Coppola goes the indie film route for ‘Youth’

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‘How the hell do you do this?’
Starting in the 1930s, the story follows Roth’s Romanian scholar, intent on suicide but instead reborn as a young man on the run from Nazi scientists desperate to study his transformation. The film flits from thriller to romance as Roth’s character rediscovers his lost love, then moves into the supernatural and themes of reincarnation as his darling regresses through past lives.

“When I read it, my first impression was, how the hell do you do this?” Roth said. “And when I asked Francis that, he said, ‘I don’t know.’ So that was the beginning of the relationship. At least he was honest about that. He said, ‘We’ll figure it out as we’re going.”’

Coppola quietly bought the film rights to Eliade’s story, hoping to shoot it undercover in Romania, with no one but family and colleagues knowing he was making the movie.

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Word leaked out just as shooting was about to begin, but Coppola still was able to make the film in relative peace, since the only money man he had to answer to was himself.

Coppola said he was embarrassed that he was unable to make “Megalopolis” after talking about it so publicly for years. He’s willing to discuss his next film, “Tetro,” in general terms, as a quasi-autobiographical tale drawing on elements of his family history, but said he prefers keeping details of his upcoming films more to himself now.

“I find without telling anyone, it’s sort of like having a million dollars in your pocket in cash that no one knows you have. When you talk a lot about what you’re doing, you’re sort of losing the energy that you need to actually do it,” Coppola said.

Coppola plans to shoot “Tetro” in 2008 then move on to the next idea. He said he might eventually consider resurrecting “Megalopolis,” but for now, he’s content with more-affordable films that he can pay for out of his own pocket.

“I don’t feel a big studio wants to do movies in this kind of adventurous way, where making a movie is like asking a question, and the finished film is the answer. They want to know the answer before they even finance it,” Coppola said.

“As long as everything holds out and I stay within my budget limit, I can keep making one movie after another, unless the audience stays away in droves, and they say, ‘Hey, stop making movies, Francis. We don’t want to see them, anymore.”’

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