Zitat des Tages von Francis Ford Coppola:
Everything I do is personal. I have never made a movie that didn't have very strong personal resonance.
The time a movie is made is unique, not only from the talent that is available but if the public was ready for it.
Films and hotels have many aspects that are the same. For example, there is always a big vision, an idea.
We do things for good reasons that are bad.
I bring to my life a certain amount of mess.
When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.
I remember growing up with television, from the time it was just a test pattern, with maybe a little bit of programming once in a while.
A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually.
When I was about 9, I had polio, and people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while, so I watched television.
They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family.
I always found the film world unpleasant. It's all about the schedule, and never really flew for me.
I don't go on set with an army of people because the most expensive elements of a movie production are the plane tickets, the hotel rooms, food and gasoline. If you're willing to discover new colleagues in the place that you are, you can save a ton of money.
I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini.
It's ironic that at age 32, at probably the greatest moment of my career, with The Godfather having such an enormous success, I wasn't even aware of it, because I was somewhere else under the deadline again.
The stuff that I got in trouble for, the casting for The Godfather or the flag scene in Patton, was the stuff that was remembered, and was considered the good work.
I was always the black sheep of the family and always told that I was dumb, and I had a low IQ and did badly in school.
Art depends on luck and talent.
I was the kind of kid that had some talents or ability, but it never came out in school.
In kindergarten that used to be my job, to tell them fairytales. I liked Hans Christian Andersen, and the Grimm fairy tales, all the classic fairy tales.
I had a heartbreaking experience when I was 9. I always wanted to be a guard. The most wonderful girl in the world was a guard. When I got polio and then went back to school, they made me a guard. A teacher took away my guard button.
I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.
When newspapers started to publish the box office scores of movies, I was horrified. Those results are totally fake because they never include the promotion budget.
Without a doubt, I was born to want to make cinema, but the kind of cinema I want to make is not like commercial movies, which I enjoy myself, but I wanted to be the kind of filmmaker who wrote original work, sort of like a novelist would who deals with who we are and our times or our relationships.
I like to work in the morning. I like to sometimes go to a place where I'm all alone where I'm not going to get a phone call early that hurts my feelings, because once my feelings are hurt, I'm dead in the water.
Frank Capra was a prop man, I think. John Ford was a prop man. It was a little bit of a father and son thing, and you kind of worked your way up.
My family were symphonic musicians and in the opera. Also, it was my era, the love of radio. We used to listen to the radio at night, close our eyes and see movies far more beautiful than you can photograph.
When a movie is about to come out on its initial debut, there are a lot of people involved - the financiers, the studio and the producers and also, many times, the foreign distributors. So it is a time of tremendous pressure and uncertainty.
I became quite successful very young, and it was mainly because I was so enthusiastic and I just worked so hard at it.
You ought to love what you're doing because, especially in a movie, over time you really will start to hate it.
I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.
I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten.
The professional world was much more unpleasant than I thought. I was always wishing I could get back that enthusiasm I had when I was doing shows at college.
I just admire people like Woody Allen, who every year writes an original screenplay. It's astonishing. I always wished that I could do that.
I associate my motion picture career more with being unhappy and scared, or being under the gun, than with anything pleasant.
You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you'll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost.
I've been offered lots of movies. There's always some actor who's doing a project and would like to have me do it.