Coppola, Take 2

“I had an impressive career as a younger person,” says Francis Ford Coppola, “but it was like an older director’s.” Perhaps that’s why people have been wondering if he’d gone into early retirement. The director of such indelible movies as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now hasn’t put out a film in 10 years and has been, by his own admission, in a creative slump for 25. So now he’s changing tactics: since he couldn’t scramble out of the ditch going forward, he’s trying reverse. For his next film, the aptly titled Youth Without Youth, Coppola, 68, returned to a stage of his career he feels ended prematurely: the beginning. “At 29 I was making an older man’s picture [Finian’s Rainbow],” he says. “The younger director never had his moment. Now I’m making a younger man’s picture.”

Youth Without Youth might also be described as a wistful man’s picture. An adaptation by Coppola of a novella by the Romanian-born philosopher Mircea Eliade, the unashamedly arty film stars Tim Roth as Dominic Matei, an aging linguistics professor whose youth is restored after he survives a lightning strike. Because of his rejuvenation, Matei is able to work on his unfinished magnum opus and pursue a lost love. With a dense, multilayered plot spanning multiple continents, decades and languages, and heady themes like consciousness and the nature of time, Youth seems a lot more than a decade removed from Coppola’s last film, the decidedly commercial Matt Damon courtroom drama The Rainmaker.

Garrulous and avuncular, sipping a Bloody Mary at 4 p.m. in a Beverly Hills hotel, Coppola explains the crisis of confidence that immobilized him, and his career pivot from John Grisham to a Romanian mythologist. In 2004 the director was much like Matei before the lightning struck; he was frustrated and grappling with a consuming project he couldn’t complete. He’d spent most of the ’80s and ’90s making forgettable films like The Cotton Club and Jack to pay off the enormous debts he had incurred on such experiments as his 1982 musical, One from the Heart. Though there were bright spots, like The Outsiders and Peggy Sue Got Married, most of Coppola’s studio pictures during this time left the director and his fans unfulfilled. In 1986 Coppola’s 22-year-old son Gian-Carlo died in a boating accident. “When you lose your kid, it’s the first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning for about seven or eight years. Then there’s the first morning when that’s not the first thing you think of. You get brave,” he says. His other two children, Sofia and Roman, are in the business, although the Oscar-winning Sofia is currently focused mainly on being a mom. Roman, an assistant director on Youth, co-wrote Wes Anderson’s new film, The Darjeeling Limited.

By the late ’90s, Coppola says, “I just wanted to find a place for myself. I didn’t want to be a director who was hired: ‘Here’s a script, we’ve got Robin Williams.'” After he lost a lengthy rights battle with Warner Bros. over a Pinocchio project, Coppola says he realized, “I don’t have that much time. The time has come to do the dream project, the ultimate one that I write myself that’s about something really ambitious, that contributes new ideas to the language of cinema.” While the Godfather movies are fan favorites, he prefers the films it took critics longer to embrace, like Apocalypse Now, or audiences to discover, like The Rain People (see box). “The easiest way to make sure a movie is successful is to make a traditional movie very well,” he says. “If you make a slightly unusual movie or [don’t] exactly follow the rules as everyone sees them, then you get in trouble or, like with Apocalypse, wait 20 years to hear that was really good.” Coppola’s career capstone was to be a utopian story set in Manhattan called Megalopolis, an original script he had been tinkering with since 1984. “You know those advertising-agency guys that were gonna quit and write a great novel? It was like that,” he says.

At the same time, the director’s side businesses were turning out to be a lot more profitable than his filmmaking. By 2001 his Napa Valley winery (he now has another in Sonoma) and his resort company were earning enough for him to start production on Megalopolis with his own money. But Sept. 11 forced him to reevaluate his fictional future New York City. Banging away on the project year after year was “like being in love with a beautiful, wonderful woman who doesn’t want you,” he says. “You don’t get her, of course, because she doesn’t want you, but you don’t get anyone else because you can’t see anyone because of her.”

One friend who sent Coppola encouraging notes on his Megalopolis script was Wendy Doniger, the first girl he had ever kissed and the one who gave him On the Road when they were students at Great Neck High School in Long Island, New York, in the ’50s. (Coppola has optioned the book.) He flew his private plane to Chicago to pick up Doniger, now a University of Chicago professor of Hinduism and comparative mythology, and bring her back to Napa to discuss her ideas with him and his wife Eleanor. Over the house wine and Coppola’s cooking, they talked about his career. “He was stuck,” says Doniger. “For the first time in his life, he could finance a movie, and therefore he didn’t have to do what anybody else said, and that paralyzed him. He had no excuse this time if the film was no good. What froze him was having the power to do exactly what he wanted so that his soul was on the line.”

Hoping to help him with some of the themes he was struggling with on Megalopolis, Doniger gave Coppola some of Eliade’s works, including Youth Without Youth. The book, meant to be inspirational, became Coppola’s lightning bolt. “I realized, well, I can just go to Romania and make this movie and not tell anyone. I optioned the script on the sly, didn’t tell my wife. I was so wounded for those five, six years that it felt good to have a secret project. It’s like if you had $1 million cash in your purse that no one knew about, you’d feel empowered.”

Within his family’s company, Francis Ford Coppola Presents Ltd., Coppola can make any movie he wants if he spends less than $17 million. Youth, thanks to financial incentives for movies made in Europe and some scrappy filmmaking, fits into that category. Coppola set up a production office at a friend’s Bucharest pharmaceutical company, auditioning actors and cinematographers amid stores of cough syrup and vitamins. He hired a 28-year-old director of photography who had just gotten out of film school to shoot in less expensive high-definition digital video. With the help of old friend George Lucas, Coppola equipped a Dodge Sprinter cargo van with all the camera gear he would need, a technique he had employed on The Rain People, the 1969 movie they worked on together. For the first time since Rumble Fish in 1983, Coppola says, he felt creatively fulfilled while making a movie. “Youth Without Youth got me across the gap,” he says. “You lose your confidence. People in the arts — they’ve got that, maybe, imbalance. Now I know I can make a movie without having to ask anyone’s permission.”

The film got its first airing at the Rome Film Festival, where the reaction suggested that Coppola is going to have a tough time making young men’s pictures again. Rookie directors can experiment quietly; every movie Coppola makes is an international event. “I’m not supposed to call this a small movie or an experimental movie,” he says, because he knows it might turn off fans. It probably didn’t help that he was quoted in the November GQ as saying he felt Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Jack Nicholson have lost the passion for good roles. Coppola told reporters in Rome that the comments were taken out of context, saying, “I was astonished because it wasn’t true, and I have nothing but respect and admiration” for the actors. “These are the three greatest actors in the world today, and they are my friends.” In whatever context the original comments were made — and Coppola declined to clarify them for TIME — he’s not alone in his opinion. While Coppola was searching for creative purpose, after all, De Niro was making Meet the Fockers and Analyze That.

Now that Coppola has shaken the blahs, he’ll get back behind the camera again and start shooting a script of his own — still not Megalopolis — in Argentina in February. Tetro, starring Matt Dillon and Javier Bardem, is “about fathers and brothers and creative competition, a little Greek.” In September thieves broke into Coppola’s home studio in Buenos Aires. “Five guys tied up the people, stabbed the photographer in the shoulder when he resisted and stole our electronics,” including Coppola’s computer with the Tetro script on it and his backup drives. “The script was finished. It made Hamlet look like garbage, but it’s gone,” he says, deadpan. Nevertheless, the production is moving ahead. He’ll shoot the film in the same guerrilla style as Youth. As Coppola starts describing the Dodge Sprinter, already on its way to Argentina, a pretty, sixtysomething woman approaches his table and tells the director she knew him from Long Island’s Point Lookout Beach in the ’50s. “Did we know each other then?” he asks, trying to remember. “You were beautiful, and I was the schlumpy kid. You didn’t pay attention to me. How are we gonna go back and recapture those moments?”