#francis coppola

Francis Coppola on the set of Apocalypse Now

“Nothing is so terrible as a pretentious movie. I mean, a movie that aspires for something really terrific and doesn’t pull it off is shit, it’s scum. And everyone will walk on it as such. And that’s what poor filmmakers, in a way, that’s their greatest horror, to be pretentious.

So here you are, on one hand, trying to aspire to really do something. And on the other hand, you’re not allowed to be pretentious. And finally you say, fuck it. I don’t care if i’m pretentious or if I’m not pretentious or if I’ve done it or I haven’t done it. All I know is that I am going to see this movie. And that for me it has to have some answers. And by ‘answers’ I don’t mean just a punchline. Answers on about forty seven different levels.

And it’s very hard to talk about these things without being very corny. You use a word like self-purgation or epiphany, they think you’re either a religious weirdo or an asshole college professor. But those are the words for the process. This transmutation, this renaissance, this rebirth, which is the basis of all life.

The one rule that all man, from the time they were first walking around looking up at the sun, scratching around for food and an animal to kill, the first concept that, I feel, got into their head was the idea of life and death. That the sun went down and the sun went up. That the crop, when they learned how to make a crop, it died. In the winter, everything died. The first man, he must have thought, 'Oh my God, it’s the end of the world!’ And then all of a sudden, there was spring, and everything came alive, and it was better.

I mean after all, look at Vietnam. Look at my movie. You’ll see what I’m talking.”

Francis Coppola talking about life and death on the set of his film, Apocalypse Now, in 1977. My favourite scene from the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse