to grapes. With a bottle of Rubicon '79, his sought-after first vintage, selling for $200, his winemaking business – established 25 years ago after stumbling on the vineyard during the search for a family summer home – has made him a very wealthy man.

"I didn't mean to make it a business, but I got lucky because Americans, who didn't really drink wine, other than the immigrants, suddenly began to realise wine was healthy and good with food, and another source of pleasure," says the 70-year-old film director. "But it doesn't compete with what I always wanted my profession to be, which was a man who writes stories and makes films of them."

It was not always this way. Despite making some of the greatest American films of all time – The Godfather, The Godfather: Part II, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now – Coppola has had a career of dazzling highs and exasperating lows, of fortunes made and lost. He is the Don Quixote of the so-called Movie Brat generation (Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, De Palma et al), often knocked down, but never completely out.

When he took on The Godfather – which gets a celebratory re-release on the big screen this month – Coppola was in financial trouble. The first film from his studio, American Zoetrope, George Lucas's stark science fiction downer, THX 1138, had so enraged Warner Bros that they'd demanded their money back, leaving Coppola deep in debt and unsure of his future as a film-maker. Lucas advised him to do The Godfather, and everything changed. For a while, at least.

Although it was an adaptation of Mario Puzo's best-selling novel, Coppola made the film personal by drawing on his own family to help bring members of the Corleone Mafia dynasty convincingly to life. For the first time he showed the Mafia – presented as a kind of feudal hierarchy – from the inside looking out. The "bad guys" were the heroes. And they were psychologically and emotionally complex.

"I didn't know anything about gangsters," Coppola admits. "I had never met a gangster. I knew they were Italian-Americans so I just made them like my family in terms of how they ate, say. Also, New York Italians speak with a New York accent, they don't 'speaka lika dis'. So I just was true to what I saw with my uncles and my father. And although they were musicians, I used my own family."

Coppola fought hard to cast the likes of Marlon Brando (the studio wanted Laurence Olivier) and the then little-known Al Pacino, and survived threats to replace him during production. He was vindicated when The Godfather became a huge success. Come Oscar time, it was nominated for 11 awards. The film-maker won his second Oscar for screenwriting (his first was for Patton), Brando was named best actor, and the film was awarded best picture. Suddenly, Coppola had Hollywood on a string. "After The Godfather, I was pretty much able to do what I wanted," he recalls.

This didn't last, of course. He scored another smash with The Godfather: Part II, before embarking on the legendarily fraught shoot of Apocalypse Now in the Philippines. Some people say Coppola went crazy while filming the epic saga of a soldier's journey through the hell of the Vietnam War, and there were certainly enough incidents to test anyone's sanity: lead Martin Sheen had a heart attack; a large set was destroyed by a typhoon; Brando arrived overweight and under-prepared; Dennis Hopper was almost permanently wired, and so on. Even so, did he really have a breakdown in the jungle? "I never had a nervous breakdown. I never went nuts or any of that stuff," says Coppola irritably. "That's just a good story."

He acknowledges, though, that he was under a lot of pressure because of the mounting cost of overruns. "I was 32 years old and I was financing a $32 million movie by putting my house up, because I didn't have that kind of money." He also "had the sweat of making a movie that I didn't know exactly what it was. When I make a personal movie," he explains, "I never know what the machine is supposed to do, but I follow my gut and I follow my intelligence and I do my best."

Coppola survived financially but then blew everything on the critically-derided box office flop, One from the Heart, taking himself and his studio to the brink of bankruptcy. The golden period was over. And Coppola became, in his own words, a "slave" to the studios. "I owed the bank a lot of money, and they were holding the wine estate in Napa, so I had to make a movie every year." From age 40 to 50, he says, "the studios gave me a script like a regular director and they said, 'Will you do this movie?' I was grateful. And every Friday I would write an e-mail or a fax to the head of the studio saying, 'Thank you for my cheque.' I did that for ten years because the cheque was going to mean I could keep my home. It wasn't until Dracula (in 1992] that I had paid it back."

He was finally free. But following 1997's The Rainmaker, he did not make another film until Youth Without Youth – the first of the low-budget, intensely personal projects that he now refers to as his "second career".

It was not for want of trying, says Coppola. He attempted to get a live-action version of Pinocchio off the ground at Columbia, and was all set to go into production at Pinewood when "another studio just said, 'We own it.' Then there was two years of a legal battle, which I won, and which they had overturned – suspiciously. I said, 'This is hopeless. You can't win.' So then I said, 'I'm just going to write the most personal, ambitious, probably self-indulgent, grandiose project I can think of.'"

This would have been Megalopolis, which he in fact started shooting in New York. But when the Twin Towers were attacked in 2001, he lost heart in the film's message. "It was about utopia," he grimaces. "It said that we can make the world be a place that's exciting for people and for everyone to really enjoy life and each other. It's an absurd idea, I know. But I thought if I made a film that showed that, then everyone would say, 'Right, then, let's do it.'

"But then right as I did that, the world went to the opposite. Not only that, the film business was becoming more and more middle-brow and the movie had to look good, but who was going to give me the money to do a movie like that? So I stopped it."

Coppola talks a lot about what he appears to regard as the middle-brow's overbearing influence on cinema and the conservatism of studios and some critics. Why, he wonders, do people keep asking him why he filmed the majority of his latest film, Tetro – a febrile tale of sibling rivalry set in Buenos Aires – in black and white?

"I don't understand that," he sighs. "It scares me that we live in a world where everything has to be the same. Where it all has to be colour because some television executive said that. I feel like I'm living in a gulag." He believes that film-makers should be willing, and encouraged, to try new things, even if they fail. "But now everything is so controlled and middle-brow that if you dare even shoot a film in black and white, it's self-indulgent. It's a time of great inhibition. You're not allowed to do anything for fear that you will step out of line."

Coppola, of course, is now wealthy enough to pursue his passions on his own terms, and to make films that he says start as a question at script stage and end up as the answer. Making Tetro, he says tearfully, taught him that he felt he had been abandoned by his beloved older brother, August, as a child, which he had never realised before. "So when you make a film that's personal, you learn about yourself." This, he suggests, illustrates the purpose of art.

"It's not to make money. You want me to make money, I will go out and make money like that!" he says, snapping his fingers. "That's another job. To do art you have to do something that you don't know what you're doing."

Normally this would be the kind of statement that sends shivers down the spine of studio executives. But Coppola isn't worried: these days he's his own man. "I should walk away from it, but I like it too much," he says. "I don't do this so I can make money. I don't do this so I get praise. I don't do this so I can meet girls. I only do it because 'it' itself is so beautiful."

The Godfather is re-released on 25 September.