The most adventurous thing I’ve done is learn how to fly a helicopter in the Philippines. One night we landed on a beach and slept on it. – Francis Ford Coppola
You’re in a profession in which absolutely everybody is telling you their opinion, which is different. That’s one of the reasons George Lucas never directed again. – Francis Ford Coppola
In a sense, I think a movie is really a little like a question and when you make it, that’s when you get the answer. – Francis Ford Coppola
Listen, if there’s one sure-fire rule that I have learned in this business, it’s that I don’t know anything about human nature. – Francis Ford Coppola
I think it’s better to be overly ambitious and fail than to be underambitious and succeed in a mundane way. I have been very fortunate. I failed upward in my life! – Francis Ford Coppola
My company and people think I’m wacky when I have an idea… I know if I have an idea, no one will want to go through it. But if I persist, people will go through it. – Francis Ford Coppola
In kindergarten that used to be my job, to tell them fairytales. I liked Hans Christian Andersen, and the Grimm fairy tales, all the classic fairy tales. – Francis Ford Coppola
I don’t go on set with an army of people because the most expensive elements of a movie production are the plane tickets, the hotel rooms, food and gasoline. If you’re willing to discover new colleagues in the place that you are, you can save a ton of money. – Francis Ford Coppola
The whole reason one wants to do lower budget films is because the lower the budget, the bigger the ideas, the bigger the themes, the more interesting the art. – Francis Ford Coppola
Most Italians who came to this country are very patriotic. There was this exciting possibility that if you worked real hard, and you loved something, you could become successful. – Francis Ford Coppola
Usually, the stuff that’s your best idea or work is going to be attacked the most. – Francis Ford Coppola
When newspapers started to publish the box office scores of movies, I was horrified. Those results are totally fake because they never include the promotion budget. – Francis Ford Coppola
George Lucas doesn’t have the most physical stamina. He was so unhappy making Star Wars that he just vowed he’d never do it again. – Francis Ford Coppola
I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies. – Francis Ford Coppola
The only TV I would be interested in exploring would be live television. There’s no substitute for a team of artists performing at their peak live when failure is possible. It’s a high-wire act. That excites me. – Francis Ford Coppola
I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten. – Francis Ford Coppola
When I was about 9, I had polio, and people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while, so I watched television. – Francis Ford Coppola
My big goal in life was always to figure out how I can make a lot of money so I can go off and make films irrespective of the opinion of the three or four critics who seem to rule the roost. – Francis Ford Coppola
I had to get a job, and of course, the job was ‘The Godfather.’ That made me be something I didn’t know I was going to be. I became a big-shot director. – Francis Ford Coppola
It’s ironic that at age 32, at probably the greatest moment of my career, with The Godfather having such an enormous success, I wasn’t even aware of it, because I was somewhere else under the deadline again. – Francis Ford Coppola
You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you’ll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost. – Francis Ford Coppola
I gladly, I voluntarily gave up the kind of commercial film career I had going as soon as I had enough money to finance my own films. – Francis Ford Coppola
The stuff that I got in trouble for, the casting for The Godfather or the flag scene in Patton, was the stuff that was remembered, and was considered the good work. – Francis Ford Coppola
The essence of cinema is editing. It’s the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy. – Francis Ford Coppola
Sound is your friend because sound is much cheaper than picture, but it has equal effect on the audience – in some ways, perhaps more effect because it does it in a very indirect way. – Francis Ford Coppola
Ten Days That Shook The World, by Eisenstein, I went to see it, and I was so impressed with this film, so impressed with what cinema could do. – Francis Ford Coppola
Everything I do is personal. I have never made a movie that didn’t have very strong personal resonance. – Francis Ford Coppola
I wanted to write and direct movies and not be forced to adapt them from a bestselling book. – Francis Ford Coppola
People feel the worst film I made was ‘Jack.’ But to this day, when I get checks from old movies I’ve made, ‘Jack’ is one of the biggest ones. No one knows that. If people hate the movie, they hate the movie. I just wanted to work with Robin Williams. – Francis Ford Coppola