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CNN Live Event/Special

EXTRAORDINARY WITH FAREED ZAKARIA. Aired 10-11p ET

Aired August 20, 2022 - 22:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA, FILMMAKER: "The Godfather" was made in a very classical, almost Shakespearean style. It was going to be about six session. Like a king with three sons and none of the sons had all his talents.

Michael could be ruthless when he had to be ruthless, but he could be friendly. In other words, he was a complex hero.

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST: We're here in the Napa Valley on a rainy day to interview Francis Ford Coppola. Now, he's one of the greatest movie directors of all time, without any question. If you Google the best movies of all time, the greatest movies of all time, "The Godfather" is number one, usually.

COPPOLA: I'm going to make them an offer again with you.

ZAKARIA: But "The Godfather" II is often on that list of top 10. And so is Apocalypse Now. So of the 10, 15 greatest movies of all time, this man has made three of them. I'm really interested in talking to him for another reason. When I came to America first, I was in college and I took a class, classics of American cinema. It was in some ways, helpful for me because it gave me a sense of the culture and the country that I was now living in. And I wrote my final paper on "The Godfather".

Actually, on the opening four, five minutes of "The Godfather", the first scene, and I had a thesis about what it all meant. And so now I get to ask the man who made the movie, whether I was right.

COPPOLA: When I first read "The Godfather", the novel by Mario Puzo, I was shocked as I went into the book to realize that, number one, Mario Puzo was some guy in Bayshore, this Italian-American who didn't speak Italian, knew very little about Italian culture, because anyone who knows Italian knows that Don Corleone is not possible.

ZAKARIA: Right, it will be Don on the first day.

COPPOLA: It will be Don Francesco or Don Vito, so he obviously didn't know anything about Italy and he didn't. He was the most wonderful man and I became to love him dearly.

Also, the book was like a potboiler. It was so salacious, that it was absurd story. I went for chapter after chapter about this girl, her private --

ZAKARIA: Her doctor -- COPPOLA: Yeah, doctor who was having an affair with this girl who had

certain anatomical problems, and ultimately I diagrammed every page. And I found within this potboiler this interesting story about America. And I was very intrigued with the Bonasera story because it really introduced you to the idea that if you were the friend of Mafia guy, you had power because he was your friend and if someone offended your friendship that was like an alliance.

ZAKARIA: Right. So when I look at that opening scene.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I believe in America, America has made my fortune.

ZAKARIA: You have Bonasera, who wanted to become part of the new modern America and then his daughter gets brutalized by these two thugs and he goes to the Godfather and he tries to in a modern way do a transaction.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What do you want to me? Tell me anything but do what I beg you to do.

ZAKARIA: So in a sense, Bonasera is representing the attempted, the New America and "The Godfather" is saying, no, no, we have to move back into the old world of relationships of intangible favors.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I come to mean to say, I'm calling around and give me just. (Inaudible). You don't have a friendship, you don't even think to call me Godfather.

[22:05:10]

ZAKARIA: And it's this fascinating tension in America between wanting the individualism and the freedom of the new but being pulled back into the world of the old. Does that make sense?

COPPOLA: Well, of course, it says everything about America and why America is perhaps different from these other systems.

ZAKARIA: So what is this?

COPPOLA: When I was a kid, I had been trained to be a stage manager and a stage manager has something called a prompt book, people come on, lights happened, sets change everything, all because of the prompt. So that was my training. And I now was given the job of doing "The Godfather", and I and I, of course, was nervous, because this was starting to become a big production.

Here's this massive novel, and I'm going to be like a sculptor and sculpt the movie.

ZAKARIA: Out.

COPPOLA: But by first knowing what's in and I'm going to -- before I know how to do it, I was going to begin by dissecting what was in the thing. And what I did was, I thought I would ask myself four or five questions about what I was going to encounter. The core is, what do you want to say in the briefest few words as to why you're doing it? Well, I mean, the core is good, because as a director, I knew that if I got that, maybe I didn't get great imagery and tone. Maybe I didn't get this. But if you got that you got it.

ZAKARIA: So that horses had seen in the book. The horse's head is not in the bed, is it --

COPPOLA: Well, here's the book. No, it's not in it.

ZAKARIA: So sort of out there. What made you put it on the bed?

COPPOLA: I just thought it would be more interesting, if Woltz felt something in his bed, any open the sheet and there was blood. Always you get more shock if you can get the audience to think, it's called misdirection, you -- so if then he saw blood, and I thought maybe the audience would think that they had wounded Woltz.

ZAKARIA: Right.

COPPOLA: And that he's discovering that he got a big gash in his head as he opens, he's got blood. As he flips over the covers, then he sees that as the horse's head.

Book can say he had an incredible shock. Well, how do you give the audience that incredible shock? You have to do it differently than the book describes?

ZAKARIA: And you say here, I think it's -- this is a great use of pitfalls. If the audience does not jump out of their seat on this one, you have failed.

COPPOLA: Yeah, so I'm like the guy, the little voice saying, all right, Francis, you better to do this. And if you don't do that, you better do it fast. And so because I was scared, and I figured that if I had this with me, when I had to do the scene, I would have this voice. This angel on my shoulder telling me the core is to reveal in a horrifying way what Don decided to do to convince Woltz of the seriousness of his intent. That's why if you do it and show that you did it, then you got the core.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:11:49]

COPPOLA: I was always the new kid. Because I went to maybe 20 schools and then my dad was always picking me out of school and I would get introduced in the middle of a demo. We have a new student, his name is Francis, haha, it's a girl's name. The theatre department was where the girls were. As opposed to the football games, which I had no abilities in whatsoever. So I would hang out at the theater department and be a techie. I would do the lights. And I would look down and I would see the teachers directing the kids and I said, well, I could do that, you know, tell you to stand here, stand there.

ZAKARIA: And when you get to Hofstra and do you then start to realize, when did you fall in love with movies? COPPOLA: At Hofstra, I started to direct one-act plays and my one-act play was the best one that anyone ever had seen a student do. And there was a little theater called, Little Theatre and they said today only four o'clock we're showing Sergei Eisenstein's 10 Days That Shook the World. And I saw this four hour Russian movie of Eisenstein.

ZAKARIA: It's about the Bolshevik Revolution.

COPPOLA: I never saw anything like it. I was astounded. I said there's no sound. And I hear everything just from the way the film is edited. And when I came out of that, I said I'm not going to go to the Yale Drama School. I'm going to go to UCLA Film School, and I decided become a film student. It was like a night and day decision.

ZAKARIA: "The Godfather", why did you get the directing job? You want a famous movie director at that time?

COPPOLA: I was the opposite of a famous. First of all, there had been a movie a year or so before "The Godfather" called the Brotherhood. And it was -- I think with Kirk Douglas, it was a big flop.

ZAKARIA: And the Brotherhood was a gangster movie, and it was --

(CROSSTALK)

ZAKARIA: This is a bad way to --

COPPOLA: So every director turned it down. And so they decided to give this nobody who Italian-American Screenwriter and was young, I was about 28 the chance.

ZAKARIA: Is it true that you almost got fired several times?

COPPOLA: Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, I would say I was almost fired more than four times. One time, I thought I was fired. All my ideas were countered to what they wanted. They wanted to shoot the picture in St. Louis. And they wanted the script to be set in the 70s which is when it was going to be made because if you make a movie, in normal time, like if we make a movie today, all the cars can be the same, the hairstyles can be the same, the wardrobe can be the same, the props -- I mean if you make a period picture you're adding a lot a big layer of cost. And St. Louis was in New York, which is where the book was set. So first thing I said is I want to shoot it in New York and I want to shoot it 1945 in the period of the book, I think it's very important that to be shot that period.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I got something for your mother and for Sunny.

[22:15:00]

COPPOLA: And then they say, who is this kid? What does he think, he's crazy. We're going to make the movie for $2 million. What's it going to cost if we try to go to New York? Then when they got into casting and they wanted, you know, maybe Ryan O'Neal or someone who had been in love story, which had been a big sit for them to play the Michael character. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm sorry.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Love. Love means never having to say you're sorry.

COPPOLA: And I was emphatic, I wanted out. But you know, I hadn't met Al Pacino on another project that I had written and I just thought he was interesting guy. I liked him personally. And also when I read the book, I pictured Al Pacino in all those scenes where Al walking across Sicily with the guys with the shotguns.

ZAKARIA: But the biggest fight was over Brando.

COPPOLA: Important person I was working with that, that was a real casting talent was a guy named Fred Roos. He's still living and still worked on my later pictures. And I remember saying to Fred, you know, Fred, what if we try something unusual with "The Godfather"? What if we just get the greatest actor in the world? So who's the greatest actor in the world? Well, we said there's Laurence Olivier and as Marlon Brando.

Brando was young, Brando was 47. He was a handsome, beautiful man and always been. Olivier was English. So he wasn't Italian, has English accent. He'd have to act his way out of that. Brando wasn't Italian and he was young. So but I said, you never go wrong casting the most brilliant actor, you can get, he'll do something. So Stanley Jaffe said, Francis, I tell you, and I tell you as the president of Paramount picture, Marlon Brando will never appear in this motion picture. And as President, I say, don't even bring him up again.

So when he told me that, I sort of whether it was fake, I it was sort of fake. I just fell off the chair, fell on the floor. And everyone looked, and I said, if I'm supposed to direct a movie, and you tell me I can't even discuss a great actor like Marlon Brando, what can I say? OK, you know, and then he says, I'll tell you what, we give you three conditions. One, he would have to do a screen test. Two, he would have to do the film for free. And three, he would have to put up a million dollar bond that he will not cause any disturbance or mishegaas to use an Italian word on the picture.

He would get -- you put a bond that he would not cause any trouble because he was considered possibly troublesome. So I said I accept. So I contact Brando and I am totally, I mean, Marlon Brando is god to me. I said, you know, since you're not Italian, I thought you might would like to just fool around a little bit and do some improvisations and see how you would approach being an Italian. So I didn't say the screen test. And he sort of said, yes.

And at one point, Brando emerged from his bedroom in a Japanese kimono with his beautiful blonde flowing hair. And then he -- he's saying that he's like a bulldog and he put Kleenex in his mouth. And --

ZAKARIA: So that's where the jowls came from?

COPPOLA: Yeah, he explained, he's like, then he's, you know, he was shot in the throat in the story. Maybe, he talks, you always taught like that, you know, so he started go, he's not doing this, just like I'm shooting. I'm amazed.

MARLON BRANDO: Why do you come to me? Why do I deserve this generosity?

COPPOLA: But basically, it was miraculous what he did. And I thanked him, I decided to just take a chance and fly to New York, and go to Gulf and Western, and show it to the head of Gulf and Western Charlie Bluhdorn.

ZAKARIA: He was the boss' boss?

COPPOLA: Charlie Bluhdorn was a Viennese guy probably was around 50 at the time, and he was very demonstrative. He talked like Francis, were you crazy guy? What are you doing? He had a Viennese accent and he talked like that.

But anyway, Charlie comes out as Francis. Francis, what are you doing here, Francis? Why -- Bob, is anyone has it? No, no, Mr. Bluhdorn and I just wanted to show you something. What do you got to show me? I have here a screen test of Marlon Brando. Screen test of Brando? Brando is out. No Brando. I turn it on and he sees Brando come out with the blonde hair. He's -- that's -- no. well, that's incredible. He watches this transformation. And Charlie Bluhdorn said, that's incredible. So if he says it's incredible, and he's going to get the part he's going to get the part because he's the boss. And that's what happened.

[22:20:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COPPOLA: Brando was wonderful on the picture. He was -- he did it. A lot of times I know you're -- they say, directly oh, we got a great performance. Directors don't get performances. I mean, some directors will argue when I say this, actors give the performance. The director is like a coach. That director is may be there to say the right word at the right time to give them the good direction. But the actor does it, of course, obviously. And Brando did it. Brando was so ingenious of how he approached every scene.

But I could do things which I did like in the first scene in "The Godfather", where I just took a cat off the floor, which is the studio cat. It wasn't a prop cat. And I just put it in his hand. He didn't say to me, what do you want me to do with the cat? No, he just did it.

MARLON BRANDO: I had a good trade man, good living. Please protect the gentleman courts of law and the family.

COPPOLA: And literally no matter what happened, he would incorporate. He was that kind of an actor. He was -- I mean he is the genius that everyone.

ZAKARIA: Do you think he was the best actor you have worked with?

[22:25:02] COPPOLA: Yeah, yeah. I mean because he was so unique I used to joke that if a herd of buffalo ran through the room he was, oh look at the buffalo. You know, he wouldn't say why that buffalo in the studio, which everyone else would.

ZAKARIA: And then when you close the movie, you end that a very dark place, you end where Michael is lying to his wife.

COPPOLA: He lies to his wife.

ZAKARIA: And he's just murdered a whole bunch of.

COPPOLA: And closes -- he goes out and he's being accepted. Oh, he's being accepted as the new Godfather.

ZAKARIA: Right somebody kisses his --

COPPOLA: And the wife is watching but she's going to be closed out of his eye. And that was the end.

ZAKARIA: And to you, what does that say?

COPPOLA: To me, it was all a Woltz. It was, duh, duh, duh, 123, 123, 123, he's again, and his son becomes and it's like something that's going to go on and on and on always, but the wife is always going to be excluded.

ZAKARIA: So in a sense, it is about succession?

COPPOLA: The movie is about succession.

ZAKARIA: When you did it, you thought, this is a no sequel?

COPPOLA: Oh, no. I -- when I said sequel, Oh, Charlie says you got the formula. Coca-Cola, you're going to tell me, you're not going to make bulk Coca-Cola? I said no. I don't want to make Coca-Cola. The method was over. I thought it was one movie. I hadn't had enough of it. I really am. You know, when I chose to do the second film, the deal I made was I would write it. I would produce it. I would pick a director who would direct it. And when finally when I told him, I'm ready, I have a script. And everything is well who do you want to direct? Then I say, someone who's very talented and can do it just as well as me. His name was Martin Scorsese. And they said, absolutely not. They've turned me down.

ZAKARIA: And so you?

COPPOLA: No, I then got a phone call from Charlie Bluhdorn, he said Francis, talking about, let's talk this challenge. You get the formula Coca-Cola, you really are not going to do it is incredible. I'll give you anything you want. So I say all right, Charlie, I'll do it. I want a million dollars. I want total control without double checking anyone not to show them the script, not to get their notes. And I want to call it "The Godfather Part II". So I get an answer. They called me back, he's, Francis wherever you want. You're going to get a million dollars. Bob Evans will have nothing to do with knowing you'll be absolutely trouble, marketing does not feel that "The Godfather Part II" makes sense because everyone's going to think it's the second half of the movie they already saw. I said, well, in that case, I guess I'm not going to do it. And I held out. And it was the smoothest movie I ever worked on. It was most complicated one but it went really well was all over the place, had Cuba in it.

ZAKARIA: Yeah.

COPPOLA: I showed it to Fidel. Fidel said it was very accurate depiction of what happened that night. I was -- he was a big movie fan.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Come with me, it's the only way out of here tonight. Roth (ph) is dead, freedom. Freedom, come with me. You're still my brother.

ZAKARIA: You must have met a number of people over the years who turned out to be great fans of "The Godfather"?

COPPOLA: All the bad people on earth. All Saddam Hussein number one fan. Qaddafi all of those kinds of guys love "The Godfather".

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:32:42]

ZAKARIA: Dictators may have loved "The Godfather". But Coppola's bosses, they didn't love him or the film while he was making it. In an odd turn of events, though, an early a film project seems to have saved his hide.

You write the screenplay for Patton.

COPPOLA: Right.

ZAKARIA: Correct me if I'm wrong, you get fired because they don't like the opening scene, which is now the most famous scene in the movie.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That no bastard ever won war by dying for his country. You want it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

COPPOLA: So I had this idea that what if you could just see him at the beginning as if the audience were the men. And he just came there and the whole audience technically would bring to attention.

Well, the actor chosen was Burt Lancaster, and he did not like that opening at all. And I got fired. They didn't pick up my contract, which is what happens how you get fired.

ZAKARIA: But then George C. Scott is given the role and he says you have to have that seat.

COPPOLA: So I love George C. Scott. And he was going to play Patton and then he felt the script that they had done for Burt Lancaster. It wasn't quite interesting. I don't know. So by hook or by luck, or whatever, my script not only got adopted, but was sort of a hit and nominated for an Academy Award. And the week I was going to sure get fired from "The Godfather" was during the Oscars, and which I watched with Martin Scorsese. I remember Martin said to me, when I won for Patton, he says, well, I guess they're not going to fire you right away. So in a way, the Patton story, saved me from what look like surefire curtains on "The Godfather".

ZAKARIA: These two openings strike me as showing something really interesting where you're always trying to do something very distinctive, very, you know, different. Why is it so important to you to do things in this very distinctive way that that others haven't done?

[22:35:00]

COPPOLA: Well, there was a wonderful director, Doshean Makavive (ph), who told me, Francis, the good rule is that when you shoot all this stuff look and decide what's the best thing you have, the second best thing and the third best thing, take the best thing you have and make it the ending of the movie and take the second best thing they make at the beginning of the movie. And the third thing put in between those two. I always thought that was really clever, because of course you want to win the audience in that first scene. But that's not as important as what you want to do at the end of the movie, when you want to have them leave with something wonderful, because then they'll tell all the friends to go see the movie. In other words, the ending of the movie is the most -- that counts for like double anything else in the movie. If you have a great ending, then you're likely to have people recommend the movie because they were impressed.

ZAKARIA: Why do you not have a signature style? I think of your movies and I think of "The Godfather" very formal, there's almost a kind of operatic quality to it. But then you have Apocalypse Now which is kind of, you know, in many senses weird, right?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hi, American.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: American civilian, all right. And you got the cigarettes and that's what I've been dreaming off.

ZAKARIA: Are you kind of almost trying out ideas?

COPPOLA: My idea is when I made "The Godfather" was made in a very classical, almost Shakespearean style, and cinematically vary, you know, shot. But when I then was going to make another movie, I didn't want to make a movie I knew how to make. I thought, well, if I make a movie I don't know how to make then I'll learn more. When I started Apocalypse Now, I had no idea how to make it. Because it was nothing like "The Godfather". I always chose movies that I didn't know how to make on the theory that then I would learn. And maybe when I was an old man, I would have gathered a style that I could then use and make one ultimate movie in whatever was my style. But every movie I made I learned how to make it. I didn't know how to make it when I start.

ZAKARIA: Did you always ask yourself, how can I do it differently? COPPOLA: No, I always ask myself, how can I serve the theme? What -- you present called the core. If it's the core an Apocalypse Now is morality, and I knew it was morality out of shape because that was not a moral war.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Nothings else on the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

COPPOLA: There was a line I read, we teach the boys to drop fire on people. But we will let them write the word (bleep) on their airplane because it's immoral. I thought that set it off, morality is what this movie is. But I'm going to put 10,000 volts in it and see what I get. And that --

ZAKARIA: That ends up being the second last line of the movie?

COPPOLA: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We train young men to drop fire on people but their commanders won't allow them to write (bleep) on their airplanes because it's insane.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:42:11]

ZAKARIA: So "The Godfather" has all these complications that we've heard about. But it turns out to be nothing like Apocalypse Now, which just seems like you had every possible problem the movie can have and then some, right?

COPPOLA: Well, it was ambitious in scope. And it was not helpful that the Department of Defense totally wanted nothing to do the -- I was banned by to pick this movie. And of course, Apocalypse was going to need helicopters and military hardware. So ultimately, we figured out and went to the Philippines, under President Marcos who did make a deal for us to come and would give us helicopters and --

ZAKARIA: And the reason you brought this because they were American helicopters. They were --

COPPOLA: The Philippines head.

ZAKARIA: Yeah. The first thing that happens is your original lead man Harvey Keitel, you decide is not the right guy.

COPPOLA: Yeah, that's a hard decision. I've not made many of those in my career. And this is the toughest thing director can do is fire an actor. He's a wonderful actor and I consider him a friend to this day. But he's a very -- what I'll call an active actor. He's like Robert De Niro. He talking to me. And you know, and I was worried because I knew the part of Willard was more of a reflective adamant, you'd have to look at this guy who's looking at stuff and he's not in your face acting. And I wasn't sure I knew how to do that with Harvey.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Go look at the camera. Go look at the camera just go by like your party. Go look at the camera.

COPPOLA: As I said, that's the toughest thing, you don't ever want to do that.

ZAKARIA: Right. But I'm trying to think through the challenges you face. So very early on, you have to replace the leading man, Harvey Keitel, you -- he switch, swapping from Martin Sheen, then a typhoon hits, and essentially --

COPPOLA: Destroyed all the scenes.

ZAKARIA: And then Martin Sheen gets the heart attack.

COPPOLA: I get the word that Martin Sheen has had a heart attack, not that he's alive or not. I just had a serious heart attack and I -- we all thought he had died.

ZAKARIA: And at that point, you told them what did you think the movies are?

COPPOLA: Well, I was in a tough position because I had guarantee the economics were this. Let's say he had died, I essentially would have been wiped out because I would own a movie that didn't exist.

ZAKARIA: Was incomplete.

COPPOLA: Right. So I was there on the verge and what was happening --

ZAKARIA: And all this that you had essentially Mortgage this state.

[22:45:01]

COPPOLA: Well, this and everything, a lot more than this but what I suggest is just take him to the best hospital in the world and care for him and I'll keep shooting. And I use his brother Joe to dress in his costume and I kept shooting. He come back four weeks later, but we had been shooting the whole time. So while I was missing, we're all the close ups.

ZAKARIA: And when Brando comes on the scene this this is not the Marlon Brando you dealt with in "The Godfather", he had gotten weirder, right?

COPPOLA: He was still wonderful. Brandon was like a big kid. You know how sometimes the kid is you love him and everything but he does these irresponsible things. Well, he arrived heavy. And he was a Green Beret Colonel so I -- my problem, oddly enough, what kind of costume am I going to put them in? They don't make Green Beret Colonel size XXXX. So I'm going to have to, how do I deal with it? How do I deal with the fact that he showed up heavy and he had to deal with million dollars a week for three weeks, he was very smart that way.

ZAKARIA: This is about a third of the 20% of the budget originally.

COPPOLA: But I had him for three weeks, was the main hours a week and the first week, we're basically just talking. And we talk the whole first week, Brando knew that if we talked the whole two week, they still was going to be free. He was going to make another million or two on top of it.

ZAKARIA: But you must have been scared?

COPPOLA: I was scared out of my mind. I was -- I but I had been scared now for five months. You know, the whole movie, I was scared. I had one blessing was that I always had a rule that when I went away on a movie more than 10 days, I took all my kids out of school and brought them all with me. So I had all my kids with me. And I had my wife with me who was however shooting a documentary. So when I would go home and say to her, oh, dear, this movie is the worst movie. I've got a just sale tab, got to get an F. I was hoping she'd say, oh, no, darling, it's going to be wonderful. I have faith in you. Instead, she'd say, oh, can I put on microphone? Would you say that again?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What I have to admit is that I don't know what I'm doing.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How do you count for the discrepancy between what you feel about what everybody else who sees?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Because they see the magic of what has happened before? I'm saying hey, it's not going to happen. I don't have any performances. The script doesn't make sense. I have no ending. I'm like, I'm like a voice crying out. Saying please, it's not working. Somebody get me off this. And nobody listens to me. Everyone says yes. Well, Francis works best in a crisis. I'm saying this is one crisis I'm not going to pull myself out.

ZAKARIA: Of so Apocalypse Now was famously filled with delays and cost overruns.

COPPOLA: Yeah, they used to call it Apocalypse when.

ZAKARIA: And at some point, you realize people need to see something because they're not going to believe there is this movie. And so you show a rough, unfinished version of the movie at the Cannes Film Festival. At this point, what are you hoping to in doing that?

COPPOLA: So I had this concept, what if I submitted to Cannes (ph) and show it unfinished as a stealing phrase from Joyce, a work in progress? And I did. My idea was that the only way I could shut people up as to whether or not the movie is the Apocalypse when and a disaster and all that saying because they said that, was to show it. And they agreed to show it as a work in progress and we took it the Cannes.

ZAKARIA: And it wins the main award?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:52:10]

COPPOLA: You know, I own Apocalypse Now. Did you know that?

ZAKARIA: Yeah, you mortgage this one way.

COPPOLA: Yeah, but you know why I own it? Nobody wanted it. Yeah, I made two Godfather films, I had a bunch of Oscars. I had probably the hottest young director going. And yet nobody wanted me to -- no one -- I've always been in that situations. But what I have learned is this interesting sentence. And it relates the pattern is it's sort of another version of the things they fire you for when you're young are the same things they give you lifetime achievement awards when you're old. The same thing, the reason I got fired from Patton was the opening. And I'm celebrated for that opening now.

So how that works in my life is that the movies that are most like me that I want to do that in my imagination, I feel could be like my dreams are impossible to finance and yet live longest. My movies tend to do sometimes OK, or middling or fair to middling, but they last for 50 years. So if a movie is played to audiences, 50 years, that makes a lot of money. So I know now that anything I want to do, as it was true with Apocalypse Now me Francis at age, you know, I'm 82, I'm not a spring chicken, but I have very good memory. I have good energy. I mean, I get enthusiastic. I know I could make a movie with the same tools I've ever had with -- in the past but I know I can't get financing for it, because it's not what they're doing today. And but it will live a long time, people will be spending the next 50 years trying to figure out what was he really trying to say or wow, he was saying that then.

ZAKARIA: Did you know at the time you were making movies that were going to last like this?

COPPOLA: No way. No way. No way. You know, there's also I know more about movie history than these people make these stupid lists. Anyone who asked you, what are the 10 greatest movies ever made? You have to look at them and say, hey, you asked me what the 400 greatest movies ever made. There were 10 great movies made in the silent period.

ZAKARIA: Why do you think that when people make these lists? What is it about "The Godfather" that propels it so high? Because there's some combination of the fact that it's hard but it's also popular?

COPPOLA: It's clearly the right story with the right cast told in the right style with the right music, with the right photography. I mean, there are a lot of elements to a movie and if you get them all right, then you make a movie that will live. "The Godfather" will stand the test of time.

ZAKARIA: Certainly by the early 1980s, you realize these movies are our classics, did that cast a shadow on you? I mean they didn't make you think, like what am I going to do to top "The Godfather"?

[22:55:12]

COPPOLA: I don't --

ZAKARIA: You didn't think like.

COPPOLA: I have no desire to top. I've been interested in that subject. I want to make, what am I going to do that can have life that can -- that in the words of Joseph Papp, that can illuminate contemporary I think I can do better than "The Godfather" to illuminate contemporary life. I can do better than Apocalypse, and I really believe that.

ZAKARIA: At the same time that he's been illuminating contemporary life, Coppola has been building a big business in the worlds of wine and hospitality. In 2021, he sold his namesake wine business, for what some say was hundreds of millions of dollars. But he still owns the Inglenook Winery, where we met. The Coppola winery sale gives the filmmaker the ability to finance his next movie, Megalopolis, an extravaganza that may cost well over $100 million.

COPPOLA: You know, I'm in this funny position where because of my merger, I base basically going to make my film no matter what it cost, you're young enough that you're going to be around and I'm going to be gone and you're going to say well, he did it or he didn't do it or who can -- look at was Bizet success? Was van Gogh (ph) a success? Those people all died thinking they were failure Bizet who wrote Carmen, which is the most popular opera in the whole opera, died thinking it was a dismal failure. We don't get to know our place in what's really important, which is in how did it measure up in time. You know what the great composer Richard Strauss said, he said, and I'll say it, I'm a second rate director. When you look at those people who came before us, Fareed, these names that are giants. Francis Ford Coppola is the second rate director, but I'm a first rate, second rate director.

ZAKARIA: I couldn't leave Coppola in Inglenook without tasting some of the wineries bounty.

ZAKARIA: This is a 2011 Inglenook made by Philippe Bascaules who was the first wine he made here. 2011 was not a good year for California, but some people, us made wonderful wines in 2011.

ZAKARIA: We should try it.

COPPOLA: Why not.

ZAKARIA: It's beautiful.

COPPOLA: Yeah.

ZAKARIA: And as you say, very elegant. So in a way, the wind is like your filmmaking out of adversity comes great, great product.

COPPOLA: Well, maybe let's extend that to life that, you know, certainly you would say that these years this last 234 years have been years of adversity, but maybe something really good is going to come from it. That's what I think, something wonderful will come from because human beings are capable of coming together and producing wonders out of adversity.

ZAKARIA: And do you think art has a role in steering us toward that higher ground?

COPPOLA: Without a doubt. I think the artists are the headlights of society. The job of film, and theatre and literature is to is to shine light on what is the contemporary human issue, what is coming forward there, the headlights so that we can see, and to help us.

ZAKARIA: So if a young Francis Ford Coppola would be making a movie about your life, what one word would capture that life?

COPPOLA: It's about a kid who wanted to be one of the group. It was interesting, because when I was an outsider of the group, I was -- didn't make the group. But then I became so famous that I was the leader, but I was also outside of the group.

ZAKARIA: Why? What's important about? Does it --

COPPOLA: It's an emotional thing. It's why I like theater, because we were, it's why I like that I have my colleague, film directors, I will always say good things about them. And they say good things about me because we're all part of the group, you know.

ZAKARIA: So do you think that you want to belong?

COPPOLA: Probably. I came from an Italian-American family, which is sort of unique. There was a certain unique thing about being both and American, which my mother said, Oh, that's the greatest thing in the world. And my father said, but you're also Italian, which is one of the greatest things in the world because they make the best of everything.

ZAKARIA: In a way, it's back to that opening scene of "The Godfather" Bonasera, proud to be an American, proud to have this American paradise, and yet drawn back to the old world with its relationships, with its culture.

ZAKARIA: Well, that is what being American is. I love this country. I really do. I can't imagine all if this doesn't go right, I'm going to go move to New Zealand or -- you know, I'm --

[23:00:10]

ZAKARIA: You believe in America?

COPPOLA: I believe in American, I really do.