Tag: francis ford coppola

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A scene from Francis Ford Coppola's "Megadoc," as reviewed by poet/critic Zeke Yu for the automachination literary magazine, depicting the director looking up with his hands in the air, against the soft orange glow of a lamp and home library.

Non sum qualis eram: on Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megadoc” (2025)

Watching Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024) was a strange experience. On the one hand, to see one of America’s greatest directors still at work, flourishing a mostly self-financed, original work of art to the public was genuinely encouraging. On the other hand, witnessing such an ungainly, out-of-step vision progress to its bizarre conclusion seemed also a reminder of how, generally speaking, artists tend to lose expressive power as they age, and that not every personal passion project is necessarily worth sharing with the world, prior filmography be damned.

However, when you’ve directed The Godfather Trilogy, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now, the only tangible difficulties in the way of getting your movie produced are, by and large, logistical. That is not to say that Megalopolis had an easy development process: Coppola conceived of the story in the 70s and, after casting switch-ups, complicated financing arrangements, and the working-out of his own bugbears regarding the project, began legitimate principal photography in 2022! But that is to say, if you are Francis Ford Coppola, if you want to get a movie made, odds are it will get made—so most of the gushing about how incredible it was, circa the 2024 premiere of Megalopolis, that a director of his age and reputation released a highly idiosyncratic, genre-defying movie in this world of shameless IP-regurgitation seemed a tad overdone. After all, most aspiring artists have some kind of idiosyncratic vision they want to put out, but most aspiring artists don’t also own multi-million dollar wine and resort companies to fall back on if major studios reject your proposals. […]

Film by Marc Magill
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A stylized shot of Gene Hackman from The Conversation by Francis Ford Coppola

Fastidious Vice: On Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” (1974)

Francis Ford Coppola gained his reputation through fastidiousness and dedication. Hearts of Darkness, the explosive behind-the-scenes documentary made partly in parallel and then in retrospect with Apocalypse Now, portrays a director with vision, but one wrestling with his own ego, pretentiousness and darker nature. His obsessive tendencies towards filmmaking are evident in a lot of his earlier works, culminating in Apocalypse Now, after which his filmog descends into nothing but laissez-faire mediocrity and stunning failure. This dramatic rise and fall could, and has been, attributed to the nightmarish production of the aforementioned Conrad reinterpretation.

The Conversation is an achievement foremost as a work of character insight, with Gene Hackman delivering a formidable performance as Harry Caul. Caul is an engineer who considers himself an artisan. His field is surveillance – specifically, the recording of dialogue between guilty parties. We open with him organising an impressive feat of monitoring on a young couple in a bustling city square, who seem to be concerned that the woman’s jealous and influential husband will off them if he ever finds out about their infidelity. The contract is for said jealous husband. Through using a sniper-scope and directional microphone, and several actors and hidden bugs, Harry manages to capture the damning evidence. […]