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Cover: The Godfather Speaks, Page 4

By Marvin R. Shanken

(Continued)

Coppola: No, it grossed less money. But it won all the Oscars and I won Best Director. It was very respected. It was the first sequel that was considered as good or better than the first movie.

CA: Given that you went into The Godfather project without any prior knowledge of the Mafia, how did you re-create a story that many people came to believe was real Mafia life? How did you do it?

Coppola: And the Mob did accept it. Although I had no experience or knowledge of the Mafia, in the end, they were just an Italian-American family. I based the film all on my uncles and my relatives. Now, they were musicians, or they were little businessmen or tool and die makers, but they were true first- and second-generation, third-generation Italian-Americans. I used my memories of what it was like in my family. How they sat around the table. How my uncles would get Chinese food. What the family dinner table was like. How my sister would serve and how the uncles would discuss world events. All I did was take another profession of Italian-Americans, which was what my family was like. In acting they call it substitution.

CA: But it was so vivid. There are so many themes and sets that seem so authentic.

Coppola: Well, of course, that's just the Italian-American heritage. There are many kinds of Italians. Today, they're politicians: Governor Mario Cuomo. You have so many Italian-Americans in every walk of life. We've been in this country in tandem with the Jewish Americans, because they came at the same time and both groups ended up primarily in New York. It's as though you were making a movie about a lot of great Jewish traditions, but you didn't know any Jewish traditions.

You use what you know and the way they talked, what the uncle was like. How the feuds started with the brother-in-law or if someone had to come from another town. All I did was apply what I knew intimately, which was my own family. All that detail, and I just said, "Oh, the gangsters were probably just like that." There were little stories I grew up with. I had one uncle who married a lady, and they said her father-in-law was sort of connected in some way. So, when the uncle's daughter's got married and there was trouble, he would threaten that he knew some people that would break his leg. Those are just stories.

CA: Did you ever have any contact with the real Mafia while you were making the movie, or afterwards?

Coppola: Mario Puzo gave me some advice when he started. He said, "Francis, when you work on this, the real Mafia guys are gonna come, and they're gonna wanna know you, and they're gonna be very nice," he says. "Don't let them in. Don't let them think that they can call you up. Don't let them think that they have your phone number. They will respect that and they will never bother you and they will never try to reach you. But, if you accept their friendship and you take the gift of cannoli and if you go out and have dinner with them, then they have access."

And I remember that, when I was a kid, they're like vampires. The vampire can't come into your house unless you invite them over the door. But, once you invite them over the door, then you're theirs. So, over the course of the film, I never wanted to know them. I never started hanging out with the big one, like Jimmy Caan.

CA: Who was that?

Coppola: Carmine Persico, I believe. That whole Mafia thing he does where he goes "badda-bing"? That was done by Jimmy Caan. In other words, in the scene—it wasn't written that way—he went right up to the guy and said "badda-bing." Jimmy should have royalty on that "badda-bing," whether or not he picked it up from the guys he was hanging out with. He did go out and would hang with them.

CA: Did you ever say to him, "What did you learn that we should use?"

Coppola: No. The way I work with actors, they are always encouraged to bring everything to it. They're free. I don't say, "OK, do the scene, and do just what's written." I say, "OK, let's do it. And they do it and they know that they're expected to take liberties. I had made another film with Jimmy when I was younger, so I was very comfortable with him. Those actors, also, are very funny. They're always joking and playing tricks on each other and goofing off andÖwhich is all day long. And that was the joy of the job. It was them.

CA: What about the scene with the horse's head? That's a classic! Is that something you made up?

Coppola: Hold…hold…hold on. Let's not discount who created The Godfather. Mario Puzo created The Godfather. Now, he didn't know a lot about Mafia people either, but he did a lot of research. He did the same thing. He was broke and he needed some money and he decided that, if he wrote this book set around the Mafia, maybe he could make some money. And, so, he wrote it.

He told me that the real person he based The Godfather on, that character with the wisdom—you know, those lines like, "Make him an offer he can't refuse," or any of those things—he said he based that kind of wisdom on his mother. He said it was his mother who said those things and had that type of personality. Mario did a lot of research. But he never had known any people in the Mafia and then he wrote a novel. He was a very imaginative man and he created the horse's head. I just did it from the book.

I'll tell you the difference between the horse-head scene in the book and the horse-head scene in the movie. You might find it interesting. In the book, the movie producer wakes up, and he looks and he sees on the post of the bed the horse's head bleeding there, and he screams. When I directed it, though—and I may have made the note there—I changed it.

CA: It's under the bed cover.

Coppola: I had him wake up and draw the sheet and see the blood and think he's been wounded. And he doesn't know: Is it his body? Has he been stabbed? And he opens the sheets and there is the horse in bed with him. So, that's the difference between the way the director did it and the way the author did it.

CA: How could the fact that certain things in the film that Mario or you had come up with became accepted years later as the way things really are, like the thing of sleeping with the fishes?

Coppola: But he had heard that. He made up the idea; as a matter of fact, you see it all the time in movies, and they put a fish in a newspaper. He had made things up. I don't know what's real and what isn't real.

CA: Stop for a second. You just said something that was profound: "I don't know what's real and what isn't real." The whole thing I'm trying to get at is that millions and millions of people, myself included, believe that the way they look, the way they talk, the way they behave—everything—was The Godfather. It was the most richly accurate, detailed examination of the Mafia that anyone had ever seen or heard.

Coppola: Well, I have to disillusion you. Knowing how the movie was made and knowing what I knew, I have to tell you that it is not the truth. We staged it. We just said, "OK, you sit here and you sit here." We used common sense and, as I said, I used things I remembered from my family. But I didn't know. I'd never been around a Mafia family. I have no idea. I just assume they're like an Italian family.

The story I wanted to tell you is that Mario used to like to gamble. So, he had a lot of cronies that would hang around him. Not so much from the Mafia, but from the gambling world. And, once we were somewhere and he had some character with him and the guy looked at me and he says, "Hey, you just remember: you didn't make him; he made you." And it was true.

CA: You made this movie without any understanding or expectation that this was something that the American moviegoer would embrace. That was 30 years ago and there seems to be an endless series of crime-related movies in the theaters, as well as on television. Now we're in the next century, the new millennium, and we have this series "The Sopranos" on HBO, and people keep describing it as the next-generation Godfather. Why do you think this topic of the Mafia is so magnetic, a subject that fascinates millions and millions of Americans?

Coppola: I can only guess and speculate. First of all, America has always had an interest in outlaws, from the days that we liked to see cowboy movies or learn about Jesse James, or when we were kids and played pirates. I think we live our lives in very repetitive, normal ways. We go to work, we're all pretty much law-abiding. There's always a romantic fascination with the idea of people who don't take those limitations and kind of do what they want.

In American culture, that was exemplified by the wild West. You had these fabulous legendary heroes that came out of maybe real, authentic people in the West. But they were romanticized. People like Jesse James or Wes Harden or Doc Holliday. They enter the mythology of the country. That was picked up by the gangster movies, because the gangster was in a funny way the urban version of the cowboy that we know.

I think people are fascinated by outlaws, because, for the most part, they are not outlaws. They can only imagine. Second, I thought that when I read The Godfather, that there was something really attractive about the idea that if you have had injustice, if your neighbor has done something terrible or someone has been unfair to you, and you know that you can't really go to the police and the legal system isn't going to honor your complaint, that there's something really attractive about the fact that you could go to someone like a godfather and say, "Lookit, you know, they've done this to me. I was innocent, they did this to me." And you would get justice.

I found that first scene in the beginning of the movie, when the little undertaker tells the story about the daughter who was raped, that you could go to someone. I think that was a very powerful idea that Mario came to understand. All of us would like that, as we're double-crossed or someone takes advantage of us. I think there is a fascination with the romantic outlaw.

That's the idea that you can get real justice from someone without going through the corruption of the court system. I think that was partly what had to do with the appeal of Mario's book, because we must remember that Mario's book was a masterful, masterful best-seller. And that the movie picked up the energy. Everyone knew The Godfather was kind of like Gone with the Wind. When I was hired, it wasn't. But, by the time a year or so had gone by, The Godfather was a phenomenon.

We made a famous movie years ago called American Graffiti and, like a year and a half later, there was a television series called "Happy Days" with Ron Howard. Television always looks to what's going on in the movies and tries to pick up and leverage that.

CA: "The Sopranos," of course, is happening 30 years later.

Coppola: There were three Godfather movies. But all these people loved to watch The Godfather and quote the lines. It became a kind of cultural phenomenon. There are three reasons that happened. One, because it had that extraordinary cast. It was a case of all the planets lining up correctly. You had a good cast, you had a wonderful book, you had a great photographer, you had a terrific art director, you had great music—you had all those things, and the public was ready for it. It's like chemistry. If you get the formula right, it will take off. It was furthered by Martin Scorsese. He made some great movies, notably Goodfellas, which looked at a more realistic view of the Mafia. My Godfather was more classical and not as gritty and as realistic as Goodfellas.

Marty was raised in Little Italy in Manhattan where there really were these fellows and they knew who they were, right in their own neighborhood. Don't forget, Joey Gallo was killed right in Umberto's Clam House, right down from where Marty was raised. Marty was a religious kid. He wanted to be a priest. He saw the Mafia from a different point of view than The Godfather. He saw it more from the little guy's perspective. He made movies more based on that perspective. And, then, what happened was "The Sopranos." But I haven't seen "The Sopranos."

CA: You've never seen the show?

Coppola: I'm so sick of the Mafia, everything about it. They just kind of picked up on what The Godfather had done and said, "Let's make a television series. We'll have a character who's one of those underbosses."

CA: So, you weren't directly or indirectly brought in as a consultant for "The Sopranos"?

Coppola: No way. I knew nothing. I don't think I've ever seen one. I do know Jim Gandolfini because I like him as an actor. He's a big interesting guy.

CA: You met him before or after he started playing in "The Sopranos"?

Coppola: I probably met him before, but didn't know him. I did meet him after the show began, too, and I spent a little time with him. I just liked him. He's a good actor. Usually, television series pick up on what happened in the movies years before and the public was still interested. The Godfather gets watched. I made The Godfather 30 years ago and they watch it as much now as they did then. So, it hasn't gone away. So, some smart guy said, "Lookit, let's have a new show. It'll be kind of that type of setting except maybe we'll do it from a lower level of the Mafia in New Jersey," or wherever it's supposed to be. It really comes down to that they wrote it well, apparently, and they have good actors. Well, I mean, movies, entertainment, theater—it's all about good acting and good writing that comes together.

The love affair with the outlaw, now in the form of the Mafia, has taken off once again. It's an extension of the same thing. Godfather still sells more now than it did when it came out.

CA: What do you mean, as a video?

Coppola: There's more every year: the DVD, the this, the that; it doesn't go away. I mean, it's like owning an apartment building and you keep getting the rent.

CA: And, it's also on TV.

Coppola: And it's on TV. I had some very low days, as you know, after I lost my studio and went through bankruptcy. It
wasn't really bankruptcy, but it was a reorganization. And we lived off of The Godfather royalties and Apocalypse Now royalties.

CA: Do you ever see yourself doing a Godfather again?

Coppola: No. I personally didn't feel there was a necessity to make a second one, much less a third one. The third one I made because I was really broke.

CA: I'm fascinated that you've really never watched "The Sopranos." It's been on about four years and it's a topic of conversation no matter where you go. In some ways, one could argue that you were, in part, one of the fathers of it.

Coppola: I have an attitude about film and art. I think one of the reasons you make art is that you hope that it's going to get out there in the culture and that other people are going to take it and redo it and make it again. Young people are going to take your work and think of it in a new way and go on. In a sense, it's like having children that you love. I love the idea that my children are going to take over for me. By the same token, I like that filmmakers take what we did and remake it.

CA: In your life, you've done a lot of things. But without The Godfather, you might not be in the position to have the vineyard, the winery and the estate. Is that correct?

Coppola: I bought this place in 1975 with the money from The Godfather.

CA: What, in your mind, is the high point of your career? If not The Godfather, what was it?

Coppola: The Godfather is not the high point of my career because it was such a horrible experience and I hate the memory of it. I become nauseous when I think about it. For me, given what I want to do in my life, the high point of my career is The Conversation, because it was a film that I really wrote from scratch and I got to make the way I wanted to make.

But, I acknowledge that The Godfather is the event that made me, that put me on the map in a way so that I was able to make The Conversation and Apocalypse Now and other stuff. I am respectful of The Godfather.

First of all, movies are the work of many people, and The Godfather was the work of myself, Mario Puzo, Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, the cinematographer Gordy Willis, the art director Warren Clymer. In other words, I acknowledge that it was really a team. But all movies are. Everything you do in life is a team thing. I acknowledge that The Godfather really made me, but it also bugged me, too, because I couldn't escape it.

CA: Doesn't that always happen when you are the chef that married the ingredients?

Coppola: I was the chef. And the plan was in here, in this book. If you look at this, you'll see everything in that movie exactly the way it's done and why I did it that way. I was very fortunate that I had this recipe.

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