Francis Ford Coppola Biography
Francis Ford Coppola was born on April 7, 1939 in Detroit and spent part of his adolescence in New York, where his father played the flute in the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Coppola developed a passion for cinema at the age of ten, when he began using an 8 millimeter camera. His mother, a former actress, encouraged him to enroll in the Drama School at Hofstra College. In 1960, he moved to Los Angeles to take film courses at the University of California.
Coppola made his first attempt to break into the commercial circuit with soft porn, “Tonight for Sure” (1962) and subsequently wrote the screenplay for “Paris Brûle-t-il?” (1966) by René Clément, and “This Property Is Condemned” (1966) by Sydney Pollack, both notable successes. In 1966, Coppola directed the adolescent film “You're a Big Boy Now”. Thanks to the intuition of producer Robert Evans, Coppola was entrusted with the direction of "The Godfather" (1972) in which he transformed the mafia saga created by Mario Puzo into a Shakespearean tragedy and into the extraordinary metaphor of a violent society that renounces its values to achieve success and power.
With “The Conversation” (1974), Coppola won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and in 1974 he directed the second part of “The Godfather” (1974) in which he recounts the rise of the young Don Vito, one of the first significant films by Robert De Niro, in a poor but lively Little Italy, in parallel with the life of his son Michael in a rich and desperate Nevada. Overall, the director creates a new masterpiece in which the reflection on capitalist society continues within an only apparently genre cinema.
In 1982, Coppola constructed a musical with “One from the Heart” which proved to be a colossal critical and commercial failure. Reacting to the disappointment, Coppola directed two films in a few months, based on the very popular novels by SE Hinton, but both "The Outsiders" (1983) and "Rumble Fish" (1983) achieved lower-than-expected results.
Among the most interesting films he has produced in recent times are “Mary Shelley's Frankenstein” (1994), “Don Juan DeMarco” (1995) and “Sleepy Hollow” (1999). Coppola contributed to the renewal of Hollywood cinema thanks to his innovative choices in the ways of producing films and their technology. His films can be counted among the most mature results of the so-called New Hollywood.
