Francis Ford Coppola Quote
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About Francis Ford Coppola
Coppola started his career directing The Rain People (1969) and co-writing Patton (1970), the latter of which earned him and Edmund H. North the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Coppola's reputation as a filmmaker was cemented with the release of The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) which both earned Academy Awards for Best Picture, and the latter earned him Best Director. The films revolutionized the gangster genre. Coppola released the thriller The Conversation (1974), which received the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
His next film, the Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now (1979), had a notoriously lengthy and strenuous production and also won the Palme d'Or, making Coppola one of only ten filmmakers to have won the award twice. He later directed films such as The Outsiders and Rumble Fish (both 1983), The Cotton Club (1984), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), The Godfather Part III (1990), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), and The Rainmaker (1997). He also produced American Graffiti (1973), The Black Stallion (1979), and The Secret Garden (1993). Dissatisfaction with the studio system led to his retreat to independent and experimental filmmaking with the films Youth Without Youth (2007), Tetro (2009) and Twixt (2011), culminating in the $120 million-budgeted Megalopolis (2024) which he financed himself.
Coppola's father Carmine was a composer whose music featured in his son's films. Many of his relatives have found success in film: his sister Talia Shire is an actress, his daughter Sofia is a director, his son Roman is a screenwriter and his nephews Jason Schwartzman and Nicolas Cage are actors. In 1997, he cofounded the literary magazine Zoetrope: All Story with Adrienne Brodeur. Coppola resides in Napa, California, and since the 2010s has been a vintner, owning a family-branded winery of his own. In 2024, Coppola was a Kennedy Center Honoree.