Francis Ford Coppola on Cinema: “I feel like there’s a wonderful cinema in the future.”

9 Responses to Francis Ford Coppola on Cinema: “I feel like there’s a wonderful cinema in the future.”

1. mutecypher says:

   December 17, 2015 at 1:13 pm

   Very interesting thoughts on using sports camera techniques to create live cinema. “I’m ready for my overhead camera fly by, Mr. DeMille.”

   There’s a Chuck Palahniuk comment to the effect that God only kills us when we are boring. I’m flashing on god-like directors and actors fighting to get camera attention. Not so much different from now, I suppose.

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   • mutecypher says:

     December 17, 2015 at 1:24 pm

     The notion of film studios being owned by Facebook and Yahoo is not an especially comforting one. I was a bit surprised that he didn’t talk about Netflix or Amazon of Hulu as distribution means: one could imagine them streaming content to theaters and gigantic screens as much as they do to homes, TVs and handheld devices.

     I do like that an old guy believes that the future of cinema is going to be pretty cool, even if we need to deal with the Chinese love of action movies skewing things.

     On the other hand, everyone’s best film of the year was Mad Max: Fury Road. I could swallow down something that good and action-y several times a year.

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   • mutecypher says:

     December 17, 2015 at 1:53 pm

     Also, his long form cinema idea – I would like to hear him talk about how that would be different from a series with an extended arc. I wonder how he views that as a separate things.

     Reply
   • sheila says:

     December 18, 2015 at 7:48 am

     Yeah, I think film language is one of those things that needs to be (and is) constantly challenged. Who says that certain things won’t work, or “aren’t done”? Who made up the rules?

     That’s what the French New Wave did. They changed cinema. They had great reverence for the past – even more reverence than the Americans did for their own B-picture past – but the new-ness of the French’s approach not only seemed modern – but it was somehow a continuum with the past. (Those films made Americans re-claim an almost shameful part of their culture – the so-called schlocky gangster/genre pictures. Suddenly they seemed cool again.)

     The French New Wave made people re-consider the old assumptions about what worked/didn’t work. Godard wasn’t really a financial hit here – he was an arthouse darling – but his impact was wide and far-reaching. Same with Truffaut and Bresson and Rohmer and all the rest of them.

     Films that mess with chronology also challenge assumptions. Sometimes these things don’t work – other times they seem revelatory. (And then of course come the imitators – who don’t really know WHY Godard used jump-cuts – they’re imitating Godard rather than coming to it organically … and so their films start to feel stale, pale imitators.)

     It’s a cycle that is never-ending.

     I really like his thoughts on 3D.

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2. mutecypher says:

   December 17, 2015 at 11:40 pm

   Coppola’s “I just want to make a stream of what I’m thinking, what I’m feeling. Maybe for me, cinema will just be one long project and maybe I’m making only one more film, but it will go on and on and change and go into this and go into that.” made me think of this quote from the computer scientist David Gelertner (a victim of the Unabomber) “A life is a sequence of events in time. The future of information management is narrative information management, in which all of your stored documents are arranged as a “documentary history” of your life.” from this long interview back in 2003.

   For some reason, it really intrigues me that with massive, inexpensive digital storage, and inexpensive high bandwidth data streams, we can create a different paradigm for cinema, a different paradigm for operating systems and data organization.

   “Narrative information management.” Not better art, just a different medium. With different possibilities.

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   • sheila says:

     December 18, 2015 at 7:54 am

     I like the “stream” thing too. Film directors have done this before. Jean Renoir’s films could be seen as a “stream”, in a lot of ways. He presents an atmosphere and characters with such love for them – and then just lets them GO – that the audience is swept away by the sensation that they are actually in the presence of humanity. It is a rare rare gift and Renoir has so few imitators – because his vision was so much his own. His film The River, with no plot really – just a lingering languid story of one family – is quite literally a “stream” – the river that is the symbolic and actual center of the family’s lives and the lives of the community. The river is eternal but it’s always changing – you can never step into a river in the same spot twice, someone said. Maybe Thoreau. I’ll have to check.

     Films like that require a director to do only what he wants to do. To have respect for the audience. To not care whether or not people will see it, love it, etc.

     Robert Altman was a “stream” kind of director, too.

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3. sheila says:

   December 18, 2015 at 8:08 am

   What I like about his thoughts is the sense of hope. Of course cinema will change, and we don’t know how it will change, and sometimes it’s disheartening to think that all movies now are basically made for virgin Chinese boys who like a lot of action and explosions and tits/ass. Movies geared towards the “foreign market” used to be prestige pictures because (it was assumed) that European audiences were more sophisticated and could take nuance, subtlety, ambiguity. Foreign audiences now means Asia, and that’s why we’re in the situation we’re in today in American films. There’s way more money in foreign distribution than in American distribution. There’s just not as much incentive anymore to make serious adult movies.

   The tragedy is the disappearance of the middle-budget adult movie. The “Ordinary People,” “Broadcast News,” whatever – movies that didn’t cost a lot, but had stars in them, good scripts, and were entertaining but also made for grownups, who wanted to hear grownup stories.

   Listen, I love the Fast and the Furious series. But when the entire industry starts to be drawn towards those movies like a magnet – for purely financial reasons – things start to feel a little bit skewed.

   However: this has been a really good year for independent movies! There are some new directors doing some REALLY interesting things with film language and structure (Clouds of Sils Maria. Last year’s Force Majeure. Even Innaritu – a director I’m not really a fan of, although I loved The Revenant. He is actually challenging film structure and HOW one makes films to try to inject some excitement/innovation into the form. He should be celebrated for that alone – or, if not celebrated, then at least acknowledged as a curious ambitious man who is trying to do something different.)

   It is just as easy to make a bad independent movie as it is to make a bad block-buster. It just costs less money.

   So I like Coppola’s curious and somewhat hopeful outlook. Or, not even hopeful: it’s just that he knows change is inevitable, we cannot know the future, here’s what he hopes will happen, and here’s what WILL happen.

   I support Quentin Tarantino’s devotion to film preservation, and to shooting on film/old-fashioned projecting on film. (Inglorious Basterds, with all the Nazi stuff, was really a celebration of celluloid itself, and its power. Emotional power but also literal power: if you strike a match to it, it EXPLODES – and kills all the Nazis in the room. A friend of mine saw it as a Nazi movie and completely missed the fact that it was all about film, and movie houses, and MOVIES. The Nazis were just an excuse.) That being said: I think sometimes QT is so in love with the past, that he becomes a bit of a bore. (I liked a lot of Hateful 8, but was bored by a lot of it – and I’m never bored at a QT movie. It was an odd experience.)

   He shot a 70mm film and had it take place mostly in one INTERIOR location. I don’t understand it and I’m sure people will race forward to explain it to me. 70mm was used for outdoor epics, because the frame was so enormous. That’s why it’s an outdated form – because outdoor epics are not as “in” as they once were in the 1960s. and “Cinerama” – the widescreen process he used in Hateful 8 – has only been used 20 times or something like that. Anyway, point being: QT’s devotion to old-school devices is very inspiring, and we need him. A lot of his films, too, pay tribute (of course) to B-picture genres like kung fu movies, Westerns, blaxploitation films. His devotion to the past has given his films a new PUNCH as well as a grounding in old-fashioned structure.

   But sometimes he sounds like an old fogey, hate to say it.

   I am not throwing out the baby with the bathwater in regards to QT.

   I’m really just saying that Coppola’s words are inspiring in their own way. Inspiration doesn’t only have to be found in the past.

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4. Dg says:

   December 18, 2015 at 10:14 am

   Neither here nor there but I recently read an interview in the FT with Coppola and they asked something about his own family life while making all those films and he said ” You’ve heard of Italian Alzheimer’s? You forget everything except the grudge”

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   • sheila says:

     December 18, 2015 at 10:15 am

     hahahahahahahaha

     Reply

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