(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 18 November 2025 15:45, UK
Following his Oscar win for writing the screenplay for Patton in 1970, Francis Ford Coppola’s career quickly kicked into an even higher gear when he directed The Godfather, which cemented him as one of his generation’s most necessary filmmakers.
The movie was a hit, and it didn’t take long before the film and its subsequent sequel were considered some of the best movies ever to revolutionise the gangster genre, wherein Coppola presented a gritty look at the intersection between family and violence. The rest of the 1970s saw him make movies like The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, which only kept his legacy solidified, but sometimes something has to go a bit wrong, and when the 1980s rolled around, his career started to take a downward turn that he would never fully recover from.
Three years after Apocalypse Now, Coppola went in a completely different direction, helming a musical romance which was a far cry from the brutalities of war, and with the failure of One from the Heart emerging in 1982, it nearly bankrupted the director and failed to impress critics or wider audiences.
Made on a budget of $26million, the movie performed so terribly that you wonder how Coppola ever bounced back, and what’s even more embarrassing is that the US box office collections for One from the Heart made just $637,355, which led him to admit to the AV Club, “One From the Heart did have flaws”. Although his regrets mainly revolved around the cinematography, I think there was more to worry about than that.
Expanding on his feelings about the movie, he continued, “If you ask me what I would do differently in my life, there is only one thing I would do different, which is pretty good, and that was that three weeks before we shot that movie, I should not have given in to my cinematographer, who didn’t want to shoot with 16 cameras, and do it like live television.”
He continued, “My idea was that there could be something like live cinema, where you get the cast and the musical numbers and everything and say, ‘Okay, kids. We’re going on. 5-4-3-2-1’. And do the whole performance, and then look at the finished movie.”
He wanted to do multiple takes to see which of the versions would work out the best, but apparently, his photographer “chickened out” and started doubting his abilities, telling Coppola, “I can do it so much better”. Thus, the director’s regrets were bound to the fact that he didn’t enjoy the process more than what could have made the film better, regarding which he himself was on the fence, even when discussing it in hindsight.
It seems Coppola has learned to listen to his gut since then, because he has brought some pretty ambitious ideas to life, not letting anyone stop him from executing them, although perhaps they should have.
With his most recent film, Megalopolis, the man reached a new low in his career, with critics and audiences alike making fun of the epic failure, which included an interactive element for the theatrical release that no one seemed to like, showing that sometimes, you just need a person to tell you when to stop.
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