Francis Coppola: The Rolling Stone Interview
Francis Coppola is nothing if not ambitious. In his films, he has defined, re-created and explored the obsessions, passions and contradictions of the American psyche with the grandiosity of vision of the great nineteenth-century American novelists. Each of his three major movies represents a different type of narrative — moving from the historical realism of The Godfather to the nightmarish hallucinations of Apocalypse Now and now to the radiant midsummer night’s dream world of One from the Heart.
As ultimate an American work of art as Robert Frank’s photography book The Americans or the Band’s second album, Coppola’s new film, set in an imaginary Las Vegas, tells the story of Hank, who works at a junkyard called Reality Wreckers, and his live-in girlfriend, Frannie, who works at a travel agency. Breaking up on a Fourth of July weekend, they discover and then go off with their fantasy mates — the circus girl (Nastassia Kinski) and the piano player (Raul Julia) — only to come back to each other at the end.
This archetypal plot, however, is only one of four major elements in the movie, the others being: the haunting score by Tom Waits (Coppola has called his film “a fable with music”), which is sung with wonderful chemistry by Waits and Crystal Gayle; the elaborate lighting and color effects by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (as Frannie walks out on Hank in her classic farewell scene, Storaro changes the Las Vegas street down which the heroine walks from a rainy sunset to dazzling neon night by means of 130 light cues); and the multimillion-dollar set by production designer Dean Tavoularis — a set that conveys the idea of Las Vegas in such an extraordinary way, seeming more real than Las Vegas itself, that it “compels us,” as Shelley said about poetry, “to feel that which we perceive and to imagine that which we know.”
Coppola informs us that he controlled this multilayered film with video monitors, designing and laying it out by electronic simulation (“I made the film spatially rather than linearly,” he says). Because of this high-tech approach, he has been criticized, with Luddite outrage, by several critics who have failed to see how the director’s technological wizardry has been at the service of an inspired fairy-tale narrative. As professor of folk literature Max Luthi writes: “The fairy tale frees things and people from their natural context and places them in new relationships, which can also be easily dissolved . . . . Everything can enter into relationship with everything else: that is the actual miracle and at the same time the simple foregone conclusion in the fairy tale.”
In this sense, we see Hank and Frannie “materializing” their fantasy lovers as a kind of literal wishfulfillment. Or we hear the circus girl telling Hank, “To lose a circus girl, all you have to do is shut your eyes and she’ll disappear,” and then see him close his eyes while we watch her magically vanish before our eyes. And we are always conscious that the more Hank and Frannie appear to be drifting apart, the more we see them superimposed on the screen, prompting the question, “Who is dreaming of whom?,” to which the answer seems to be, “Both, of each other, and their dream is the film.” In One from the Heart, Coppola has created his most graceful, most inventive and wisest work, gently and beautifully reminding us that, in the words of Thoreau, “our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”
The following interview took place at the director’s New York City hotel suite two nights after the January 15th preview of the film at Radio City Music Hall.
The French poet Mallarmé once said, “Everything in the cosmos exists in order to emerge as a Book.” It sounds as if the world, as you see it, exists to end up as a Movie.
I guess my life was meant to end up as a movie in which I try to understand or put together all those big issues about Love and Life and Sex and the Meaning of Life. But that vision is my fun. Each time, you learn. And then, when you do the big project, you can take from everything that you’ve done and all your experiences and figure out how to synthesize.
When I was young, no one ever liked anything I ever wrote, and then I got shy about it, so I started to direct. And people were very impressed with the way I could dazzle them on the stage, because I had been the stage-crew guy who built the scenery and did the lights. And I always had the best show. But I really wanted to be a writer, and I was very hurt by my own opinion that I had no talent. And later in life, I started to realize that, you know, talent shmalent: I wrote stuff. And it didn’t matter whether it was good or bad. It’s like if I made you macaroni tonight and it wasn’t too great, you wouldn’t pick on me, you’d be happy that I tried. And somehow I began to realize that it didn’t matter whether you “had talent,” although in my family, that’s what the issue was.
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