In the Aug. 28, 2006 issue of Time magazine, Francis Ford Coppola answers ten questions. There were two thoughts that I thought were especially worth passing along:
"The ideal way to work on a project is to ask a question you don't know the answer to."
That stands in sharp contrast to a lot of Hollywood movies, where you can tell even from the title that they knew the answer and that you'll know it, too, within the first five minutes of the film.
His other thought is about doing what you can rather than waiting. He says, "I had been hitting my head against the wall for six years on a big, ambitious project, and I realized, well, even if I get this thing where I like it, who's gonna wanna make a movie that's so unusual? It's like being in love with a woman who doesn't want you. So I thought, well, I'll do what Sofia [his daughter, who made Lost in Translation] did and make a more modest film that I can just go out and do."
The film to which he refers is Youth Without Youth, scheduled to come out in 2007. The theme is that of artists who do great work when they are young but then cannot repeat that level of work later in their lives. Obviously a theme of personal importance to the man whose finest hour so far is The Godfather (or maybe Apocalypse Now).
The website for the film is www.ywyfilm.com. It includes a diary, unfortunately containing only a few entries, in which Coppola muses on this a bit and then concludes: "I've begun to think that the only sensible way to deal with this dilemma is to become young again, to forget everything I know and try to have the mind of a student. To re-invent myself by forgetting I ever had any film career at all, and instead to dream about having one."
