Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. There seems to be one or two moments a year where I find myself way in over my head, sitting down in front of someone that should not be giving the likes of me the time of day. Last Tuesday was the first one of those in the year 2009. I was in Los Angeles for a few secret things and my trip just happened to coincide with a press day with Francis Ford Coppola, talking up his newest flick TETRO. I was told if I could make the screening Monday afternoon that I could have 20 minutes with Coppola. So, yeah. I made damn sure I could make the movie. TETRO is obviously a very personal film for Coppola, much like his last flick YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH. You get the feeling that he’s absolutely not compromising a single frame or decision, making the exact film he wants to make. When Coppola and the young lead Alden Ehrenreich entered the room Coppola first noticed the Roland Edirol Digital Audio Recorder I use for interviews. He picked it up and turned it around in his hands, asking about the background and that’s where we start off.
Quint: They actually built these for concert halls, for the orchestras in those giant halls. It’s a stereo recorder.
Francis Ford Coppola: I’m sure they love it when you go and make your own recording of the orchestra when they say “Don’t make a recording.”
Quint: I haven’t done that part yet.
Francis Ford Coppola: You can take this to Jazzfest.
Quint: That would be a great idea and I live in Austin, so it’s such a big music town…
Francis Ford Coppola: Do they like you recording their stuff when you go to hear the music?
Quint: I’ve never done the music thing. I only use this for work. It’s always been for interviews and stuff.
Francis Ford Coppola: It’s amazing what they are making.
Quint: My recorder before this was a little mini-tape recorder and the difference in the quality is night and day.
Francis Ford Coppola: You could record and make a movie with that.
Quint: Yeah, it’s almost like a little DAT. Well, congratulations guys on the movie. I saw it yesterday and I really liked it.
Francis Ford Coppola: In LA you saw it?
Quint: Yeah, I saw it here at the Wilshire Screening room.
Francis Ford Coppola: Oh, last night?
Quint: In the afternoon. I think they had a press screening. I thought it was great and I loved the photography. Was that digital?
Francis Ford Coppola: It’s digital.
Quint: What kind of camera was it?
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Francis Ford Coppola: It’s the Sony 900, the same I used for YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH. It’s really now become the digital workhorse, but there’s lots more sophisticated stuff, but the bottom line with digital photography is it really comes down to the lens and the eye of the photographer. You can make gorgeous photography. You have to be fastidious, because you don’t have some of the forgiveness that other formats have, but if you have beautiful lenses and you have a talented, in this case, young cinematographer, who understands the camera, you can get beautiful results.
Quint: Did shooting black and white help as well?
Francis Ford Coppola: No, I think… You know, black and white is always more challenging because the lighting for black and white is more time consuming and you have to worry about “if this is gray (grabs his suit collar) and the wall is gray, how will the audience know the difference?” There’s a lot of more tricky lighting.
Quint: Let’s back up a little bit. I just wanted to talk a little bit about you, Alden, came into the picture. It’s weird saying this in front of you, but for people like us, people who grew up with your work, it must have been a little tense being up for the a lead in one of your pictures. Was there any intimidation there?
Alden Ehrenreich: I was more just excited to be able to work with somebody that I had admired and Francis was sort of one of the first film figures that I really loved when I started thinking about film more consciously and looking at films a little more analytically. When I was 12 I saw GODFATHER and read The Godfather, and was just obsessed with it. As I got older and saw APOCALYPSE NOW and RUMBLE FISH and THE CONVERSATION…
Quint: THE CONVERSATION is one of my all time favorite movies.
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Alden Ehrenreich: Before I met him, I watched these clips and interviews and stuff with him and different things, so I would know what his demeanor was like and he’s such a warm personable person, that it wasn’t ever really intimidating. He really gives you a sense that you are meant to be there, no matter what you are doing, so it was always really wonderful and relaxed, surprisingly so, considering the iconoclast kind of thing.
Quint: What was the relationship like between you two, both in prep and in shooting?
Francis Ford Coppola: I like to have a chance for the actor to feel safe, because actors do a lot of things that they are frightened about. Even Brando… if they stall or they don’t want to go out to do it… He once looked at me and grinned and said “Well I get frightened, too,” because the actor has to put up or shut up and they don’t do it through a violin or something. They do it through their body or their soul, so that they are on the spot. I like to rehearse a couple of weeks and sort of say that “For two weeks we don’t have to worry about being bad or making mistakes, because it can’t be bad and you can’t make mistakes…”
Quint: “The pressure is off.”
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Francis Ford Coppola: Yeah. “Let’s have two weeks and we are not shooting. Let’s have two weeks where we can come in and play all day.” Out of play a lot of good things come, because people are free to suggest things that they would be scared to suggest and those very often are the best things. So we had a rehearsal like that. We did very wacky things and nutty improvisations and stuff, but it was all… when the actors are there… one rule I have is they cant ever say “Well, my character would never have a bag like that.” They have to say “I would never have a bag like that.” I just make them be in the first person, because every minute that they are like that, they are exercising their character. We did that and by two weeks of course we started to see the lay of the land. They also felt comfortable to say “look at the last twenty pages of this script, I would never do that.” And then I would say “Well gee, then you would disappear from the movie if you weren’t like that.” So you were able to kind of put some thorny issues on the table. Usually the thorny issue with actors is that there’s a plot that’s sort of going towards a certain end and there are a lot of steps along the way that if the actor wouldn’t do that step, then you are not going to get to that end, then you have got to change the end and not going to have it be… I ran into that as a young filmmaker, where the actress would say “Well, I would never do that.” I said “Well, the character does.”
Quint: “The character has to or else we have no end to the movie.”
Francis Ford Coppola: And then you learn that there are many ways in the acting method that you learn to do substitutions to figure out ways to still get to that end, even though you don’t get there maybe through the same door.
Quint: A compromise.
Coppola: Or you make a swap. At any rate, that goes on during the rehearsal, so by then it’s pretty much established that people are not going to bite each other’s heads off, even though they get nervous, maybe, about certain scenes. Actors can be your greatest collaborators, because they know the characters really better than you do. At a certain point they cross over and the character sort of becomes them, so then it’s easy. Once that happens, you don’t have to tell them a lot how to do something, because they are going to do it in character. And that’s one thing you learn from Brando. Brando was great with that. He could be playing a scene and I always used to make the joke that a herd of buffalo could run through the room and he would go (in a Godfather voice) “Oh, look at the buffalo” in character. Nothing would be out of the ordinary. Alden Ehrenreich: And one of Francis’s greatest gifts that he gives to actors more, beyond just listening to their ideas and then saying “Oh, I wouldn’t do this or I wouldn’t do this” is being as attentive to just the natural dynamics between people and the dynamics between everybody, even between us and Francis and using that energy and harnessing it and infusing the story with that same energy, so that you don’t have to be the author of some kind of chemistry between two people, you can just coast on the same rhythms that you are already on and then when he says “Action,” it’s just staying true to that as opposed to “Now I’m acting.”
Quint: There’s an authenticity to it.
Alden Ehrenreich: Yeah, yeah.
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Francis Ford Coppola: Yeah, the director more presides over things and a lot of times they are like “You really got that performance out of so and so” and I have never gotten a performance out of anyone. I would set the stage and put the props around knowing that “Oh, he’s going to reach for the cheese,” but I don’t… You know, they do it, you are just sort of like a ring master.
Quint: I noticed a lot of use of mirrors and reflections in the movie. That seemed to be a big visual element to this film. Was that something you knew from the get go? How did that develop?
Francis Ford Coppola: I experimented a lot with visual style in my career, in fact in my first career, every movie I did was a different… THE GODFATHER is one thing with a very classic style and in APOCALYPSE NOW the camera is flying all over the place. I did ONE FROM THE HEART, which was meant to be more like live TV and so forth and I always felt “Well, I’m just learning.” But now at my age, I sort of prefer a visual style where the camera doesn’t move. If you go to a regular movie and you watch the lower corner of the frame, you are going to see it’s always doing that (makes a rectangle with his fingers and moves it around) or the guy stands up and it goes like that (mimicking the camera tilting up). I chose in the last two pictures and I think now for all of my films to have a much more where the frame is the frame and if you go out of the frame, the camera doesn’t go with you, then another shot picks you up, so that’s like a way to structure a scene that I now feel, for a lot of reasons, is more beautiful. For one I get sea sick when I see a lot of camera work today, because the camera is moving unnecessarily to give you a kind of dynamism… I don’t know why it’s a style. Also the more the camera moves in relation to the actors, the less the actors are moving, because if the famous shot of if the train is leaving and if the guy is running after his girlfriend and the camera is going, if you look at it, the train is not going to be leaving! The decision to do that means that inevitably I was shooting that part of the room, so by having a mirror and some guy was entering here, then the guy would enter and you would see him in the mirror, so the mirror sort of worked, or the reflection, worked hand in hand with the idea of the camera not moving around. Normally you would have a shot like that and the camera would pan over to there, but if I wasn’t going to do that…
Quint: Yeah, you almost got your reverse shot in the same shot.
Francis Ford Coppola: In the mirrors… We didn’t intend to do that, but as we built these frames… The operator wasn’t even on the camera, the camera was tied off, so the fact that there were reflections kind of, without moving the camera, enlarged the field of view.
Quint: Well, I thought it was really interesting that you incorporated that as well, because you have that whole subplot where Alden’s character is going through his brother’s notes and you are having to use the mirror to decipher them essentially.
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Francis Ford Coppola: I’m sure you figured out by now that a lot of things that authors do or filmmakers do, they don’t know they are doing. The example that always struck me was in THE GODFATHER there’s a kind of orange symbolism, guys are always lifting up an orange and the truth of the matter is I didn’t know that I was doing that other than an orange citrus made me think of Sicily and there were usually some oranges on the set. So I would say “Okay, take an orange” or “Bring him an orange, it comes from Miami” so a lot of times you are doing things that feel right for you to do them, but you don’t know all of the levels of significance that might be in you subconsciously or just your choice implies more interpretation.
Quint: Or even just happy accidents.
Francis Ford Coppola: Often happy accidents, but that happens in literature all of the time. The critic’s job is to illuminate what’s going on beyond what the filmmaker knows, so you learn. But I know some very heavy things people have said to me, even about this film. One guy said to me “You knew Jim Morrison at UCLA and to what extent is TETRO based on Morrison, who had an extremely tough relationship with a big father who was an admiral” and I thought “God, I’ve never thought of that, but it’s true.” Who knows? In life you just pick (things) up and you don’t know what you are doing.
Quint: Well there’s also the parallels where the father character is a composer and your father was a composer and stuff like that.
Francis Ford Coppola: The father is a conductor and he is like a von Karajan, a Fritz Reiner, he’s a prima donna. My father was, through my life as a kid in his house, my father was a very frustrated flutist who had a big talent and wanted to be Gershwin and wanted to be these guys, but we lived in a house with a man who was not getting his break and anyone who has done that knows that the kids really feel the father’s… Fortunately my father got his big break through THE GODFATHER and so in some way I was able to be helpful to him, but he wasn’t like at the top like that guy who was world famous.
Quint: I’m sure you knew you were kind of inviting parallels there.
Francis Ford Coppola: Yeah, no. It’s true and of course music and having music and knowing who Brahms was… One of my father’s greatest things was he really knew music well and you could as him any question about any composer and he would explain to you. Even having lost him now since 1981, all of a sudden I just want to call my father up and ask him a question about “Well, who is really greater? Wagner or Verdi?” I don’t have that anymore, but there are elements of my father in that character, but my father was not such a world important man as that guy is.
Quint: And he never stole your girlfriend?
Francis Ford Coppola: He didn’t. (laughs)
Quint: Alright, I think they are breaking us up. I really appreciate the time.
Gotta love any conversation where the interviewee can just throw down Marlon Brando stories at the drop of a hat.
I could have spent hours talking with Coppola about his previous films, especially THE CONVERSATION, which I mentioned as being one of my all time favorite films. I rewatched it in the days before leaving LA and that movie is fucking scary. It’s a horror show. Gene Hackman is so damn good in it…
My apologies to Alden Ehrenreich for not lobbing more questions in his direction. He’s great in the film, looking like a GILBERT GRAPE-era DiCaprio and bringing just as much talent to the role as DiCaprio did with that picture. It’s a helluva debut and I’m sure we’ll be seeing much more of him in the future.
TETRO opens in limited release today. Hope you guys dug the chat! Look for my interview with the director and star of another great indie flick opening in limited release today called MOON. That should hit sometime this afternoon… Oh, and I also picked a winner in the MondoTees Tyler Stout RoboCop contest! See you folks soon with that stuff!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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