A biography for Francis Ford Coppolahasn’t been written yet.
“I had to get a job, and of course, the job was 'The Godfather.' That made me be something I didn't know I was going to be. I became a big-shot director.”
“Lots of people have criticized my movies, but nobody has ever identified the real problem: I'm a sloppy filmmaker.”
“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 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.”
“I like simplicity; I don't need luxury.”
“The essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy.”
“I was a pretty shy, lonely kid. I blossomed about age 17, when I went to college.”
“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.”
“We do things for good reasons that are bad.”
“The only TV I would be interested in exploring would be live television. There's no substitute for a team of artists performing at their peak live when failure is possible. It's a high-wire act. That excites me.”
“I was raised as a Catholic, but I didn't like the Catholic Church at all. I thought the nuns were mean.”
“I believe that filmmaking - as, probably, is everything - is a game you should play with all your cards, and all your dice, and whatever else you've got. So, each time I make a movie, I give it everything I have. I think everyone should, and I think everyone should do everything they do that way.”
“Most filmmakers can't afford to try something out that doesn't work.”
“I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini.”
“We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn't speak Italian in the house. We were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music, ate Italian food.”
“That's part of the requirement for me to be an artist is that you're trying to share your personal existence with others and trying to illuminate modern life, trying to understand life.”
“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.”
“The whole reason one wants to do lower budget films is because the lower the budget, the bigger the ideas, the bigger the themes, the more interesting the art.”
“When that happens - when risk is taken and the filmmakers dive into the subject matter without a parachute - very often what you get it something with those qualities that make it age well with the public.”
“I think it's better to be overly ambitious and fail than to be underambitious and succeed in a mundane way. I have been very fortunate. I failed upward in my life!”