WHO is he?
Influential American screenwriter, filmmaker, producer who has directed over 25 features since his debut in the early sixties. Coppola started out in Roger Corman’s exploitation movie factory, before becoming a successful screenwriter and subsequently launching himself as a hugely popular Hollywood movie director. He has won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival twice for The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979) and also five Academy Awards.
WHAT are his films about?
Themes
The films that Coppola made during the peak of his career show a remarkable proclivity for the theme of loneliness. Characters either isolate themselves voluntarily owing to fear and paranoia or end up alone, thanks to their line of work. But these films, more importantly, are obsessed with the ideas of familial bonding and inheritance — a theme that is complicated by the fact that filmmaking is a familial enterprise for the Coppolas themselves. Family is both a bastion against disruptive external threat and its own oppressor.
Style
Coppola has been widely recognised as a versatile filmmaker who, instead of possessing a fixed style as his acclaimed contemporaries such as Scorsese and Spielberg, adapts his style to the needs of the material. His films of the seventies are characterised by tonally integral and measured narration, visual palettes dominated by a single colour, deep space compositions with strategic use of décor and architecture, a preference for strong contrasts, dramatic editing patterns involving cross cutting, intricate sound design, use of existing classical and popular music and a general aesthetic restraint typically forgone in groundbreaking films of the period.
WHY is he of interest?
Coppola all but fell off the critical radar after Apocalypse Now and his works since have been largely shrugged off. But his shape-shifting, multi-phase career — from writing and making B-movies, to scriptwriting for major studio productions, to directing them, to moving away from the industry to make small, personal pictures, to getting bankrupt, to making a comeback to cinema with even more independent features — is an astonishing example of continuous artistic reinvention.
WHERE to discover him?
Sandwiched between the supremely popular Godfather movies, The Conversation (1974) is arguably the zenith of Coppola’s filmmaking. Centred on a super-reticent, paranoid surveillance expert (Gene Hackman), whose grip on reality loosens and the antiseptic, amoral bubble progressively crumbles, the film is a terrific exploration of late capitalist paranoia in the tradition of Polanski’s Repulsion and Antonioni’s Blow Up .
