Francis Ford Coppola on Family, Fulfillment, and Breaking the Rules

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard. I’m on the phone with acclaimed film director Francis Ford Coppola. He’s the subject of our October Life’s Work interview. I’d like to start by asking you, how do you get great performances out of your actors?

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: Well, I think the key is that you don’t get it out of the actor. The idea that the director pulls a performance, it’s not like that. But what you do is you come to know your actors very well. And then you go through a process in which you make the actor, of course, feel comfortable, feel relaxed, and most of all, feel not frightened, because their work as an artist is something they do just with their own self. They don’t have a violin or cello between them and the audience, so it’s a frightening type of work, I think, for actors.

And you try to give them that sense that they can do no wrong and that you admire them and that you believe in them. And then through the process of various– you have a little bit of time rehearsal which I always try to have in that I came out of theater, originally, as a young person. So I like to have five days, two weeks of preparatory rehearsal before the film starts shooting. And in that process, you explore ideas, but you tend to do it with asking the actor always to be in character. By asking the character to be in character through the various improvisations and exercises and things that exist in the field, little by little, you’re affecting a transition.

Once you do that, then ultimately, it’s the actor who’s giving the final performance and who knows best what the character might be feeling or might do in a moment. So it’s at that point the director isn’t pulling the character out of the actor but has sort of helped preside over this amazing transformation.

ALISON BEARD: So it sounds like once you’ve prepared them, you just trust them to do their own thing.

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: You do trust them, but you’re always there to be of help and to guide them through tough spots and to make it, again, as little terrifying experience as you can for them.

ALISON BEARD: I know that some of your most famous decisions about scenes and casting have been ones that your studio bosses initially disapproved of. So what’s the secret to winning approval when you don’t have it or knowing when to break the rules?

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: Well, it’s tricky, because you’re never quite sure yourself. But then you’ve got to just try to convince people that what you want to do is worth taking a shot at. Everyone has this conservative streak, especially when money and success is at stake. And you tend not to want to be experimental when your studio’s investment is at stake. So you have to do whatever you can, and “anything that works works” type of thing to try to encourage them to see what you’re talking about and that it might be better.

And I think with, most famously, the casting of The Godfather, the studio was pretty much against most of the ideas, certainly against Al Pacino as the young son and against Marlon Brando, ironically, because he was a star who was seriously in decline at the moment, and people felt he was box office poison in the studio world.

And with the Brando situation, he was only 47, and he wasn’t Italian, and if you looked at him, at that moment, he was a handsome 47-year-old young man with long blond hair and, you know, Marlon Brando. And I encouraged him, the kind of actor he is, he’s very much exploratory, so I just went over to his house, and I brought little dishes of Italian sausages and Italian cigars, and I laid all these things around the house, didn’t say a word. And he came in and, a pretty intuitive person, he rolled up his hair and put shoe polish on it. And little by little, he was trying to achieve what he remembered about those kind of older Italians and started to improvise without saying anything.

And I was videotaping it, and when I saw the transformation, I took that tape right to New York to the head of the– in a movie company, there’s always the person who’s the real boss, and if you try to win over someone lesser on the chain of authority, then you’re going to get passed to the one above. So I went right to the top and asked that gentleman to look at this videotape.

At first, he said, no, no, no chance. Never. And then he just saw this transfer information, and I won him over. And then once he was won over, then all the other people that I really dealt with fell into place.

I like to tell– especially when I talk to young people– that the things that you get fired for when you’re young are the exact same things that you win lifetime achievement awards when you’re old. Which is to say that the things that run against the grain that are not common, are not logical, don’t fit in to what is the standard approach, that if you do surviving and get that across– I’m thinking about the opening of Patton, where there was the unusual opening with the general standing in front of the audience and just making a speech in front of a flag. I was fired for that, or my option wasn’t picked up.

And yet, many years later, that very same thing that I was fired for was considered one of the most unusual openings in any movie. So you have to realize, especially when you’re struggling to try to have some sort of success, that the things that get you in trouble are also the things later on that are remembered as being exceptional.

ALISON BEARD: So let’s talk about low-budget versus high-budget ones. Are they very different disciplines? Do you enjoy one more than the other.

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: Oh, much more. I think the smaller the budget, the bigger the ideas can be. And the bigger the budget, the smaller the ideas are and the exploration and the adventure and the challenge. If there’s less money at stake, then you might slip in between the cracks and try to really look at the material in a more honest, direct view. You don’t have to worry about, oh, what would preserve the money of the investment better?

My decision in life has been that it was easier to earn the money to invest in a movie than it is to go out and have to convince some wealthy people to do it. So 16 years ago, I slid into another field, another business to earn money. And then, with the money I’ve earned in that, then I just, like every year, subsidize my own patrons, so to speak.

ALISON BEARD: Are there similarities between the wine business and the film business?

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: Well, as an art form, wine and film are very similar. They break into three phases. There’s the gathering of the resources, there’s the actual putting of the resources together, and then there’s the finishing, which is a very important process in both film and wine. But as a business, they’re totally different. Making wine and making film, there are many, many similarities.

But to be a part of a business– a real business– movies are not a real business. It’s a kind of crazy activity in which, since the movies themselves are not consistently likely to make money or not likely– you might have a tremendous success one year and then five years of failure, so it’s very hard. And you, as a producer, are on the bottom, although you initiate the thing, and you take all the first risks, you’re the last one to get paid.

In the wine business, it’s more of a real business. If you do well one year, then it’s very likely that you’re going to do as well or a little better the second year. And you have a business plan, and then you achieve the plan. And then every year, you’re more and more solid, and your revenues are higher. And in the film business, it’s very hard to make a business plan.

ALISON BEARD: So you famously had a 10-year gap where you’d been working on some projects that didn’t come to fruition. Did those setbacks and the time off change you as a director?

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: It was frustrating. I was trying to make these big– I’d write the script and solve the script and figure out where would I get the money. And then I sort of realized after the 10 years, why don’t I take advice from my own daughter, Sofia, who makes smaller films– very personal. She learned that from me. So why don’t I learn that from her?

And then I began just making this new period of my life, which is just saying, well, why don’t I just pretend I’m 21 and I’m starting out and I could put together a small budget and go off to Romania with nobody, none of my more famous and accomplished colleagues– who are obviously expensive to bring off to travel around the world with– and just start from scratch with nothing. And that’s what I did. So since that time, I’ve made three little small personal films, and hopefully, I can keep doing that, rather than trying to go out and get someone to give me the money to make a much bigger project.

ALISON BEARD: You mentioned your daughter, and family is obviously very important to you. I know you’ve worked with your children, and you and your wife has been married for 48 years. How hard is it been to balance that with your career?

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: We were just talking about this morning, about how when I started out, I was so focused on trying to do what seemed impossible, which was to get to be a movie director. And then I thought, well, if I ever could be successful at it, how I would wish I could help my father achieve his dreams or my brother. But we didn’t think about the sister or the wives. But of course, all the women in our family all had aspirations, and we didn’t quite understand that as much, because I came from an era in which your mother was a housewife. So I think dealing with the females in the family who want to be movie directors and famous people and acclaimed artists was a transition that was tricky.

But the reason the family has been successful with all these young people finding their way is because, I think, a little bit of the spirit of the summer camp. I used to be a camp counselor when I was 17 and used to love to work with little kids and do plays with them. And some of the summers here in Napa were like that, where I said to all the kids and everybody– the aunts and the– who wants to do one-act plays this summer? We’ll all direct one-act plays, and then we’ll put them together and invite the neighbors to see them. And it was those kind of activities, I think, that brought everyone to realize that they liked it or they had some ability.

And the fact that I always believed that when I was going away on location from more than a week or two, I would just pull the kids out of school and want the family to go. I think it’s very hard to encourage and have that relationship with kids if you’re off on business trips making movies six months at a time. So if you really enjoy all the many activities of a creative family– which our family is– and the different projects that the kids cook up and you’re enjoying them, then that tends to give this type of family, where all the different people seem to have an area or a field that they’re good at, some confidence to pursue it.

ALISON BEARD: So where do you find your creative inspiration?

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: I think it really is a matter of remaining like a little kid. I’ve never seen a painting from a two-year-old that wasn’t beautiful. You can get 10 or 20 two- or three-year-olds and give them paper, and they all have these beautiful pictures. And then somehow, in the process of growing up and becoming educated, so much seems to be, I don’t know, not beaten out of them, but removed.

And I think I remain, pretty much, a five- or six-year-old all my life because of the strange circumstances of my upbringing and the nature of what my family was like. And that five- or six-year-old is the font of all my thoughts and. And that intuition that I’ve learned to trust, even as now a 72-year-old man, I always seem to go back to how I feel. What’s my hunch? What’s my so-called gut reaction? Which I think is very much that of a six-year-old boy.

ALISON BEARD: And when you get stuck creatively, if you don’t know where a script should go or how a movie should end, how do you get yourself unstuck?

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: Well, if my intuition and asking the question just what feels better to me doesn’t give it to me, I have a little exercise where any project I work on, I have what the theme is in a word or two. Like on The Conversation, it was privacy. On The Godfather, it was succession. So I always have that word, and I encourage my children to do the same, to break it all down beyond everything else. Don’t tell me it’s a coming-of-age story, because that’s not specific. What, specifically, is it?

And if you have that word, then when you reach an impasse, you just say, well, what is the theme related to the decision? Should it be this or should it be that? Then I say, well, what does the theme tell me? And usually, if you go back to that word, it will suggest to you which way to go and break the roadblock.

ALISON BEARD: You mentioned succession, and a lot of people talk about The Godfather being a business movie more than it is a Mafia movie. If the theme of The Godfather is succession, what message should business leaders take away from it?

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: It’s funny, because I always hear that all these sometimes terrible people, their favorite movie and that their philosophy– that Gaddafi’s favorite movie is The Godfather or Saddam Hussein’s favorite movie. To me, it was always the story of a great king who had three sons, and each of the three sons had one part of what the great king had. One had his guile and cunning, one had his sweetness, one had his brilliant analysis. And then each of the sons got only part of that.

So for me, I don’t know, the business thing seems to be a kind of Machiavellian competence in evaluating the conditions, who the friends are, who the foes are, but not losing what I called the sweetness that only the son Fredo had. Of course, he was the one they didn’t take seriously, but the father had a sweetness too. So I like to think in business, you can’t lose that. You can’t lose the sweetness.

But I know that’s not what the fans of The Godfather– they like more the cunning and the “keep your friends close but your enemies closer” and all those– actually, most of the advice in The Godfather– The Godfather was written by Mario Puzo, and all that comes from him, not from me. But the person he based The Godfather on, and who had all that wisdom, was his mother. And all those sayings– “make him an offer you can’t refuse” and all that stuff– all came from things his mother told him.

ALISON BEARD: I know that your father was a big influence on you. And I read one interview where you described him as successful but unfulfilled. Have you done it differently?

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: My father was very talented, and he had success only late in life due to my success with The Godfather, and then he was able to have his break, so to speak. No, I don’t think I’m yet unfulfilled. I don’t feel I’m fulfilled because what I really want– and now I have learned more about the reality of it– but what I really want us to write a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful piece of work and make it into a film that’s truly beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. And I mean write it all– write the story, write the script, not to adapt it from a book. So in my present work, I sort of have a rule with myself, is that there will be nothing from a book or a play, and I have to write it from scratch, and I have to write it alone to see if I can pull off what would be really fulfilling for me, which would be that.

But the trouble with work– and this is a really tricky thing– is that I’m, of course, 72, and I’m best known, and my name is totally because of the Godfather films or Apocalypse Now or some movies– The Conversation– that I made 30 years ago. And the truth is that people really don’t know how good movies are until 20 or 30 years goes by so that in those days, I was very unfulfilled because there was so much carping and criticism over many of those films, in fact. Granted, The Godfather was a great success, but if you read the early reviews of it in those papers, you’ll see what they were really saying.

And then, of course, they just trashed Apocalypse and many of the other ones, which today, 30, 40 years later, are considered wonderful masterpieces. Which means that you don’t really get it in your time. I’ve made a couple of little films. Some of them– at least one of them– I think, are really beautiful. But the people are treating them much as they did for the films we just spoke of. And who knows what, in 30 years, they’ll say about them?

ALISON BEARD: Are you working on a film now?

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: There’s always a film in the works. But I am writing, now, a more ambitious personal piece of work that I am at the very beginning of that I feel is more what I’m talking to you about, about wanting to do something personal and fulfilling that starts from scratch, just from my own heart and imagination that’s not based on a book or something. I am writing that now.

ALISON BEARD: And when you’re doing that, do you still stay involved with the wine business?

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: I’m lucky in that I have management that I’ve– whether it’s because of me or because of them– that have been there for now 15, 18 years. As you can imagine, it’s very disruptive when a company changes a CEO or changes some of the key people, and I’ve been lucky to keep them in a good relationship for well over 16 years.

And I know what I’m good, and I know what they’re good at, so I’m able to contribute in the area– it’s more like being a movie director in trying to give them the direction or to try to to break the corporate think and the advertising agency think all the time and try to return it to the true heart of what we’re trying to do with the different products and the company, that it reflects a real personal focus.

The business is personal to me. It’s not a business just to make money. It does make money, but I think it makes money because it’s personal, and the people who are patrons– our customers– they can tell that I’m not doing it– it’s not just a guy that has his name on some products.

ALISON BEARD: Well, Mr. Coppola, thanks so much for joining us.

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: Thank you so much.

ALISON BEARD: That was Francis Ford Coppola. For more, go to hbr.org.