From Coppola's heart
August 16, 2006

Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola was true to his outspoken nature in a Q&A with film students last Tuesday at a DVD release party for Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier, the latest digital configuration of his 1979 Vietnam opus.

After sitting through a longish hour of selected clips from the more than five hours of bonus materials on the DVD, Coppola took the stage at the Director’s Guild of America to answer questions, noting at the start that he was the one who suggested showing DVD extras rather than the three-hour movie.

 “I don’t think that I could sit through the movie again in my life,” he simply said.

During the Q&A, Coppola said some stories and claims from his wife Eleanor Coppola’s 1991 film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmakers Apocalypse, the acclaimed feature-length doc about Apocalypse’s legendarily hellish production, weren’t true or were taken out of context. He went as far as saying he might consider doing a commentary for a future DVD release of Hearts to refute some of it.

And he’s no fan of the Godfather videogame from Paramount and Electronic Arts. Coppola said he wasn’t in favor of it, mostly because he wasn’t brought in and asked to participate until the game had already been made, complete with Marlon Brando voiceovers.

“I told them not to connect my name to it,” he said, adding that he hoped it had flopped. Told by an audience member it was coming out on Xbox 360, Coppola said “It’s the same game, so that won’t make it better.” --contributed by Jennifer Netherby

Posted by on August 16, 2006 | Comments (1)