Coppola goes the indie film route for ‘Youth’

updated 5:23 p.m. ET Dec. 13, 2007

LOS ANGELES - The year’s fresh face on the independent-film circuit is a guy named Francis Ford Coppola.

Yes, THAT Francis Ford Coppola, the director behind “The Godfather” trilogy, the man with all those Academy Awards, the filmmaker who went into the wilderness on his own dime and came back with “Apocalypse Now.”

For all that, the 68-year-old Coppola talks as though he were an unknown just out of film school, making the sort of smaller-budgeted idiosyncratic stories that never would cut it at blockbuster-minded studios.

Though Coppola repeatedly put himself on the brink of financial disaster on such films as 1979’s “Apocalypse Now” and his 1982 musical flop “One From the Heart,” he has not lost the daring to use his own money to shoot his films.

The latest: “Youth Without Youth,” a strange tale of swirling ideas and images that stars Tim Roth as an elderly language expert given a second chance to realize his dreams after a freak lightning strike restores his youth. The film opens Friday.

Coppola saw himself in the story
Coppola adapted the screenplay from a story by Romanian author Mircea Eliade, whose protagonist is overwhelmed with regret over a lost love and the academic tome he has been unable to finish. Those themes resonated with Coppola, who had not made a film in 10 years and was wearied by failed attempts to make “Megalopolis,” the big-budget story of an idealist aiming to build a utopian city.

Eliade’s story “dealt with a man roughly my age who was reaching a point of disillusionment about himself and lost opportunities, as in the case of the girl he should have run off and married when he was a student, when he had his nose in the books too much, and as an old man realizes he’s going to die unfulfilled and without the woman he loved,” Coppola told The Associated Press in an interview.

“And he gets this extraordinary lease on life. Which for me was, ‘Well, I’ll go and make this movie like a student. I won’t be a 68-year-old.”’

He thought he’d return to his youth, when he started out on original projects such as 1969’s “The Rain People” before wild success with “The Godfather” drew him into big Hollywood.

Coppola would not disclose the precise budget of “Youth Without Youth” but said his winery and other family businesses have done well enough that he can afford to make a film a year costing up to $20 million without jeopardizing his finances.

That’s a dream come true for Coppola, who rails against the studio interference and red tape that can stifle a filmmaker’s creative vision.

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In a way, the director is following the lead of daughter Sofia Coppola, who co-starred in “The Godfather Part III” and rose to filmmaking stardom with her own personal little tale, “Lost in Translation,” while her dad was stuck in his “Megalopolis” quagmire.

“‘Megalopolis’ was very ambitious, probably would be very expensive,” Coppola said. “And I never quite felt comfortable that I had licked it, licked it to the extent that if I brought it to Warner Bros., they would say, ‘Yeah, let’s make this.’ ...

“So I was very frustrated. Here I was, time was going by, I was very aware that it would be Christmas, I would see my family, it would be New Year’s. Next thing I know, it was June, and I was no further along, year after year. Just do the math. I realized, how many years do I have to have this revived career that would be more along the lines of what I had hoped when I was younger?”

A friend who read the “Megalopolis” script introduced Coppola to Eliade’s writings. “Youth Without Youth” dealt with themes of consciousness and time that Coppola had been exploring with his own screenplay.

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