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According to Francis Ford Coppola, audiences can take Youth Without Youth at face value - if that’s all they choose to do. “I think you can see a movie and enjoy the movie, the beauty of the film, the photography, the sound, the acting, what have you. Then also later on see it again, as people have with The Conversation or Apocalypse, and get more out of it just in private thought. But I didn't want to make a movie that the audience the first time through wouldn’t enjoy. I also knew that I was making a film that was more adult than what's made. Obviously because I financed it myself, if I had not financed it myself and I gave this to a film producer, they probably will say, 'Well, okay, can you do this to it? Can you do that to it? Can you make it less ambitious and blah blah blah.' I didn't have to because I financed it myself.”
Financing it himself meant he could pick and choose his cast without having to obtain the approval of producers or a studio. On selecting Tim Roth to star in Youth Without Youth Coppola said, “I felt Tim Roth was an actor who had done such good work so many times but had never had his day in the sun, the way Nicolas, my nephew, Cage was doing good work, good work and then he did Leaving Las Vegas and suddenly people said, 'You know, he's a really good actor.' I felt the same about Tim Roth. I wanted to choose someone who had the potential, who also would give me the time to do all the difficult things the role had, to learn all these languages and try to be old. He had to be 25 and 85 and I thought he would give me [that]. It wouldn't be, ‘Okay, he's coming for a month and then he has to leave.’”
“He's a very intelligent guy and he knows a lot about movies,” added Coppola. “When an actor knows a lot about movies, it can either be a pain in the neck or it can be a big help. In this case, it was a big help.”
Asked if he sees himself as a master of cinema, Coppola replied, “Anyone I know who makes films knows that you don't work in it without learning so much. I absolutely am not a master of film, but I don't think anybody is. Film is a medium that's only existed 100 years and it just keeps unfolding and there's just more aspects to it. Look at Apocalypse Now. When that came out, a lot of you were very young, but that was considered really weird. Well, when you see Apocalypse now, it's not really weird anymore because partly it's changed our perceptions of what a movie [is].
In fact, when I saw it before I did the Redux version of it, one of the reasons I even added more scenes is I said, 'Gee, we cut all these scenes out because we thought the movie was so weird for the audience. We'd better go slow and make it more like a war film. But now it doesn't seem so weird 15 years later. Let's put those scenes back in and make it more weird.'
I think art is a process that is always bringing audiences along with it. Some people might think some painting, Jackson Pollack, 'Wow, my kid could paint that. That's weird. That's not art.' Then 30 years later, there's wallpaper that looks like that. Artists should be the avant-garde of what's going to happen. Very often they're punished for it. You read history about what people thought of certain musical works or paintings or things, ‘What trash this is,’ and yet, 30, 40 years can change their opinion about it. It happened in my lifetime with Apocalypse. That was never considered a landmark film because who won the Oscar the year that Apocalypse came out?”
Kramer vs Kramer took home the top honor instead of Apocalypse Now. “That sort of says where the tastes are when the movie comes out," offered Coppola. "I hope I'm not being defensive, but I've debated this a lot in my life. ‘What do I want now at age 68? Do I want to win an Oscar? Do I want to become famous?’ I'm already famous. I already won an Oscar. So now I'm in it a little more for my own love of it and to want to make beautiful things. I hope that I have a big audience that will see it. But I know I'm not going to have all the kids in Dayton, Ohio [rushing] to see my film, but maybe someday they'll see it.”
Speaking of Oscars, what was it like for him to be able to hand one to his friend Martin Scorsese? “Well, we were happy for him of course because he had made such great movies that certainly deserved the Oscar in the past. But, you know, the Oscar is what it is. It's a contest of stuff and we were very thrilled for him because we knew it was a relief to him because…he wanted to be included in all the other people who ever won Oscars.”
