Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola is a writer, producer, and director known for a string of 1970s classics that included “The Godfather,” “The Conversation,” “The Godfather, Part II,” and “Apocalypse Now.” In the early days of his career, Coppola worked for Roger Corman (for whom he directed “Dementia 13”) and as a journeyman screenwriter, winning an Oscar for his “Patton” script. After a series of intriguing movies that failed to find audiences (“You’re a Big Boy Now,” “Finian’s Rainbow,” “The Rain People”), Coppola hit the jackpot with “The Godfather,” a critical and commercial smash that established him as one of the major auteurs of the New Hollywood. In the early 1980s, he attempted to launch a new studio with “One From the Heart”; the film and the studio were financial failures, but Coppola’s innovations, such as digital editing and previsualization, were eventually adopted by the industry at large. A pair of S.E. Hinton adaptations gave Coppola renewed economic (“The Outsiders”) and artistic (“Rumble Fish”) success, and he spent the ‘80s and ‘90s alternating between personal projects like “Tucker: The Man and His Dream” and works for hire like “Peggy Sue Got Married,” hitting the sweet spot between art and commerce with “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Following “The Rainmaker” in 1997, Coppola took a 10-year break from filmmaking to focus on his winery before returning to the director’s chair for a trio of ambitious independent films: “Youth Without Youth,” “Tetro,” and “Twixt.” After another hiatus, Coppola returned in 2024 with the self-financed “Megalopolis.”