Apocalypse Now Redux and Godfather I & II are among my favorite films… could not resist this piece over at Esquire magazine.

A pleasure to read as Stephen Garrett allows Mr. Coppola to just ramble from question to answer to question. Almost a stream of consciousness thing. Really nice.

I was never sloppy with other people’s money. Only my own. Because I figure, well, you can be.

Ten or fifteen years after Apocalypse Now, I was in England in a hotel, and I watched the beginning of it and ultimately ended up watching the whole movie. And it wasn’t as weird as I thought. It had, in a way, widened what people would tolerate in a movie.

I saw this bin full of, basically, garbage film. We had shot five cameras when the jets came and dropped the napalm. You had to roll them all at the same time, so there was a lot of this leader, which was just footage. So I picked something out of this barrel and put it in the Moviola and it was very abstract, and every once in a while you saw this helicopter skid. And then over in sound there was all this Doors music, and in it was something called “The End.” And I said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if we started the movie with ‘The End’?”

I have more of a vivid imagination than I have talent. I cook up ideas. It’s just a characteristic.

via Francis Ford Coppola Interview – Coppola on Wine, Godfather, Scorsese, Sopranos – Esquire.

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• Official Release Specs and Artwork – Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt (dreadcentral.com)
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