2024-08-05 16:16:32
Megalopolis, a sci-fi epic that director Francis Ford Coppola spent four decades in the making, is often referred to as a manifestation of folly, a masterpiece, and a disaster. It had its world premiere at the Cannes festival, and will go to Czech cinemas in the fall. You can shorten the wait with the book Journey to Paradise. He colorfully describes that risky ventures where money and health are at stake have always been the domain of the eighty-five-year-old filmmaker.
“Coppola had the actors shoot live bullets,” reads one of the many incredible pieces of information about the filming of Apocalypse. American journalist Sam Wasson pours them on us from the front pages. The seasoned author of several books on the behind-the-scenes of Hollywood knows how to draw the reader into the story. After a short prologue, he plunges straight into the heart of the Philippine jungle, where a generous parable inspired by the war in Vietnam and the book Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad was created in the late 1970s.
Many legends surround the production of Apocalypse. Francis Ford Coppola is said to have been hiding from the crew in an inactive volcano. The temperatures were so extreme that his stash of cocaine leaked. Actor Martin Sheen almost went insane during the filming of the opening scene and later suffered a heart attack. The creators borrowed the helicopters from the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who used them to suppress the rebellion in the meantime.
Wasson does not try to disprove the stories, made famous by the documentary Heart of Darkness. He conceived his story about an influential filmmaker, which was published by the Universum publishing house and stylistically balanced into Czech by Iva Hejlíčková and Michael Málek, as a wildly flowing stream of thoughts and scenes. The biography, with a comic book cover and a title derived from Dante’s Divine Comedy, is based on hundreds of hours of original interviews, but it is not a serious, let alone an academic, historiographical work. With its non-linear structure and the amount of direct speech, The Road to Paradise is closer to a novel, in the center of which stands one uncompromising visionary.
Instead of chronologically retelling Coppola’s life, the author chooses a few key moments of his career and describes them with a detail that is sometimes fascinating and sometimes tedious. In doing so, he outlines how the director of the films The Godfather or The Conversation lives, thinks and works. In addition to numerous interviews, he uses unprecedented access to Coppola’s archive.
The boldest utopia
The line connecting the individual episodes tells the story of the San Francisco production company American Zoetrope.
According to legend, Francis Ford Coppola hid from the crew in a dormant volcano while filming Apocalypse. | Photo: Profimedia.cz
Coppola founded it in the late 1960s as an experimental playground for himself and peers such as George Lucas or Walter Murch, who were fed up with the production model of Hollywood studios. They wanted to initiate personal projects outside the system. In addition to “film brats”, as the rising generation of American directors is called, the company offered a background to foreign authors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa or Wim Wenders.
Wasson presents American Zoetrope as the first and boldest of Coppola’s utopias. It was a community fantasy to give power back to artists, push technological innovations like multi-channel audio, and thrive. The last one was the worst for her.
After Apocalypse, Coppola wanted to try something different. The film One from the Heart was supposed to be a modern tribute to the Technicolor musicals of the 40s and 50s. During production, however, one of the main sponsors withdrew, and the desperate director had to mortgage his eight million dollar estate to complete the expensive work.
The artistically dazzling experiment from 1981 nevertheless failed in cinemas. For American Zoetrope, the failure was almost fatal. Coppola retreated to smaller and commissioned pictures in the following years. In the new conditions, he could not do otherwise. The staggering sales of Jaws or Star Wars have redirected Hollywood’s interest from original works to giant spectacles with the potential to resonate with many associated products across the entertainment market.
Coppola’s film Apocalypse was last returned to Czech cinemas by the distribution company Aerofilms. | Video: Aerofilms
Triumph in Cannes
Wasson depicts a slice of Coppola’s career framed precisely by the rise and fall of American Zoetrope. Meanwhile, we witness many smaller personal and professional successes or crises. At the same time, film and private life constantly influence each other. The stressful filming of Apocalypse almost costs the protagonist his marriage to his wife Eleanor, who, in addition to his mood swings, also has to endure his numerous extramarital affairs.
After a nightmare in the Philippines and a grueling post-production where the artist’s perfectionism is on full display, Apocalypse is finished anyway and Coppola is taking it to Cannes.
The atmosphere in the festival palace after the lights were switched on is described by Sam Wasson with a characteristic sense of drama: “The silence in the palace lasted. A second. Two seconds. Three seconds. Then an eruption, a standing ovation, disbelief, crowd frenzy, spotlights in the sky…”.
The alternation of numbing depression with moments of absolute happiness is clearly the underlying dynamic of both Coppola’s adventurous fate and Wasson’s compelling book. As if there was nothing ordinary, average in the life of the directing dreamer.
The successes he experienced changed his position, but at the same time he took enormous risks. The publication also presents intimate family moments with daughter Sofia Coppola, today’s acclaimed author of films such as Lost in Translation, as emotional melodramas.
If anyone thought that Coppola’s life would be made into a movie, Road to Paradise will make it much easier. The flashback structure, building tension, strategically placed twists and vivid style with an eye for telling details, reflecting the director’s manic energy, are perfect for this. According to one of Wasson’s earlier books, dedicated to the director Bob Fosse, a Fosse/Verdon miniseries has already been created.
Francis Ford Coppola never stopped looking for ways to live and create big. The picture is from the filming of Apocalypse. | Photo: American Zoetrope
No monument
The book would be a suitable basis for a screenplay for one more reason. For all the grandiose talk about how “no one has ventured on greater adventures, no one has experimented more, and no one has been more influential,” he does not create a cult of personality. It shows Coppola as a man who is brimming with self-confidence, but constantly questioning and reinventing himself and the possibilities of cinema.
It is clear from dozens of incidents that it was not only the mistrust of investors that prevented him from fulfilling some grandiose visions. He can also blame his irascible nature, scatterbrain, disorganization and untamed ego. The budget of the film One from the Heart was enormous also because of the modest fee for the director. The five-Oscar winner continued to host lavish parties for star friends, even though his company was headed for bankruptcy and he had to lay off employees.
Where does Francis Ford Coppola belong in the history of cinema and whether he really set out to change the rules of Hollywood will probably be judged more soberly by film historians over time.
Sam Wasson wrote a mostly entertaining book about a man who never stopped looking for ways to live and create big. Sometimes he gave up his own house for this, sometimes his life or his prosperous winery. He sacrificed that to make Megalopolis.
Wasson arrives at the site of this project at the end of the book. He becomes a direct witness of how Coppola fulfills his apparently last utopian dream for 120 million dollars, i.e. almost three billion crowns. He’s not yelling at the actors this time. There is no panic on the set. There is no threat of typhoon or civil war. The filmmaker, who has moved between extremes all his life, finally radiates peace and a sense of fulfillment.
It sounds like an overly ideal denouement, but Sam Wasson, like Francis Ford Coppola and other talented storytellers, understands that reality sometimes has to give way to story.
Sam Wasson: Road to Paradise – Story by Francis Ford Coppola
(Translated by Iva Hejlíčková and Michael Málek)
Publishing house Universum 2024, 360 pages, 459 crowns