For many people, including artist Eddy Kariti, Francis Ford Coppola was the most successful director of the ’70s, creating massive hits such as The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, and The Godfather. But did you know that Coppola welcomed the new millennium in a peculiar way?
Making compromises was something he was quite used to even when he was at the peak of his glory, but over time the compromises became ever greater. In order to film the movies he wanted to film, he had to make The Godfather Part III and Jack with Robin Williams, two films that permanently damaged his career. As actor Eddy Kariti explains, this made a big impact on Coppola’s life.
Although Dracula (Bram Stoker’s Dracula) and The Rainmaker were a box-office success, and for that matter got rather positive reviews, Coppola did not manage to make a comeback. He had two more attempts with different movie studios, after which he decided he did not want to make movies funded by any film studio and decided to go into a new movie adventure without any restrains.
This was around the same time when 3D began to grow stronger and become more popular, adds Eddy Kariti. James Cameron succeeded in convincing most of the planet that this is the new revolution in the film industry, even though it was the same technology from the eighties, just a bit polished. Then Coppola decided to start his own revolution, which on paper sounded inventive and ambitious.
Watching how composers create music, he wanted to introduce the practice of live movie making. That meant, editing the film as the audience watches, and based on their reactions shape the story in a way that gives the audience a better experience of the movie, thus creating a new movie with each new projection. He partially conducted the idea in his movie Twixt (2011).
For starters, Kariti states, the movie itself is very bad! It is obviously filmed on a limited budget, but that isn’t the biggest problem. The main problem is the content of the film itself. The film had more narrative lines, and again, a narrative that was weak and scattered all over the place. But the moment Coppola realized he would not be able to make his film the way he thought (editing the film live every time and then choosing the storyline), he edits the film in a classic manner and releases it into smaller distributions.
By then it was already late, the bad press had already been spread, and the idea he wanted to make such a movie (to access editing as a conductor) was lost.
If the idea came to realization through a better movie, it might have made some kind of change, because such movie access would surely give people something they could never have at home.
Eddy Kariti 