Eleanor Coppola, wife of movie legend Francis, mother of filmmakers Sofia and Roman, grandmother of “Palo Alto” helmer Gia, celebrated her 81st birthday last week.
And this week she celebrates the release of the first fictional feature film she’s directed, “Paris Can Wait.”
It’s not like Coppola, an accomplished documentarian (“Hearts of Darkness,” which she co-directed, chronicled the madness on location of her husband’s classic “Apocalypse Now” and is itself considered one of the all-time top movies about moviemaking) and acclaimed textile, watercolor and mixed-media installation artist, had long been burning to join the family nonvineyard business.
“I didn’t feel competitive in that sense because I was making documentaries and they weren’t,” says Coppola, whose other relatives in the movie business include nephews Nicolas Cage and Jason Schwartzman, sister-in-law Talia Shire as well as her late son Gian-Carlo, a budding film producer who died in a boating accident in 1986. “And I was doing my own artwork, so I was occupied in the areas that interested me. I was thrilled and proud of them, and of course I went on locations with Francis and Sofia.
“I think seeing Sofia make ‘Lost in Translation,’ I realized she had just fictionalized a real-life experience,” Coppola adds. “So when I started my project, I was kind of inspired by that idea that you could take your own life experience and embroider and develop it, evolve it into an entertainment.”
Which is what Coppola did, fictionalizing a real-life experience into her first screenplay. When a head cold prevented her from flying from the Cannes Film Festival with Francis to a work commitment he had in Eastern Europe, a French colleague of “The Godfather” director offered to drive Eleanor to the family’s apartment in Paris. That trip wound up taking a few extra days, as the Frenchman insisted on going the scenic — and gourmet gastronomic — route through Southern France, much to the delight of his unsuspecting passenger.
Before turning it into a food porn travelogue for the ages, though, Coppola insists that she had no intention of directing her script until one morning at breakfast Francis suggested she should consider doing so. So she took a few classes and six years to raise the production budget, before heading back to Southern France with Diane Lane as her Hollywood wife Anne, Alec Baldwin as Anne’s mostly absent, not entirely trustworthy producer husband, and Arnaud Viard as the charming, good-timing and also somewhat shady driver, Jacques.
“I never knew I would actually get to make it,” Coppola says, brushing off the suggestion that tackling a major new career challenge at 80 might generate some trepidation. “It took six years to get the casting and the money to meet each other, so all the angst was wondering if it was ever going to come together.”
With mostly female department heads and an enthusiastic crew, Coppola retraced much of the route she’d traveled earlier, with new detours to a lovely basilica here or an imposing Roman aqueduct there that she hadn’t seen on the first trip. Additionally, all of those great restaurants Anne and Jacques indulge themselves at along the way were actually either in Paris or sets built there; on a tight multilocation schedule, it was impossible to arrange shooting days at actual bistros throughout the large area the film covered.
Stuff like that brought home to Coppola how different her previous way of making films was from what the rest of her family does.
“It’s the reverse of a documentary,” she says of feature filmmaking. “I’m a naturally very observant person, and making documentaries is like fishing. You’re just waiting for something that has some life or interest to happen in front of you, then you turn your camera on and hope you’re in focus and capture it. But a fiction feature is completely the other thing. It’s constantly, ‘Do you want her to have her coat on or off? Should she wear the red dress or the blue dress? Flowers on the table or to the side?’ … You just constantly have to compose everything that’s in the frame.”
One luscious element that’s real in “Paris Can Wait,” though, was the food.
“It was really important,” Coppola acknowledges. “The gentleman who drove me, that was his thing. He wanted to stop and eat this good thing here and there and everywhere. So I definitely wanted food to be like a character in the film, and I got a chef friend of mine to design the meals and the wines to pair with them. It turned out well; I’m very pleased with the visuals of the food.”
And consuming the props after all the takes were done? Depends on what, and when, it was.
“I myself am kind of chocoholic, so I did eat a lot of the desserts,” she confesses. “Although that ornate, long dinner where Diane wears the red dress? We had to shoot that at night because the room was surrounded by windows, and we had to do it when it was dark. So we started at 5 in the evening and finished around 5 in the morning. As the sun was coming up, all of those wonderful things you thought you were going to eat looked somehow less appealing at 5 a.m.”
Wait … a grandmother of five was up working until 5 in the morning? Not usually, Coppola admits, while acknowledging that the key thing it takes to direct a movie, regardless of one’s experience or talent, is stamina.
“The adrenaline rush just keeps you going,” she says. “I was so excited after six years of trying to finally get it to take off. We only had budget to shoot it for 28 days, and I felt like I could definitely survive that.
“But yeah, there was a difference between me and my young crew. At the end of the day, I would go back to the hotel, have yogurt and fruit, study my script and kind of crash. The rest of the crew would be down in the bar, hooting it up and having long, crazy dinners and drinking into the night. So I definitely wasn’t part of that. I had to pace myself. Fortunately, it worked out, I was on hand every day. It was thrilling, really.”
Thrilling enough that Coppola has directed two short films since making “Paris.” The Sunset Beach native seems content with doing that at the moment, near where she lives at the family’s Napa Valley wine estate. But she’s not ruling out another feature film in her future.
As for how close “Paris Can Wait” comes to the reality of that romantic — in the movie version, anyway — road trip, Coppola coyly chuckles, “That I leave to everyone’s imagination.”
There’s another reason, though, why she’s declined to identify her real-life traveling companion.
“He thinks it’s sort of funny that I made something out of the trip,” Coppola says. “And I think he’s charmed, but he doesn’t want to participate.”
If you want to take anything beyond hunger, beauty and a little wish-fulfillment out of watching “Paris Can Wait,” though, Coppola defines it as a different kind of participation that reflects her journeys as both a traveler and an artist.
“It’s just to remind us to live in the moment, appreciate life and smell the roses,” she says. “Take time, y’know?”
