Coppola’s drive to feature debut
Francis’ wife, Eleanor, blurs fact and fiction in road-trip-inspired movie
Eleanor Coppola admits she had some fun playing with the line between autobiography and fiction while writing the screenplay for “Paris Can Wait,” her new romantic road-trip movie which is also — remarkably, at age 81 — her narrative feature directorial debut.
The story of a devoted, artistically inclined American wife (played by Diane Lane) in France with her self-involved movie mogul husband (Alec Baldwin) was sure to make audiences guess “just how much is me and how much is Francis (Ford Coppola),” Coppola said recently. “You just can’t shake that, especially when they hear the inspiration was a real trip.”
While in San Francisco (from her main home in Rutherford) to receive a filmmaker award from the San Francisco International Film Festival, Coppola said she still can hardly believe she successfully wrote, directed and produced “Paris Can Wait” “because it was so daunting, it was something I never thought I’d do, and I started the process as a grandmother of six in my late 70s.”
Coppola, a lifelong visual artist, has directed seven documentaries, mostly behind-thescenes takes on films directed by family members, including her 1991 Emmy Award-winning “Hearts of Darkness” about her husband’s punishing “Apocalypse Now” shoot in the Philippines.
Coppola calls herself a “natural observer,” temperamentally more attuned to the work of documentaries. She never expected to make a fictional feature, citing in part the burden of expectations that comes with her surname.
“Here I was, living with an Academy Awardwinning screenwriter, and my daughter (filmmaker Sofia Coppola) is one as well. Everyone in the family makes films, even my granddaughter (Gia Coppola). I thought, What am I doing? I don’t even have any Coppola genes.
“But sometimes in life, when you don’t know what’s coming next, something gives you a little kick.” Just such a moment, which would eventually result in “Paris Can Wait,” presented itself to Coppola following a 2009 trip to the Cannes Film Festival.
A bad head cold prevented her from flying back to Paris, where Francis was going to meet her after a detour to Budapest for business. “At the airport, a French distributor friend of Francis’ offered to drive me back,” Coppola said. “It was a seven-hour drive so I thought I’d be in Paris by dinnertime. Well, it ended up taking 48 hours, with many stops, a lot of food and wine and Francis calling all the time wondering where I was.
“When I got home, I was telling a friend about it, and we were laughing, and she said, ‘That’s the movie I want to see,’ ” said Coppola, seated in a corner table at Cafe Zoetrope in North Beach’s landmark Sentinel Building, which Francis bought in 1973 with, she said, “the new money from ‘The Godfather.’ ”
In “Paris Can Wait,” Lane’s bemused character, Anne, is a woman at a crossroads in life, with her husband preoccupied with work and her daughter away at college. The roué French producer, Jacques (played by Arnaud Viard), is a slow-food and slow-life advocate, stopping hourly to smoke, detouring for beautiful scenery and, predictably, flirting with her throughout.
“I had a lot of fun, it was liberating, once I realized that with a fictional feature anything can be put in that feels right to the story, as well as specifics straight from my own life.”
One of those true-to-life details, one that seems to encapsulate a great deal about what it’s like being married for 54 years to someone as famously larger-than-life as six-time Academy Award winner Francis Ford Coppola, occurs in one of the opening scenes of “Paris Can
Paris Can Wait (PG) opens May 19 in Bay Area theaters.
v To see a trailer: www.sonyclassics.com/ pariscanwait
Wait.” A fan of Baldwin’s character asks for a photo as he’s standing arm-in-arm with his wife. We then see through the admirer’s camera as she re-frames the shot to completely cut out his wife.
“I’ve had that exact experience of being cropped out,” said Coppola, with a good-humored laugh. “I remember someone asking to take a picture of Francis at a film festival. I was on one side of him and Sofia was on the other. They printed it with Francis and Sofia — and my shoulder.”
Coppola was refreshingly frank about the “inner conflict, the push and pull” she’s felt her whole adult life about pursuing her own creative ambitions while raising three children and supporting her husband’s career.
“I was always trying to balance the disparate parts of myself,” Coppola said, echoing themes she explored in her 2008 memoir, “Notes on a Life.” “On the one hand, traveling everywhere with Francis has brought me experiences I never would have had, but another part of me was always saying, ‘But I’m just following his life around. What am I doing with my life?’
“I had to make my peace with it. Francis has a such a big personality, is so well known, and I was always the accessory.”
Back in the ’70s, “When a man won an Oscar, his wife was given a little gold Oscar on a gold chain to wear,” Coppola said. “I have two of them. It’s funny; but it’s not.”
She says Francis was “very helpful” with the making of “Paris Can Wait.” He suggested Eleanor direct it herself, after she “couldn’t find a woman director with the aesthetic I was thinking of.” He also swooped in with lastminute funding when preproduction was stalled, and even persuaded Baldwin to take the role after another actor (reportedly, nephew Nicolas Cage) dropped out.
“A very big moment for me was in the editing,” Coppola said. “Francis and three other award-winning male directors saw it and all advised me to cut some things. But I realized that, no, I needed those things in the story I wanted to tell.”