Francis Ford Coppola (/ˈkoʊpələ/ KOH-pə-lə, Italian: [ˈkɔppola]; born April 7, 1939) is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is considered one of the leading figures of the New Hollywood film movement and is widely considered one of the greatest directors of all time.
1: “I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.”
2: “I was raised as a Catholic, but I didn’t like the Catholic Church at all. I thought the nuns were mean.”
3: “We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.”
4: “I like simplicity; I don’t need luxury.”
5: “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.”
6: “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.”
7: “I don’t think there’s any artist of any value who doesn’t doubt what they’re doing.”
8: “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.”
9: “Steven Spielberg is unique. I feel that the kinds of movies he loves are the same kinds of movies that the big mass audience loves. He’s very fortunate because he can do the things he naturally likes the best, and he’s been very successful.”
10: “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.”
11: “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.”
12: “When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.”
13: “Everything I do is personal. I have never made a movie that didn’t have very strong personal resonance.”
14: “It is a little disappointing to see that your legs are not as strong. But I like the idea of growing old, and the thought of approaching death is not particularly daunting to me.”
15: “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.”
16: “Roger Corman exploited all of the young people who worked for him, but he really gave you responsibility and opportunity. So it was kind of a fair deal.”
17: “Listen, if there’s one sure-fire rule that I have learned in this business, it’s that I don’t know anything about human nature.”
18: “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.”
19: “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.”
20: “Sound is your friend because sound is much cheaper than picture, but it has equal effect on the audience – in some ways, perhaps more effect because it does it in a very indirect way.”