Coppola

Bram Stoker’s Dracula Special Edition DVD Francis Ford Coppola and what he has to say is quite interesting.

He then talks about the budget of the film and how tight the production was. Shot for a reported $40 million the entire movie is shot on a stage, absolutely no location shoots. He points out several moments in the film that look the way they do because they weren’t granted the budget to shoot it the way he wanted to. He talks about how the film was one week ahead of schedule and how he approached the financiers for the money from what is now a bonus week to shoot some effects. He was granted the money at first only to be denied later for what was being called an accounting error.

Taking everything into consideration and what sounds like a very troubled shoot, including a moment he says he “lost his cool” with Gary Oldman, kicked a chair across the room and walked off set, the film is officially Ford Coppola’s most successful film at the box-office. This is a man that made the highly acclaimed Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now, yet a film that he speaks of with what I can only describe as antipathy is his biggest monetary success. He is obviously proud of several moments of the film, but at no time does he seem overly pleased with the picture.

I must confess, and this maybe sounds disheartening, but when I look at this and I think of all the work it is to make a movie any way, I have to say that unless it’s a theme or a subject matter that you have to make because it says something that has never been said before or it is in your soul and you have to get it out – I can’t see any point to make a film at all.

The way it’s been set up and the way the whole profession has gone it’s like you have to tolerate so much stuff. You have to work on this movie for so long under such unenlightened directives from the company financing it and when it’s all said and done they publish in the newspaper like the sports scores how much money it did. They show it in a theater that’s a box with ten other [films] and you have to not only hear the battery of critics that rightly or wrongly say their opinion along with everyone else, it seems like the only reason to make a movie is because it’s something that’s never been made before and is really part of your feelings about life.

Therefore it should be something that you should finance as well as make because that is the only way that you can have the same right as a painter has when he paints a picture, or poet has when he writes a poem or, to a large extent, that a novelist has when he writes a novel. Even really an opera composer, more or less, has the right to sit down and make his opera the way he sees it.