1970–1979: Breakthrough and acclaim
Coppola co-wrote the script for Patton starting in 1963 along with Edmund H. North. This earned him his first Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. However, it was not easy for Coppola to convince Franklin J. Schaffner that the opening scene would work. Coppola later revealed in an interview,
I wrote the script of Patton. And the script was very controversial when I wrote it, because they thought it was so stylized. It was supposed to be like, sort of, you know, The Longest Day. And my script of Patton was—I was sort of interested in the reincarnation. And I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I wasn't fired, but I was fired, meaning that when the script was done, they said, "Okay, thank you very much," and they went and hired another writer and that script was forgotten. And I remember very vividly this long, kind of being raked over the coals for this opening scene.
When the title role was offered to George C. Scott, he remembered having read Coppola's screenplay earlier. He stated flatly that he would accept the part only if they used Coppola's script. "Scott is the one who resurrected my version," said Coppola.
The movie opens with Scott's rendering of Patton's famous military "Pep Talk" to members of the Third Army, set against a huge American flag. Coppola and North had to tone down Patton's actual language to avoid an R rating; in the opening monologue, the word "fornicating" replaced "fucking" when criticizing The Saturday Evening Post. Over the years, this opening monologue has become an iconic scene and has spawned parodies in numerous films, political cartoons, and television shows.
The Godfather (1972) was a turning point in Coppola's career. However, he faced several difficulties while filming. Paramount had owned the rights to Mario Puzo's novel, about an Italian-American mafia family, for several years. Coppola was not Paramount's first choice to direct; Sergio Leone was initially offered the job but declined in order to direct his own gangster opus, Once Upon a Time in America. Robert Evans wanted the picture to be directed by an Italian American to make it "ethnic to the core". Evans' chief assistant Peter Bart suggested Coppola, as a director of Italian ancestry who would work for a low sum and budget after the poor reception of The Rain People. Coppola initially turned down the job because he found Puzo's novel sleazy and sensationalist, describing it as "pretty cheap stuff". At the time, Coppola's studio American Zoetrope owed over $400,000 to Warner Bros. for budget overruns on THX 1138 and, when coupled with his poor financial standing, along with advice from friends and family, Coppola reversed his initial decision and took the job.
Coppola was officially announced as director of the film on September 28, 1970. He agreed to receive $125,000 and six percent of the gross rentals. Coppola later found a deeper theme for the material and decided it should be not just be a film about organized crime, but also a family saga and a metaphor for capitalism in America. The story follows the Corleone family as patriarch Vito Corleone passes the reins of power to his son Michael. There was disagreement between Paramount and Coppola on casting; Coppola wanted to cast Marlon Brando as Vito, though Paramount wanted either Ernest Borgnine or Danny Thomas. Orson Welles was also considered. At one point, Coppola was told by the then-president of Paramount that "Marlon Brando will never appear in this motion picture." After pleading with the executives, Coppola was allowed to cast Brando only if he appeared in the film for much less money than his previous films, would perform a screen test, and put up a bond saying that he would not cause a delay in the production (as he had done on previous film sets). Coppola chose Brando over Borgnine on the basis of Brando's screen test, which also won over the Paramount leadership. Coppola would later recall: The Godfather was a very unappreciated movie when we were making it. They were very unhappy with it. They didn't like the cast. They didn't like the way I was shooting it. I was always on the verge of getting fired. So it was an extremely nightmarish experience. I had two little kids, and the third one was born during that. We lived in a little apartment, and I was basically frightened that they didn't like it. They had as much as said that, so when it was all over I wasn't at all confident that it was going to be successful, and that I'd ever get another job.
The film was a critical and commercial success, setting the box office record. Pauline Kael wrote: Coppola, a young director who has never had a big hit, may have done the movie for money, as he claims—in order to make the pictures he really wants to make, he says—but this picture was made at peak capacity. He has salvaged Puzo’s energy and lent the narrative dignity. Given the circumstances and the rush to complete the film and bring it to market, Coppola has not only done his best but pushed himself farther than he may realize. The movie is on the heroic scale of earlier pictures on broad themes, such as On the Waterfront, From Here to Eternity, and The Nun’s Story. It offers a wide, startlingly vivid view of a Mafia dynasty. The abundance is from the book; the quality of feeling is Coppola’s ... The direction is tenaciously intelligent. Coppola holds on and pulls it all together. The trash novel is there underneath, but he attempts to draw the patterns out of the particulars. It’s amazing how encompassing the view seems to be—what a sense you get of a broad historical perspective, considering that the span is only from 1945 to the mid-fifties, at which time the Corleone family, already forced by competitive pressures into dealing in narcotics, is moving its base of operations to Las Vegas.
In addition to Brando, the film starred Al Pacino, James Caan, John Cazale and Robert Duvall. It featured Richard Castellano, Sterling Hayden, Diane Keaton and Coppola's sister Talia Shire. Brando won the Academy Award for Best Actor, which he refused to accept. The film won Best Picture and the Best Adapted Screenplay. Coppola was nominated for Best Director but lost to Bob Fosse for Cabaret. For the score, Coppola commissioned Nino Rota, who had scored many Fellini films. Gordon Willis's chiaroscuro cinematography was acclaimed, as was Dean Tavoularis's period production design.
The film routinely ranks near the top of polls for the greatest movies ever. It was ranked third, behind Citizen Kane (1941) and Casablanca (1942), on the American Film Institute's inaugural AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list in 1997. In 2007, it had moved to second place, ahead of Casablanca and behind Kane. David Thomson writes that "The Godfather deserved all its success because it had the nerve to take its 175 minutes slowly ... It has a calm faith in narrative control that had not been current in Hollywood for twenty years. It was like a film of the forties in its nostalgic decor; its command of great supporting actors; in Gordon Willis's bold exploration of a film noir in color; and in its fascination with evil."
The Conversation (1974) further cemented Coppola's reputation. It was influenced by Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966) and generated much interest when news leaked that it featured the same surveillance and wire-tapping equipment that members of the Nixon administration used to spy on political opponents in the Watergate scandal. Coppola claimed that this was purely coincidental, as the script for The Conversation was completed in the mid-1960s. However, audiences interpreted the film as a reaction to Watergate and its fallout. It stars Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, "the best bugger on the West Coast", hired to spy on a young couple played by Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest. It features Cazale as his partner, Stan. The movie was a critical success and won Coppola his first Palme d'Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. The film received three Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Sound. Coppola's brother-in-law David Shire wrote the score and Walter Murch edited the picture, as Coppola started work on his next project.
The Godfather Part II is both prequel and sequel to the first film, telling parallel stories of the rise of young Vito Corleone and the fall of his son Michael. After its five-hour-long preview, George Lucas told Coppola, "You have two films. Take one away, it doesn't work." Coppola claims it was the first major motion picture to use "Part II" in its title; he was influenced by Sergei Eisenstein's two-part Ivan the Terrible. Paramount was initially opposed to his decision to name the movie The Godfather Part II. According to Coppola, the studio's objection stemmed from the belief that audiences would be reluctant to see a film with such a title, as the audience would supposedly believe that, having already seen The Godfather, there was little reason to see an addition to the original film. However, the success of The Godfather Part II began the Hollywood tradition of numbered sequels.
The movie received tremendous critical acclaim, with many deeming it superior to its predecessor. Kael wrote: Coppola has plunged us back into the sensuality and terror of the first film. And, with the relentlessness of a master, he goes farther and farther. The daring of Part II is that it enlarges the scope and deepens the meaning of the first film ... The first film covered the period from 1945 to the mid-fifties. Part II, contrasting the early manhood of Vito (played by Robert De Niro) with the life of Michael, his inheritor (Al Pacino), spans almost seventy years. We saw only the middle of the story in the first film; now we have the beginning and the end. Structurally, the completed work is nothing less than the rise and decay of an American dynasty of unofficial rulers ... Part II has the same mythic and operatic visual scheme as the first; once again the cinematographer is Gordon Willis. Visually the film is, however, far more complexly beautiful than the first, just as it’s thematically richer, more shadowed, more full. Willis’s workmanship has developed, like Coppola’s; even the sequences in the sunlight have deep tones — elegiac yet lyrical, as in The Conformist, and always serving the narrative, as the Nino Rota score also does.
In addition to Pacino, Cazale, Duvall, Keaton and Shire reprised their roles from the first film. Newcomers included Michael V. Gazzo and Pacino's mentor Lee Strasberg. The Godfather Part II was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won six, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director. De Niro won Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Vito, making him and Brando the first actors to win Oscars for playing the same character. The film ranked at No. 32 on AFI's inaugural 100 Years...100 Movies list, maintaining its position ten years later. It is ranked No. 1 on TV Guide's "50 Best Movies of All Time" and at No. 7 on Entertainment Weekly's list of the "100 Greatest Movies of All Time". Together, the two Godfathers placed at No. 4 on Sight & Sound's 2002 list of the ten greatest films of all time. Thomson writes that "it exhibited a mastery of so many periods and locations as to be entrancing." It was one of the last major American motion pictures to be filmed in Technicolor.
Following the success of The Godfather, The Conversation and The Godfather Part II, Coppola began filming Apocalypse Now, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) set in Cambodia during the Vietnam War. It follows Willard (Martin Sheen) as he journeys upriver to find and assassinate the rogue Kurtz (Brando). The production in the Philippines was plagued by numerous problems, including typhoons, nervous breakdowns, the firing of Harvey Keitel, Sheen's heart attack, Brando arriving overweight and unprepared and extras from the Philippine military and half of the supplied helicopters leaving in the middle of scenes to fight rebels. It was delayed so often it was nicknamed Apocalypse When?
Apocalypse Now premiered at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where Coppola made grandiose claims, among them: "My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam." Despite such pronouncements, and complaints from critics that the film's message was confused, it shared the Palme d'Or with Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum and won Oscars for Best Cinematography (Vittorio Storaro) and Best Sound (Murch, Mark Berger, Richard Beggs and Nat Boxer.) Roger Ebert wrote:
In his book The Films of My Life, the French director François Truffaut made a curious statement. He used to believe, he says, that a successful film had to simultaneously express "an idea of the world and an idea of cinema." But now, he writes, "I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse."
It may seem strange to begin a review of Franics Coppola's Apocalypse Now with those words, but consider them for a moment and they apply perfectly to this sprawling film. The critics who have rejected Coppola's film mostly did so on Truffaut's earlier grounds; they have arguments with the ideas about the world and the war in Apocalypse Now ... Like all great works of art about war, Apocalypse Now essentially contains only one idea or message, the not-especially enlightening observation that war is hell. We do not go to see Coppola's movie for that reason—something Coppola, but not some of his critics, knows well. Coppola also knows well (and demonstrated in the Godfather films) that movies aren't especially good at dealing with abstract ideas—for those you'd be better turning to the written word—but they are superb for presenting moods and feelings, the look of a battle, the expression of a face, the mood of a country. Apocalypse Now achieves greatness not by analyzing our "experience" in Vietnam, but by re-creating, in characters and images, something of that experience.
An example: the scene in which Robert Duvall, as a crazed lieutenant colonel, leads his troops in a helicopter assault on a village is, quite simply, the best movie battle scene ever filmed. It's simultaneously numbing, depressing and exhilarating: as the rockets jar from the helicopters and spring through the air, we're elated like kids for a half second, until the reality of the consequences sinks in...
What's great in this film, and what will make it live for many years and speak to many audiences, is what Coppola achieves on the level Truffaut was discussing: the moments of agony and joy in making cinema. Some of those moments come at the same time; remember again the helicopter assault and its unsettling mixture of horror and exhilaration. Remember the weird beauty of the massed helicopters lifting over the trees in long shot, and the insane power of Wagner's music, played loudly during the attack, and you feel what Coppola was getting at: those moments as common in life as art, when the whole huge grand mystery of the world, so beautiful, so terrible, seems to hang in the balance.
The film's reputation has grown and it is now regarded by many as a masterpiece of the New Hollywood and is frequently cited as one of the greatest movies ever made, ranking at Number 19 on the 2022 Sight and Sound poll. For the film, Murch was the first person to receive a credit as a Sound Designer.
The documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991), directed by George Hickenlooper, Fax Bahr and Francis's wife, Eleanor Coppola, who was present through the production, chronicles the difficulties the crew went through making Apocalypse Now and features behind-the-scenes footage filmed by Eleanor. Coppola famously stated, "We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment and little by little, we went insane."
