Artist’s film doco set standard for ‘behind the scenes’ features
‘Francis feels very frustrated,” Eleanor Coppola, his stoical wife, wrote in 1976. “He gathers up his Oscars and throws them out the window. The children pick up the pieces in the backyard. Four of the five are broken.”
Filming for Apocalypse Now, his Vietnam epic based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, had yet to begin but the acclaimed director had heard that Steve McQueen, Al Pacino, James Caan and Robert Redford had turned down his offers to star in it, and he was feeling the strain after the success of the first two Godfather films. Far more absurd and chaotic scenes were yet to come, at every turn recorded by Eleanor, who has died at 87, in Notes: The Making of Apocalypse Now, her three-year-diary that was published in 1979, the year the film was released. She was, she wrote, “an observer at heart”.
When the family of five arrived in the Philippines in March 1976 for filming, Francis asked his wife to gather footage of the shoot for the United Artists publicity department. “I don't know if he is just trying to keep me busy or if he wants to avoid the addition of a professional crew,” she said. “Maybe both.”
She proved a natural, though she had to teach herself to use the equipment. Where Francis was bold and authoritative – he took “an Italian approach to life”, she said – Eleanor, three years older, was quiet and introspective. With her cropped hair and slim, boyish frame, she worked discreetly to capture some of the most frenetic behind-the-scenes footage ever recorded.
What was supposed to be a 13-week, US$13 million shoot turned into a near 18-month ordeal during which one lead was fired (Harvey Keitel), another suffered a heart attack (Martin Sheen) and “little by little”, Francis said, “we went insane”.
Helicopters lent to the production by Ferdinand Marcos, the Philippines’ strongman president, were suddenly recalled for his war on communism. The weather was catastrophic. At various points there was too much equipment, crew and money, much of it from Francis using their family home as collateral. The script had no ending and magazines started calling it “Apocalypse When?” then “Apocalypse Forever”.
Francis called it his “Idiodyssey”. When she was not capturing the madness, Eleanor was counselling her husband, “a real tortured-sufferer type” who was growing increasingly petulant, erratic and tyrannical. She filmed him cooking pasta with La Boheme playing at full volume as the set was destroyed by a typhoon. In another shot he wandered, glassyeyed, around the set, hitting his head on a lightbox. “It is scary to watch someone you love go into the centre of himself and confront his fears, fear of failure, fear of death, fear of going insane,” she said.
In a private conversation she recorded – “he was so far into his own concerns, he didn’t care if I taped it or not” – he said he wanted to “shoot” himself (he was later hospitalised and put on lithium for four years to treat his depression). “There were times when I would just say to him, you know what? We can just go home,” Eleanor recalled. “You can just say this one didn’t work out. You’ve made fabulous films before, and you can again. Just let this one go.”
This, she knew, was not in her husband’s nature. Three years later, Apocalypse Now became one of the most celebrated war films of all time. Eleanor, for her part, had captured 60 hours of footage and 40 hours of audio, but argued with the publicity team about how to use it. The project was shelved until 1991, when she teamed up with Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper to produce Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.
Narrated by her, it won four Emmy awards and became one of the most influential documentaries about the turbulence of film-making. When her husband saw it he was not pleased with everything, “but one of the things he had to say is that it’s true”, Eleanor recalled. “It's all true. It’s the kind of truth we don’t often see in this business, which is a business of illusion.”
What the documentary had not captured was Francis’ affairs, the most significant of which was with the family babysitter. The relationship grew more serious on the set of Apocalypse Now, during which Francis told his wife that he loved them equally. “It hit me in the chest and knocked me backward,” Eleanor wrote. “I saw myself pick up the vase of flowers and throw it.” Though the marriage survived, there were more infidelities. At a dinner during Cannes Film Festival, Eleanor threw a glass of wine over a young woman flirting with her husband.
“I was thinking about Jackie Kennedy in the White House,” she wrote in 1977. “She came into her own, in a way, only after her husband’s death. There is part of me that has been waiting for Francis to leave me, or die, so that I can get my life the way I want it.”
She was born Eleanor Jessie Neil on Long Beach, California, in 1936, the eldest of three children and the only girl of Delphine (nee Lougheed) and Clifford Neil, a political cartoonist for the Los Angeles Examiner who died when she was 10. Eleanor grew up “in an era when all little girls were taught to embroider and stitch”, and it was her first taste of creativity. During a degree in art and design at UCLA she specialised in weaving and jewellery making, because “women were pushed out of the painting and sculpture areas”.
She had ambitions to become a textile designer but after graduating she worked in the art departments of films. She met Francis in 1962 when she was assistant art director on the set of his horror Dementia 13 in Ireland. Within a few months she was pregnant with their first child, Gian-Carlo, known as Gio. They married in Las Vegas.
She never expected him to become a celebrity – “he was making this black-andwhite film, very low budget” – and she had not prepared for his conventional view of marriage, a product of his traditional Italian upbringing. He expected her to fulfil the role of wife and mother, at the expense of her own creative ambitions, but “I am not a homemaker,” she once said. Much of her life was spent in his shadow, “waiting for Francis to get a chance to direct, waiting to go on location, waiting to go home”.
When she was not managing the winery they had bought in Rutherford, California, however, she was “sneaking in” art projects of her own. In 1975 she held a conceptual art show in their 22-room Victorian house in San Francisco with Lynn Hershman, an artist and a fellow mother at her children’s school.
Eleanor knew that the audience “wasn’t as interested in our art as they were in coming to Francis Ford Coppola’s house, where it was known he kept his five Oscars”, but she was not above stitching that into her own work. “In those days when a man won an Oscar, a miniature Oscar was given to his wife to wear on a chain around her neck,” she recalled. “I had a jeweller file off the little loop for the chain at the top of the head of my five tiny Oscars, then removed Francis’ from the lighted glass case where they were always kept and displayed my miniature gold statues in their place.” Francis, who had been away for the weekend, “saw neither the art in it nor the humour”.
Other creative pursuits included designing costumes for Oberlin Dance Company, but Eleanor nevertheless felt stifled by a life of chopping vegetables and driving her children to Francis’ shoots. Her mind, she wrote, began to feel like a “rusting file cabinet”, dulled by “shopping for the mop, frying pan, kitchen towels, firmer pillows, fresh flowers, groceries, wastebaskets, trash bags, laundry detergent”.
As her children grew older and embarked on their own careers in film, boredom turned to loneliness and frustration, even envy. She recalled one lunch sitting opposite her husband and daughter, who was 27 and about to direct her first feature. “I am very happy for Sofia, happy that Francis is being such a good father and mentoring her,” she wrote, “but I also feel a hot, aching jealousy in my chest”.
Most of Eleanor’s work as a film-maker was geared around that of her family. She wove footage that Francis took of Sofia’s birth into a feminist art installation and shot several more documentaries about his film-making, as well Sofia’s directing of The Virgin Suicides in 1999 and Marie Antoinette (2006). The LA Times called her “the memoirist of the Coppola Clan”.
Yet in 2016, aged 80, she became one of the oldest American women to make her directorial debut, with Paris Can Wait, a gentle comedy about a woman who escapes the clutches of her directorhusband to go on a road trip in the south of France. “It was a little intimidating, because here I was living with two Oscar-winning screenwriters,” she said. “But something happens to you in your seventies. I think that you just suddenly realise you’re not going to live forever.”
In 2020 she directed her second, and last, feature, Love is Love is Love, an anthology of three shorts about “commitment and loyalty in long relationships”. She is survived by Francis, their son Roman and daughter Sofia. Their eldest child, Gio, died in a speedboat accident in 1986, at the age of 22.
Last year Sofia dedicated her film Priscilla, about Elvis Presley’s longsuffering wife, to her mother. “I’ve been there,” Eleanor said after watching a scene in which Elvis goes on tour, leaving his wife at home with their daughter, Lisa Marie. “When Elvis said to Priscilla, ‘You have everything you need to be happy’, that’s exactly what I was feeling at the time. I went to the psychiatrist and said, ‘Why am I unhappy?’”
– The Times