Coppola’s rocky road to Paris
Why a new film also represented a breakthrough for a long-standing Hollywood power couple, writes
‘It’s not about money, you know that someone might just chance into a room where you’re doing a show and remember it for the rest of their lives.’ own bands, with ever-changing names and line-ups.
The Bilders, Builders, Bilderine, Die Bilders, Bilderbergers, Six Impossible Things, Above Ground, The HAT, AM Express, Urbs, Max Kwitz, Soluble Fish – Direen has released music under so many monikers, it’s easy to lose track.
‘‘Some of my bands were thrown together very quickly, which adds something special to the music, I think. We’re often under-practised so an element of improvisation is necessary, just for us to get through the songs. That lack of predictability brings a lot of fresh energy to the music. The songs themselves aren’t, you know… Beethoven, but their simplicity means we can deliver them in many different ways.’’
Direen’s richly expressive speaking voice falls silent at one key moment in A Memory of Others.
There he is, high in the Port Hills overlooking Christchurch, and Ogston asks him about his relationship with the city.
Direen talks of having to leave at one point, to get out and escape a ‘‘broken life’’ and ‘‘a lot of troubles’’.
Ogston doesn’t press him for details; the moment is poignant enough without further explanation.
‘‘Yes, well… he intuited that I didn’t want to talk about certain things,’’ says Direen, who’s in no hurry to talk about these things now, either.
‘‘Simon respected my privacy, and sometimes talking around the edges of things gives just as much insight. You know, I have three children who were born in Christchurch. Perhaps the earthquake reminded me of some difficult times in my life whose origins were connected with that city.’’
Now 60, Direen’s still writing, recording, thinking, touring. He still makes consistently engaging work for very little cash and scant recognition, because making this work helps him understand the world in which he lives while hopefully changing that world for the better in some small way.
‘‘Writing songs and stories and poems is necessary for me to function; they help me think. Sometimes you’re just driven to do these things, even though there may not be a huge audience for them. Sometimes you play a show and only 10 people turn up, like those little concerts you used to give to your family as a child. But little shows like that can really move the people who are there, and that’s important.
‘‘The creative work people do gives a throb of energy to the places we share, like blood circulating in the city’s veins. It’s essential to feed the spirits of the people who live there. That’s what keeps me going, and I’m sure a lot of other people doing creative work feel the same.
‘‘It’s not about money, you know that someone might just chance into a room where you’re doing a show and remember it for the rest of their lives.’’
Bill Direen: A Memory of Others premieres at the NZ International Film Festival, with Simon Ogston and Bill Direen hosting Q&A sessions after each screening.
Auckland: Event Queen St (Friday, August 4, 1.45pm/ Saturday, August 5, 1.30pm).
Wellington: Te Papa (Saturday, August 12, 5.30pm), Embassy (Sunday August 13, 3.15pm).
Christchurch: Northlands 4 (Saturday, August 19 6pm/ Sunday, August 20 5.30pm).
Dunedin: Rialto (Sat, 26 Aug 5.45pm/ Sunday, August 27 1pm). James Croot.
Eleanor Coppola is used to cinematic crises. After all, she documented her husband Francis’ muchpublicised troubles making Apocalypse Now in 1991’s Hearts of Darkness. But even she faced a steep learning curve when it came to tackling her first narrative feature.
Featuring Diane Lane, Alec Baldwin and Arnaud Viard, Paris Can Wait is the story of a long-suffering film producer’s wife who goes on an unexpected Gallic voyage of discovery when she accepts a lift from her husband’s French colleague.
A six-year labour of love for the now 80-year-old Coppola, production almost shuddered to a halt when the writer-director-producer lost both her leading man and opening location in Cannes just days before they were due to start.
The latter was because a Saudi Arabian prince had belatedly decided to vacation on the Riviera – with 1000 guests. Every room was booked. Security was tight across the whole city. Then production designer Anne Seibel remembered a hotel about 20 minutes away, where she’d worked with Woody Allen. The owner allowed filming, but only between 11am and 5pm after her guests had breakfast and before they returned from the beach.
Finding a new actor required the same amount of lateral-thinking and luck, says Coppola down the phoneline from her home in California’s Napa Valley.
‘‘I tried everybody that I knew, but nobody was available. It just happened that Alec Baldwin called to ask Francis for a favour and he said, ‘well I can’t do that, but can you do me a favour? Be in my wife’s movie’.’’
She says that one of a couple of times that her husband proved to be ‘‘pretty helpful’’ with this project, a far cry from earlier in their marriage when he wasn’t very encouraging about her artistic endeavours.
‘‘He saw them as time away from my ‘real work’ – the family.
‘‘So Paris Can Wait was a breakthrough for me and Francis as a couple. He went with me to meet my French production team. He brought in American Zoetrope with an investment and guaranteed the completion bond. He defended me to the financiers when they had objections to some of my choices and he gave me wise council when I ran into problems I didn’t have the experience to solve. For example, our French actor [Arnaud] had never worked in English before and was struggling. Francis had the wisdom to send a dialogue coach over so he could manage his lines, so it didn’t take 10 takes to get his lines right.
‘‘Really, Francis was crucial to the film getting made.’’
He was also partly the unwitting inspiration for the story. Like, Diane Lane’s Anne, Eleanor Coppola had accompanied her husband to the Cannes Film Festival in 2009 and found herself unable to fly to their next destination because of health issues. Enter a long-time French business associate who offered to drive her. But thanks to his unreliable vintage Peugeot and bon vivant behaviour a seven-hour sojourn turned into a more than two-day odyssey.
Coppola, who had also made behind-the-scenes documentaries about some of Francis’ other films Youth Without Youth and The Rainmaker, as well as one for her daughter Sofia’s avant-garde period drama Marie Antoinette, had never considered writing or making a feature film until she regaled this tale to one of her friends back home.
‘‘She said, ‘that’s a movie I would like to see’. It had never occurred to me to do fiction, documentaries are where my abilities lie. But I think it’s something that happens in your mid70s, you go ‘why the heck not give it a try?’ What did I have to lose anyway?’’
Six years arguably. And yes, she knew it was always going to be a hard sell to film financiers.
‘‘My movie doesn’t have any aliens or gunshots or killings. There’s no sex and no violence – nobody wants to invest in that. So, it took a long time [to get it off the ground].’’
Coppola says she also caught in the old ‘‘Catch 22’’ thing for a long time where she couldn’t get the actors until she had the money and a start date and she couldn’t get either of those until actors committed to the project.
Then there was the period of adjustment Coppola needed herself to get used to shooting a narrative feature, rather than a documentary.
‘‘They are completely the opposite,’’ she says, her voice tinged with more than a little exasperation. ‘‘With a documentary, you don’t set up anything. You try to be a really good observer. You just hope you’ve got the camera turned on, in focus and pointed in the right direction. It’s always unpredictable and you love it if there’s a problem, because it makes your documentary more interesting. The bigger the crisis the better.
‘‘With dramatic features, the reverse is true. Any crisis wasn’t amusing and was really tough on me. Also, you have to compose everything that is in the frame. You have to decide if you character is going to wear a red dress or a blue dress? Is she going to have a hat or not? Will she have a wine glass in her hand? I wasn’t sure if I would be up to the task.’’
Fortunately the grandmother-of-five overcame those fears and the result is a older-audience-orientated road trip to delight the sense and tickle the funny bone. Paris Can Wait
screening. (PG) is now