Eleanor Coppola’s journey to fiction feature debut
Paris Can Wait inspired by 7-hour road trip that lasted two days
So there was Eleanor Coppola, hanging out at the Cannes Film Festival back in 2009, while her filmmaker husband, Francis, conducted business and arranged for a side trip to visit some Eastern European film studios Eleanor wasn’t especially keen on seeing herself.
A business associate of the Coppolas, a French distributor of Coppola’s films in France, was driving to Paris; Coppola (Eleanor, that is) had an ear infection and felt lousy. She thought, well, that’d be a fine way to get there in approximately seven hours’ time, and then Francis would join her in Paris when he was done with Budapest.
The road trip ended up taking a couple of days, with her voluble, high-living driver stopping “every 30 minutes or so” for another fantastic meal or sightseeing detour. When she got back, an idea for a screenplay went ping! And now, the 81-year-old Coppola has made her first fiction feature, Paris Can Wait, opening in Victoria Friday and starring Diane Lane as the wife of a famous director (played by Alec Baldwin) whose road trip to Paris becomes a push/pull romantic odyssey. Arnaud Viard portrays the French connection.
Back in 1991, Coppola made the superb, revealing documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, about husband Francis’ torturous filming of the Vietnam War fantasia Apocalypse Now.
“I accidentally fell into that,” she says over coffee at a downtown hotel. “They were looking for someone to do a five-minute feature to go with the television airing of Apocalypse Now.I thought I’d get some explosions, maybe a little time with some of the actors. But I got very intrigued by Francis’ creative process, so I started to film that process. It was truly something to be behind the scenes of a film like that, examining what was really going on.”
When they were both UCLA students, Francis was hired by producer Roger Corman to do a Psycho knockoff on a tiny budget. Dementia 13 was the result, filmed in Ireland in 1962.
“I knew the cinematographer,” Coppola tells me, “and I said: ‘Oh! Get me a job on that! Sounds fun!’ So I became the assistant to the art director. We were a twoperson art department, him and me.” She and Francis became friendly as work colleagues. Then they started dating. They married in 1963, and their children, and various relatives, make their living in one realm of moviemaking or another. (Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled opens in late June.)
Writing Paris Can Wait, Coppola didn’t see herself directing it: That was her husband’s suggestion. It took several years to scare up the money. Lane initially turned down the lead; she was going through a divorce from actor Josh Brolin at the time. A year later, Coppola was still working on the financing, and Lane was available and interested. Viard, a relative unknown, plays the larger of the two male roles, but as Coppola notes, with a slight smile: “The funders didn’t care about the Frenchman; they only cared who was playing the American.”
They filmed in late summer 2015, and enjoyed a lot of highly photogenic food while on location. “The story’s very slight, but it needs to build to this unexpected experience this woman has with this man,” she says. “We all have those experiences in life, that wake you up and open your eyes.” Writing the script meant “taking my own experience and elaborating on it, fictionalizing it, growing it from that seed.”
Different family members offered different suggestions. One nephew suggested that the characters’ car should break down. Coppola’s son, Roman, told her “the thing about fixing a fan belt with panty hose. I liked it, so it’s in there, too. I don’t have anything invested in keeping my original creation intact. Anything that makes it better, it goes in. Francis is like that, too. Always has been. Use anything that works.”