Visionary, maverick director Francis Ford Coppola began his film career in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Three times he won a screenplay Oscar for a film which also won Best Picture (Patton, The Godfather, and The Godfather Part II), an accomplishment as yet unequaled by any other screenwriter. His career, for all its twists and turns, has been marked by an ability to utilize the apparatus of studio-based filmmaking to create deeply personal work. Born in Detroit in 1939, Coppola moved with his family to New York, where his father, Carmine Coppola, was a featured flautist with Arturo Toscanini’s celebrated NBC Symphony Orchestra. When he was ten years old, young Francis developed polio, which forced him to spend a year in bed. It was during this time, playing with puppets, listening to the radio, watching television, that Coppola developed his long-standing interest in technology. “I became obsessed with remote control.”

Coppola studied at Hofstra University on Long Island in 1956, majoring in theater arts and producing and directing plays. There he saw Sergei Eisenstein’s Ten Days That Shook the World, “On Monday I was in theater, and on Tuesday I wanted to be a filmmaker.” In the autumn of 1960, Coppola entered the burgeoning film department at UCLA, which included among its faculty French director Jean Renoir, and Dorothy Arzner, one of the few significant female directors in Hollywood up to that point. It was at UCLA that Coppola edited together footage from two separate films—his own short and footage from someone else’s nudie Western—to form the nudie-cutie quickie Tonight for Sure (1962). During this time, he was also writing at a furious pace, winning, at 22 years old, the prestigious Samuel Goldwyn Award for his script “Pilma Pilma.” Soon, like many young filmmakers at the time, Coppola fell into the ranks of those working for exploitation king Roger Corman, learning Corman’s brand of fast, guerrilla-style production.

For Corman, Coppola edited and dubbed Russian action films for American release, worked as dialogue coach, and on The Terror, was associate producer and shot second unit. While in Europe shooting The Young Racers, Coppola pitched Corman an idea for a horror flick which could utilize much of the same cast and crew. Always looking to save costs and cut corners, Corman liked the idea of getting two films out of his European sojourn instead of just one. Dementia 13 (1963), Coppola’s debut as writer/director, was the result.

While working on Dementia, Coppola met his lifelong partner, Eleanor Neil, and the two married in 1963. At this same time, based on the strength of the scripts he wrote at UCLA, Coppola began writing for Seven Arts. He wrote drafts of This Property Is Condemned, Is Paris Burning? and an early draft of Reflections in a Golden Eye. He wrote numerous unproduced scripts such as “The Disenchanted,” “The Fifth Coin,” and “My Last Duchess.” He also used his own money to buy the option on the David Benedictus novel You’re A Big Boy Now. He originally approached Roger Corman with his script adaptation, but due to contractual complications involving Seven Arts, he was obliged to make the film for that studio. Coppola used his ownership of the script to leverage his own hiring as director for his first studio-financed film.

A “nutty comedy about a young male virgin,” as the review in Variety read, the film was entered in competition at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival and garnered a Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination for Geraldine Page. The jazzy, meandering manner in which Coppola shot the Times Square sequences of the film became the inspiration for similar footage in Midnight Cowboy. Coppola also submitted the film as his thesis at UCLA, and received his Master of Arts degree.

Just prior to the opening of You’re A Big Boy Now, Coppola completed his screenplay on the life of General George S. Patton. Even though other writers worked on the script for Patton during its long production process (it wasn’t released until 1970), it was Coppola’s draft which star George C. Scott and director Franklin Schaffner referred to most definitively. Coppola’s next assignment was to direct Fred Astaire and Petula Clarke in an adaptation of the stage musical Finian’s Rainbow.

Years earlier, while studying at Hofstra, Coppola wrote an original script then titled “The Old Grey Station Wagon,” inspired by a childhood memory of his mother’s two-day disappearance. After meeting the actress Shirley Knight, Coppola was inspired to revise the script, which focused on three housewives, into the poignant story of one woman’s journey away from her husband and family and toward self-discovery. Coppola directed the film, re-titled The Rain People (1969). Legend has it that Coppola secured financing for the picture while awaiting the 1968 release of Finian’s Rainbow by spreading a rumor around the Warner-Seven Arts lot in Los Angeles that he was working on a secret project in New York and then dropping out of sight. The strategy worked, for the head of the studio, afraid of losing the project, signed Coppola to a contract without even seeing the script. The Rain People was the most personal of any project Coppola had undertaken so far, and he sank much of his own savings into the production, buying equipment which would form the basis of his own San Francisco-based mini-studio, American Zoetrope, which he founded in 1969.

A four-month on-the-road shoot that traveled across 18 states, The Rain People brought together numerous actors and technicians who would work with Coppola in the coming years, including actors James Caan and Robert Duvall, sound engineer Walter Murch, editor Barry Malkin, and associate producer Mona Skager. Filming a documentary of the production was a young USC student named George Lucas, who had met Coppola during shooting of Finian’s Rainbow. Coppola produced Lucas’ first feature, the sci-fi thriller THX 1138.

Having established a reputation as a talented writer and director, Coppola was approached to adapt Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel The Godfather, an exploration of a multi-generational Mafia family. In juxtaposing Mafia gangsters with a rich familial sensibility, Coppola created a classic work. While the film has, over the years, grown in stature to its present position as a cultural landmark, the process of the film’s production was a difficult one. Coppola faced extreme pressure over his casting decisions and had to fight hard for the actors he wanted, most notably Al Pacino and Marlon Brando. Despite the headaches of production, The Godfather went on to become one of the highest-grossing films of all time.

When The Godfather was released early in 1972, Coppola was already at work on numerous other projects. He executive-produced George Lucas’ second feature, American Graffiti (nominated for Best Picture in 1974), and this one made money. A million-dollar cancelled check hangs framed on a wall in Coppola’s Napa Valley office, and across it is Lucas’ handwritten note: “Thanks for the start.” During this time, Coppola also staged a revival of Noel Coward’s Private Lives in San Francisco, formed The Directors’ Company with Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin, and began work on his next feature, The Conversation. He had been working on the script on and off for several years, dating back to 1967, and had originally hoped to make it after The Rain People.

The Directors’ Company was a production experiment whereby each member would make two films for the company and produce a third by one of the others, all to be released by Paramount. As it turned out, only The Conversation and Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon came out of the venture.

Production on The Conversation began in December 1972, with a modest budget of $1.9 million. When shooting was completed, Coppola needed to begin pre-production on The Godfather Part II, so the sound mix and editing process for The Conversation took nearly a year. By the time the film was released, the Watergate scandal had hit, making the project surprisingly timely. “A devastating study of the moral and psychological consequences of cold-blooded professionalism,” wrote Stephen Farber in The New York Times. Despite winning the Palm d’Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, the film did only moderate business at the box office.

The Godfather Part II, which featured Robert DeNiro in one of his first major roles, was an unqualified success. Working mainly from his own story ideas, Coppola crafted a sequel which built upon the previous film, the two interweaving like a tapestry. “They were siblings,” said Coppola. “One film hangs over the other like a ghost.” At the 1975 Academy Awards ceremonies, where Godfather II won Best Director, Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, Coppola’s main competition was from The Conversation, nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.

By this time, Coppola had also purchased for himself The Little Fox Theater, City magazine, and a radio station, attempting to create a self-contained Zoetrope media empire. Coppola believed that journalism was rich ground for story ideas, hence the magazine, and that theater and radio doubled as good testing grounds to workshop film ideas.

His next project, Apocalypse Now (1979), based on a script by John Milius which Coppola rewrote, itself an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, was more than five years in the making and almost drove Coppola to the brink of personal and financial destruction. The troubles which beset the production have been well-documented by Eleanor Coppola in her book Notes and in her on-set documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. In many ways, Apocalypse Now ushered in the scorecard fascination which now plagues Hollywood and entertainment journalism, as the film’s spiraling costs and substantial box-office returns received as much coverage as the film itself. The film, a spectacular metaphysical exploration of the madness of war, won the 1979 Cannes’ Palm d’Or and garnered ten Academy Award nominations, including those for Best Director, Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Coppola’s next film again revealed his fascination with technology. One From the Heart (1982)—shot on film but using live video techniques, including “video-assist,” now used on all films—was a lavish, experimental, soundstage musical, but was a box-office disaster and caused the financial ruin of the fledging Zoetrope studio. Despite such financial setbacks, Coppola continued to work at a fierce pace throughout the 1980s. He filmed two S.E. Hinton adaptations, The Outsiders (1983) and Rumble Fish (1983), back-to-back in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Next, he directed The Cotton Club (1984, which he also wrote), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and Gardens of Stone (1987).

With Tucker: A Man and His Dream (1988), the story of an independent car manufacturer doomed for being too ahead of his times, Coppola seemed to find a perfect analogy for himself and his place in Hollywood—the idealistic dreamer railing against the confines of a system hostile to outsiders.

Next, Coppola took on The Godfather Part III (1990) and the formidable task of continuing the storyline of what had by then become his signature work. Godfather III earned Best Picture and Best Director nominations. He subsequently directed the visually stunning Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Jack (1996), and John Grisham’s The Rainmaker (1997, which Coppola adapted from the novel).

Over the years Coppola has also executive-produced filmmakers he has believed in, beginning with Lucas and including Paul Schrader (Mishima), Akira Kurosawa (Kagemusha) and Wim Wenders (Hammett).

He has also continued to have a wide range of ongoing projects, turning his attention toward his growing family of Zoetrope interests: the Coppola-Niebaum winery in Napa Valley, CA, the Blancaneux Lodge in Belize, and Zoetrope: All-Story magazine in New York City. Zoetrope: All-Story sponsors an ongoing screenplay submissions site, where aspiring screenwriters can, once they’ve evaluated the work of contemporaries and colleagues, submit their own work for critique. All can be found at www.zoetrope.com.

Was one of the early challenges of the script for The Conversation how to balance the thriller aspects with a character portrait?

The Conversation, in truth, was, just as one might think, inspired from seeing Blow Up, to the extent that I saw Blow Up and I thought, gee, that’s the kind of movie I want to make. I was there, in Hollywood, between the two poles of the studio films that were being made, and the auteur films that we had seen when we were younger, in the ’50s and ’60s. Blow Up was successful, and I said, look, there’s a film that’s a very interesting personal film, so just as a goal, I thought I’d like to make a film like that. I like the component of it where it dealt with revelations of information in razor slices. I was beginning to think it would be interesting to make a film that used repetition as a motif, in that we repeat the same thing, over and over again.

Like a music score.

Yes, it would be like a musical composition. So I was interested in working with repetition. I was walking down the street once with the director Irvin Kershner, and we were talking about technology. He was saying that now they have microphones that they aim with a sight, and that you could aim it on a person’s mouth and be able to hear what they were saying. I thought, that’d be curious, what if someone walked in front of it and there was a part you didn’t get? Out of that, and wanting to make a film more like Blow Up, an art thriller, as it were, I started working on the opening of The Conversation. I began to get intrigued with the idea of a very mundane conversation that wasn’t about anything at all. Like, “What are you doing?” “I don’t know. Nice day.” “I saw Joe yesterday . . .” And then you began to realize that someone was going to great trouble to record it, through a number of means. Through these high-distance microphones, and through people trying to get close enough to get what they wanted. And so then the conversation was starting to become important, clearly not for what they were saying, but for the efforts that people were going through to get it. So that’s how I began to write the script.

My pattern with original writing has always been the same—I write the script up to a point, maybe halfway through, and then I just hate it and abandon it. I’m convinced that writers have a hormone that’s secreted when they’re working which makes them hate what they’re writing. But the hormone does, in time, go away. So I began it, abandoned it, and I picked up another screenplay that I had been working on years before that I had also abandoned about halfway through. I think it was called “The Grey Station Wagon” then, but it became The Rain People. So I then looked at that, and I thought, gee, this wasn’t so bad, this is interesting. So I started working on that again, and I ultimately made the film. By the same token, I was starting on something else when I got discouraged and found the fragment of The Conversation. Once again, I picked it up, and the hormone was gone, so I read it and thought, gee, this is promising. So I finished it. That’s been the pattern for me, with original material.

You were also reading Hermann Hesse at the time?

I had read a number of Hesse novels, so the mood of Steppenwolf, with the solitary guy, was in there. I’ve always believed it was fine for younger artists, or any artist really, to do that. My father used to say: “Steal from the best.” Especially when you’re young, and you don’t know exactly what your so-called voice is. With an original screenplay you don’t know where you’re going. You’re in uncharted territory, and that’s terrifying.

There’s an almost prescient anxiety about technology in The Conversation. Was that a personal thing for you, because you use cameras and gadgets?

Personal, yes, but I’ve never had anxiety about technology. Since I was a child, I was always very comfortable with technology. From the day I was a little boy I always had a workbench [gestures toward a workbench] and have one to this day, where I can go to take something apart and fix it. So I didn’t have anxiety, I had fascination and comfort with technology. But after a while, working on the film, I realized that what I wanted to do was to make a film about privacy. Sometimes it helps, when you can say what your film is about in the simplest possible terms.

We let technology into our lives, but there’s a moral ambiguity there, certainly with surveillance technology. Surveillance was partly born out of a journalistic impulse, the desire to uncover truth, but your film explores the ramifications.

Well, I wasn’t really thinking in those terms. Although, when we were making The Conversation, the news on the Watergate break-in happened. I remember we were shooting, and we said, hey, isn’t this weird? This is sort of what we’re about. But I didn’t approach it that way. Wiretapping and surveillance were, quite honestly, something that appealed to me. Partly because I was paralyzed as a kid, and I was very good at technology and science, so I knew how to plant microphones in things and hear what people were saying. I remember we threw a party once and we bugged the bathroom so we could hear the girls talking. [Laughs] And this was in 1952! I was a friend of technology. And surveillance, I think, is another aspect of remote control. When you’re paralyzed, remote control is everything. That’s why boys like Lionel Trains.

Technology becomes an appendage, an extension of your will.

Yes, when you can’t walk. And in those days they didn’t have remote-control television. So as much as possible, by my bed, when I was about nine, I had my projector and I had my tape recorder and I wished I had remote-control so I could change the television stations. So I saw technology as something that extended me, and wiretapping as something that extended my ears. So I was on the other side. I was on the wrong side of the tracks. [Laughs] I didn’t come to The Conversation in any way as a social critic, or to be critical of that. I began to be interested, of course, in the story and in the consequences of it. The plot turned on [electronic eavesdropping], because Harry was someone who felt ashamed of and responsible for what his information had done in previous cases.