By Tom Ryan
CINEMA
The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story
Sam Wasson
Faber & Faber, $45
Sam Wasson’s absorbing portrait of the artist as a mad genius announces itself as a story about Francis Ford Coppola, as distinct from the story. So he’s indicating right from the start that there are many tales to be told about the filmmaker whose name is as closely associated with excess as it is with success.
And it’s quickly clear that Wasson is very much going his own way, little concerned with a detached recounting of the events of his subject’s life or with putting them in any particular chronological order.
Francis Ford Coppola (right) and Marlon Brando during the making of Apocalypse Now in the Philippines.Credit:
Denying readers the comfort of watching it all from a carefully measured distance, his biography drags us into the messy cut-and-thrust of the work required to get things done, and of Coppola’s mission to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In contrast to his more conventional earlier books, including Fosse (2013), which served as the basis for the 2019 miniseries Fosse/Verdon, and The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood (2020), his writing style here is probably best described as immersive.
If The Path to Paradise were a film, it would be shot raw, with a hand-held camera, darting here and there as incidents call attention to themselves, rather than in a steady master shot. Wasson wants to recapture in prose what it must have been like to be Coppola struggling against the odds in the Philippines during the Apocalypse Now shoot, or to be young Francis, stricken with polio and spending a year in bed, or to be the boss of Zoetrope as he watches the dream turn sour, or to be a veteran trying to get back into the game with his new film, Megalopolis (which makes its debut at the Cannes Film Festival next month). He wants to take us inside the experience of what it might be like to be Francis Ford Coppola.
Although it’s never directly articulated, Wasson’s Coppola story is about a man whose view of the world was flavoured by the same communal ideal – the hippie spirit – that was born in San Francisco at about the same time as he was embarking on his career. And plunging into the maelstrom swirling around it.
Francis Ford Coppola directs Marlon Brando in The Godfather.Credit:
And what an engrossing story it is. About the making of Apocalypse Now (1979), The Godfather (1972), One from the Heart (1982), and others; about Coppola’s “Icarian” career, how he hustled his way into the film business and then set out to transform the Hollywood way into something closer to his own values; about the “overreaching” that saw him flying too close to the sun; about his devotion to the idea of family even while he was openly having affairs.
And about what his art meant to him, which is where Wasson sets out to find the real Coppola. “As no filmmaker does,” he writes, “Coppola lives in his stories, changing them as they change him, riding round an unending loop of experience and creation, until either the production clock strikes midnight and the process must stop or, one hopes, he recognizes his new self in the mirror of the movie – for him a documentary of his new internal landscape.”
Taking such an approach, The Path to Paradise strays from the precepts of traditional auteurism – which is primarily concerned with identifying the recurring ideas that run through an artist’s work and the formal strategies that give expression to them – and instead regards Coppola’s creations as “rites of passage”, reflections of his mode of being, his temperament and moral character.
To make his point, Wasson focuses on Coppola’s personal work, as distinct from the films he made as a director for hire (when he needed the money to prop up Zoetrope, the company he founded). He takes us from You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), “its very title literalizing the first rite of passage”, to Apocalypse Now, during which his wife, Eleanor, became fearful that he was becoming like Marlon Brando’s Kurtz, and warning that he was “creating the very situation he went there to expose”.
And then from The Godfather films, in which the Al Pacino character’s reviewing of his family circumstances creates an opportunity for Coppola’s pondering of his, to One from the Heart, Wasson identifying its story about “lovers drawn apart by their fantasies, reunited by deeper acceptance and love” as Coppola’s way of thinking through his estrangement from Eleanor.
Wasson’s sources are interviews, diaries, news stories and other accounts drawn from a wide range of people with firsthand experience of the now 84-year-old filmmaker’s extensive career. Colleagues on both sides of the camera, business associates, journalists, critics and family members, including Eleanor, who wrote the admired Notes (1979), about the making of Apocalypse Now, and daughter Sofia.
Francis Ford Coppola arrives at the 2022 Oscar ceremony in Los Angeles.Credit: AP
The information Wasson gleaned from them might not always be trustworthy – some sources appear to have been off their heads at the time – but the author uses it all to take us inside Coppola’s hell-bent approach to his work and life and to illuminate his often fevered dreams of how it should be. And, although it’s only mentioned in passing, he evocatively links the director’s obsessive ways with the late Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima’s in relation to his art.
Citing a Vogue interview, Wasson tells us that, for Coppola, Mishima was the ultimate artistic hero, his ritual suicide a theatrical act that illustrated the depth of his beliefs. “Everything you always wanted to define, he tried to define once and for all. And on that final day of his life … he turned it all into an act of art.” Wasson’s Coppola never goes that far, but he seems to be constantly teetering on the brink.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.