Interview: Francis Ford Coppola, Tetro

“Tetro” is visionary director Francis Ford Coppola’s first original screenplay since “The Conversation” nearly four decades ago and it’s his most personal film yet. Arising from memories and emotions from his early life, though totally fictional, it is the bittersweet story of two brothers, of family lost and found, and the conflicts, disturbing secrets and complex dynamics within a highly creative Argentine-Italian family. The film stars Vincent Gallo, Alden Ehrenreich, Francesca de Sapio, Maribel Verdu, and Klaus Maria Brandauer.

Written, produced and directed by Coppola, the visually stunning “Tetro” was shot on location in Argentina, mostly in black-and-white, by director of photography Mihai Malaimare Jr. It’s edited by Coppola’s longtime collaborator, the legendary Walter Murch. The independent low budget film features a mixture of languages and dialects – Spanish, Argentine and English -- and a tantalizing score by Osvaldo Golijov.

MoviesOnline recently sat down with Francis Ford Coppola and actor Alden Ehrenreich (who delivers a sensitive performance as the younger brother, Bennie) to talk about their new film at the Los Angeles press day for “Tetro.”

Here’s what they had to tell us:

MoviesOnline: What was it about Alden Ehrenreich that caught your eye and made you want to cast him in your film?

COPPOLA: Well, when I had written the story, as I said many times, it's not really true, it didn't happen, but certain things did happen and one thing that happened is there was a younger brother and it was me and I did run away from military school, not for reasons in the story here, but you kind of use your personal life as source material and then you use your memories and your feelings to put the flesh on a fictional story that you might cook up. The young guy was someone I wanted to feel reminded me of me, not that I was as handsome as Alden is, but he was probably dark, dark haired. At any rate, when I met Alden, and a lot of young actors, a lot of like more in the 24-year-old area, because that's often what happens when you're casting an 18-year-old. I always felt, for example, that James Dean was too old to be a high school student in Rebel Without a Cause. He didn’t look like a high school student to me. I tend to like to cast people closer to their real age.

Alden hadn’t been in a lot of films and was still in high school or just graduating high school when I met him. He was 17. I gave him the assignment. I said, “Go get Catcher in the Rye. There’s a couple of monologues in that. Read it for me.” He came back and read it for me and when he did, he did a really good job. He brought a lot. When there’s a piece of text that you know and yet someone bring some new idea that you hadn’t quite thought of, but that was my recollection, that I thought he did it very well. I immediately knew that he was the best choice and a good choice and I was enthusiastic.

I work a lot with Fred Roos, who was an associate for many years, and he’s a real casting professional. His attitude was, “That’s great. He’s really a good choice, but let’s not leave any stone unturned and let’s make sure. Let’s do some screen tests. It’s much more conservative, but you’re making a big decision.” I tend to be more a person who, you know, what I feel is what I do. But, we did do the tests and at each level he came up with impressive [work]. The screen tests were good. Later, we did more and I had him do a lot of crazy improvisations. So when the moment came, I was really happy working with him. He’s young. I think he’s 18 now, but he’s precocious. He has a good head on him and a desire to learn about stuff and he already knows a lot.

When he got together with Vincent Gallo, who is the older figure, Alden was very interested to learn from Vincent about the art scene and the music scene. Vincent is an interesting guy and has had a lot of experience in fashion and New York and those periods. Immediately, they started to hook up like an older brother/younger brother with Vincent teaching Alden about things and Alden being interested, not only about acting, but all these other areas. There was a nice relationship set up which makes it easy for a director to guide the actors towards being as they’re going to be in the story.

MoviesOnline: Do you have a younger brother or an older brother?

COPPOLA: My younger brother is George Lucas (laughs), but I have an older brother.

MoviesOnline: Is Tetro based on your point of view about fame and time?

COPPOLA: Well I think when you do personal work, you don’t know the full scope of what you’re getting into. You might think, well, I’m going to do a story that deals with family and creative people and rivalries. When you have lots of people in different artistic things, some are bound to be more successful, some are bound to be less. Or, even in the bible, one brother is jealous. They were jealous of Joseph or Esau and Jacob or Cain and Abel. Rivalries seem to come with the first human groups. Who is favored in the eyes of the father?

I was interested in having a family that had lots of successful, creative people in it. You think that’s a wonderful thing. It was like Bach’s family. They were talented and wonderful. I think some of Bach’s children were considered wonderful composers on their own. You would think that’s something to be overjoyed about and yet, within the families, there are jealousies. Maybe the new sister-in-law thinks you’re really more talented than your brother. From a child’s point of view as a kid, I always thought having the family all there with my cousins and my uncles, because we were Italians and family having wine and food and fun, and then all of a sudden you realize that aunt wasn’t invited anymore so those cousins didn’t come and why? You know that something happened, there was some offence. Maybe it was that they invested in the uncle’s bowling alley and he took a salary for being manager but never went. God knows what adult stuff. Or, maybe it was something to do with the career.

One thing I did notice as a child is that the rivalries seem to be passed on through generations. It could exist with the old uncles, but it could exist then with the nephews. You wonder, is that because of the uncles? Does the family set this in motion? If the uncles had kissed and made up, maybe then the nephews 60 years later would. At any rate, that began to interest me. I wanted to write about that, but when you write, you don’t know what you’re getting into and you don’t know what the answers are. You learn that when you make the film. You learn more. When you make a personal film, one of the benefits is that you’re going to learn a lot about what your subject is.

MoviesOnline: What about Coppélia? I’ve seen many excerpts from the ballet but I’ve never seen it staged like you did in Tetro. Also, a quick question about Tales of Hoffman. George Romero said when he was a kid, he was always renting that, and when it was out, Martin Scorsese had it. So what is it with great directors and that film?

COPPOLA: Well, I’ll tell you the truth. I have an older brother who is five years older than me and he was a wonderful older brother. He was very, very handsome and very good at school and very advanced in that he was reading literature and seeing unusual films. I patterned myself on being like him as much as I could be. When I was maybe 7 years old, he used to take me to these unusual movies. We also went to see Abbott and Costello Meets Dracula and the good movies, but then he would take me to things like Tales of Hoffman and, as you can imagine, a little kid, I’d just never seen this type of thing, but whenever I think of my brother, some part of me thinks of Tales of Hoffman. He told me Coppélia is really Coppola and there are themes in even the Coppapélia story that resonate in our family.

When I wrote the script, my idea was, what if there was a brother like that who took his kid brother to see those beautiful Michael Powell films and what if when the brother found the manuscript telling the true story of what had happened that had driven the family apart, when he read it if he imagined it as if it were a Pressburger/Powell film, almost seeing it as if it were Tales of Hoffman or The Red Shoes? That was the simple idea of why. But also, there was the love of those films and the idea that film doesn’t have to be people just sitting around talking, although there is a lot of it in this film, but you can try to use, as Red Shoes did, ballet as part of the story. That was fun to get to do the dance sequences.

MoviesOnline: Could you talk about the artistic elements of the film? I know you have an extensive literary background.  How do you bring that literary background to film?

COPPOLA: I have a literary background as much as my brother [who] ultimately became a professor of comparative literature. As a kid, he’d give me [a book and say], “Oh, read this” and it was Andre Gide or Jean-Paul Sartre or Hemingway or, even when I was younger, Aldous Huxley and Brave New World. So I did have the benefit of a brother who I admired who took the time to share what he was interested in with me.

I’m always struck, I have a great appreciation for literary work, but when you read a lot, you of course are then surprised when you think of the contemporary films how much more simpler and dumbed down everything has to be. Part of it I understand is because a film has to be pretty much gotten in one sitting, although it doesn’t, you can see it again. It seems if you attempt anything a little more ambitious, you’re immediately condemned for being pretentious. You’re not allowed to do that. You get slapped for doing that. You know, I admire literary greatness, and I’m sad that our films are being so narrowed down to only be those films that will reach 4,000 screens throughout the country and not [taking into consideration that] there might be people who really do appreciate a little more, people who read.

So, partly, that’s what took me to Argentina. I knew that in the last 60 years the great literary achievements were happening in Latin America. Certainly, in America, we used to all be excited there was going to be a new Saul Bellow book or, before that, a new Hemingway book or an F. Scott Fitzgerald book, but little by little our books, our novels, started to be more like movies, you know, best sellers. Part of the movie best seller thing is that they’re sort of the same story over and over again because the audience buys into it and enjoys it, so the sequel is basically pre-sold which is what’s really going on.

I was attracted to Argentina because there had been this literary tradition there, not only in Argentina with (Jorge Luis) Borges and (Julio) Cortázar, but also in Peru and in Chile with Roberto Bolano, who was someone I was reading four or five years ago who no one had heard of, then all of a sudden this year his work emerged in America as well. I guess it got translated. He had died. I went to Argentina in search of learning something.

I have to say, at my age now, I’ve kind of done everything, I think, although I never became jaded. I’ve had fame and I’ve had wealth and I’ve had failure and I’ve had wealth again and I’ve had all these wonderful privileges, but the real happiness in life is to learn something and, as I get older, it’s what I really look for. Nothing makes you learn more than when you work on a personal film or a film about something that you’re interested in because, in order to make the film, you have to do research, you have to study it, you have to spend a whole year just thinking about that.

My goal in wanting to have a second career with more personal kinds of films is that I’m going to learn about how to make movies. Although I’ve been doing it for 40 or 50 years, I know that much of what you could know [is] because the cinema is young and we haven’t even begun to touch that language that could be invented. Most of what we use in films was invented in the 20’s when movies could be pioneers in Germany and Berlin or Eisenstein or the great American silent artists. Then, all of a sudden when it because really a business, you’re not allowed to do anything. It’s kind of become a gulag. You can’t make it in black and white, it can’t be subtitled, it can’t be a drama anymore, it can’t be intellectual, it can’t be pretentious.

What is pretentious? Pretentious is meaning that you’re trying to do beyond what your ability can do. If you quit trying to do more than your ability is, then you’re going to lose ever discovering by luck something that everyone can enjoy and younger filmmakers can make use of. The first guy who took the chance to take a scene like this and suddenly realize he could take a close-up of you and a close-up of you and could do that and the audience would miraculously accept that, I mean, he gave us part of a language we can all use now. But there are probably other things that cinema can do that we can only know if we can take a chance and not have the guy say, “You can’t do that. We’re not going to finance that kind of a movie.”

MoviesOnline: When you’re writing something like this, is there anxiety about making it too indulgent in terms of what you want to show an audience? What was going through your mind since clearly some aspects of your life do infiltrate the story?

COPPOLA: Well, it’s not a real story. Nothing in my life ever quite happened like this certainly, but at the point that I’ve started the second career, part of it is that I financed the film. So, since I put up the money and I don’t get paid, I figure I’m allowed to do anything I want. And by self-indulgent, what does that mean? I hear it all the time because obviously I am doing that, but all that tells me is that I’m on a more personal desire to learn and to try things out and to follow my heart.

Is self-indulgent different than heartfelt? I don’t know. Maybe it is. Maybe self-indulgent is when you’re doing something and I’m imposing on my audience. Like, if I were cooking you dinner and I just gave you lots of stuff I knew you didn’t like but I liked it. But even that’s sort of good. I know if I invite 30 people to have lunch and they maybe would prefer that I just ordered out Kentucky Fried Chicken but I’m going to try to make some real interesting regional dishes that you’ve never had before, it’s sort of what it’s like to be a little self-indulgent because in a way I’m holding my audience captive.

In the movie business, I’m totally aware of that. They’re just not going to go unless I give them something of some value. My desire is to give them something of value. Yet, at the same time, I know I have to be true to whatever is personal to me and that I feel excited about. Who knows, maybe 10 years later, that part of the audience that said “I don’t want to see that,” as has happened with most of my films, 10 years later people said, “Well that’s a wonderful film. That’s really interesting.” I’m always shocked. I’m not dumb, I realize now as I sit here that I’ve become famous and many of the directors I admired have died, so the world needs a couple of old guys that they can think were important.

My success is based on a lot of failures. Many of my films [were failures], with the exception of The Godfather, which got a bad review in Variety but was successful right off. People liked it. I didn’t write it so it’s not all me. But, many of my other films, people say to me, “Well Francis, are you afraid that your films now are not going to live up to all those other films like Apocalypse Now?” I say, “Hey, those movies were failures. Ten years later they started to be interested in them.” So, maybe 10 years later, everyone is going to like Youth Without Youth. It certainly has some value to it.

The bottom line is you can’t worry about it unless you want a career. If you’re trying to have a movie career, then you’ve got to worry about if they’re going to call you up and give you offers. But I’m not trying to have a movie career. I do not have a movie career. And, as to my importance now, am I perhaps a Has-Been? For sure, I’m a Has-Been, but I has been in something that was very exciting at the time but I don’t want that anymore. I’d like to learn a lot. I’d like to make films that I’m in love with and I don’t care if I don’t get paid or if I don’t make money.

MoviesOnline: You talk about stepping away from Hollywood.

COPPOLA: No, no, I never said that. You just did.

MoviesOnline: You’ve said you’re not satisfied with the current state of what’s being produced in Hollywood generally. From my point of view, with the economic stasis right now with Hollywood infecting Hollywood, it seems like a really cool time for interesting filmmakers to come about. What do you think about that?

COPPOLA: If you can get your film financed and if once having it financed, you could get your film released, and once having the film released, if someone would go see it, because, in a sense, the audience has been brainwashed by 40 years of network television and half-hour situation comedies and little short-form things. It’s not that the audience has changed, because I’m sure our world audience, even though they might not all know it, would still respond to the great classics of Western civilization or world literature. They would still think that one of those books is beautiful if they had the chance to be exposed to it.

It’s a tricky situation now as I understand it. There are guys far older than me. Clint Eastwood is much older than me. Ridley Scott is older than me. I’m sure there are many wonderful directors but they’re still swimming in the… Michael Mann, well I think he’s younger than me, but these are all our best filmmakers, like Terry Malick, although he’s his own exception, because he’s not swimming. But what would I do? If I wanted to be in the industry, what kind of movies would I make?

They don’t want to make the kind of movies I want to make. They didn’t even want to make Apocalypse Now. Apocalypse Now only got made…I was at the high point of my career but I couldn’t get anyone to do it. I had to mortgage my house in Napa in order to even then. Imagine today if I wanted to do something, who would…? Stanley Kubrick had Warner Bros. as his kind of home and they would do what he did and thank God. We got a lot of great films because of it. But I never quite had a home. I would have hoped that Paramount might have been my home because I made Godfather for them, but they got sold many times.

Without having a patron, without having a home, I think I would just not be in the film business because I really don’t want to make … If they offered me, “Okay, you can make Batman, Part 6,” I don’t know that I would be a good choice and they would give me the choice. Well, they let me do Dracula. That was sort of like that. That was fun. You know what I’m saying? It’s that I don’t really have a place anymore and, since I’m not trying to have a career and not trying to make a fortune or be famous, what we have now is good. I’m independently wealthy and I use my money to make little personal films.

MoviesOnline: What was it about Bennie? Once you got the script and read the character, what was the connecting point for you that made you say, “I can embody this character, I can play this guy”?

EHRENREICH: I think the notion of living imaginatively and manipulating your environment in order to fit into a narrative that you devised yourself was something that made a lot of sense to me from growing up and watching films and then admiring different people in films and thinking of things narratively and certainly songs. You’d listen to a song and you’d think of yourself in a movie with the song playing and things like that. I know a lot of my friends do that same type of thing too and I think that’s an important thing to embody, is other narratives and try out things that you admire. Like what Francis says to young writers, which is “Copy people you respect.” You try out those things because you’ll never really just do what they’re doing. You’ll always have your own voice and eventually you see those things in a better light and grow out of them and take certain things from them. That process of growing through different narratives and trying out different lenses on your own life made a lot of sense to me and it’s something that I value very much in my upbringing.

MoviesOnline: What did you take from your experience working with Vincent Gallo and Francis Ford Coppola?

EHRENREICH: Vincent is a lens that I wouldn’t have tried on naturally but it was something that was really exciting and really was beyond myself in a certain way. I got to experiment with his very interesting logic and perspective on things that’s so fascinating and from such a different background than Francis but in the same sort of worlds. Certainly film and hearing his stories and his take on things and just the way that he thinks about things and his specificity about his choices and the way that he works was so interesting to be exposed to that kind of perspective. That was an interesting introduction for me. It was a dream that I’d had since I was very little and would watch these great films that I loved. It was coming true at the time and has come true by being in this film. I’m compelled in some way to explore a new horizon that I probably never would have gone towards or that I couldn’t imagine within myself in growing up. So, finding something that was really beyond that was a very interesting perspective to be around.

MoviesOnline: Francis, would you talk about working with Vincent Gallo a little bit?

COPPOLA: Well I didn’t know Vincent’s work. I needed an actor to play this mysterious character and someone in Argentina suggested “What about Vincent Gallo?” I heard something about a very controversial guy that everyone was very polarized about and that he was an actor and had directed. It was interesting that they knew him really well in Argentina. Since they’re not on the first opportunity to see films, they know how to work the internet real well and they knew his films. I got those couple of films and saw them first starting with Buffalo 66 and I thought it was wonderful and his character was full of life and interesting and the film itself had – I keep thinking of Christina Ricci doing her little tap dance. I love movies that surprise you where you’re not seeing the same thing over and over again.

I started to say, “Well what about Vincent Gallo for this part?” and a lot of my more savvy people said, “Are you crazy!? The guy’s a nightmare and he’s going to drive you crazy and you’re going to shoot yourself.” I got his number and called him up and said, “Would you be interested in visiting me in Buenos Aires? Just hop on a plane and we’ll spend a week together.” He said he would and he came down and we sent the ticket, of course. When an actor comes to see me, I always try to pick them up at the airport because it’s a welcoming thing to do.

I was there and as he came out through the airport, I saw him and just thought, “Oh yeah, this guy’s really interesting looking” although he was all hairy and you couldn’t see his face. I spent the week with him and found him very intelligent, very sweet and very nice with a weird sense of humor which I immediately thought probably is what gets him in a lot of trouble because he sometimes says things which are very provocative that get people all freaked out but he’s really pulling their leg in a way. I heard about this famous website where he was auctioning his sperm and thought he couldn’t possibly be serious. There’s got to be a joke in there.

At any rate, the long and short of it was, a lot of people called me up and said, “Do not do it! You do not know what you’re in for.” And I did it and found him to be a wonderful colleague and very contributing to the process, on the button, always there. At the rehearsals, always willing to do the zany things I ask actors to do. Very intelligent, not only about what we were doing, but as Alden said, the art and fashion scene in New York and all the artists and what have you. Funny. When we shot the film, hardworking, always there on time and not afraid to say, “Gee, Francis, I’d never say this line,” but then I’d say, “Well what would you say?” and then he was helpful.

So, it was what you want from actors – a good collaborative thing. If you were to ask me, “Should I hire Vincent Gallo to be in a movie?,” I’d say, “Yes, it was an extremely [good experience].” Usually in my films I have not had a lot of trouble with actors and I think it’s because when actors give you difficulty or they don’t come on time or whatever it is, it’s usually out of insecurity. If you set it up so that they feel welcome and can’t really get in trouble with you, and the rehearsal hall is a safe place where you can suggest ideas and not come off as being self-indulgent or difficult, [then] actors are generally not difficult. They’re frightened is usually what it comes down to.

MoviesOnline: Did you watch The Brown Bunny? Have you seen it?

COPPOLA: I did. Obviously Brown Bunny was very controversial. Did you see it? Do you understand what the point of that big, sexy scene was plot-wise? (Note: He’s referring to notorious fellatio sequence with Chloë Sevigny.)

MoviesOnline: It was just a shocking image. Maybe that was the objective.

COPPOLA: But what was the upshot of why that …what was unusual about what had been going down? I mean, aside from the fact that it was very … What was the plot point?

MoviesOnline: I don’t remember.

COPPOLA: See, that’s the thing, the plot point was she was dead. What’s that Japanese movie where the potter is sleeping with the beautiful woman that turns out to be a ghost? You know the one. He’s a potter and he goes off and a very noble woman catches his eyes and he goes to her castle and he’s having this fantastic love affair with her and forgets his wife and then later he realizes she’s a ghost. What’s that movie? It’s a Japanese movie. And then he’s worried because there’s been civil war and he goes home and his wife welcomes him and comforts him and he’s so happy and then the next morning he realizes the wife was dead. She had been killed while he was away.

That was sort of the point, as I took it, is he was doing something very graphically shocking and seemingly self-indulgent. Obviously, he’s doing this, but the point was that the tragedy of all of that was that he had lost this woman and he had loved her and this sexual memory was basically of a ghost so that there was sort of a reason but people really condemned him for it. I thought in the end it was an interesting idea. I’m sure, he’d hate for me to say it, but if he gave me Brown Bunny, in a weekend I could cut that film so it would really….people would understand what that movie was about. There was a beautiful scene in Brown Bunny with Cheryl Tiegs. Remember that scene? At the beginning, he stops at the rest stop, at the convenience store. That was a beautiful scene. She was very moving.

MoviesOnline: This movie is half in Spanish. Did you write the Spanish?

COPPOLA: It’s not really. It’s really in English but there are lots of times when people are talking in Spanish. Twenty years ago, if this movie had been made, everything would be in English, but obviously the people who would be talking to other people in Spanish, I just let it be in Spanish and figured that we’re all comfortable with text since everybody’s texting and that could be more natural. You see a lot of movies made in Hollywood or other [places] where they’re supposed to be here or there and everyone’s talking with British accents.

MoviesOnline: Can you tell me what’s next for both of you?

EHRENREICH: I’m just going back to college in New York.

COPPOLA: Me too. (Laughs) What’s next for me is I don’t feel the desire to want to write about this aspect of my family and more so I really feel I have a clean sheet of paper and I can write something new that’s the kind of movie I’ve always wanted to make. It’s a great privilege to know that I can sit down and I’m writing it already and pretty much be sure that I can finance it and make it. Film directors always have a lot of anxiety that they’re never going to get to make the movie that they want to make, even the big ones. It’s not like just the really big famous ones you know of are able to make what they want to make. They have to make what will be financed and pay them their salary and they have to work with the actors.

Have you ever thought about this thing about actors, that if there’s an A list of actors, then you have this piece and you need to get so and so if you want to get it financed? So and so might not be right for the part but inevitably you make so and so play the part because even if he’s a wonderful actor, he might not be right for what you’re doing but if you get him, then you change the movie to fit. When you make a lower budget film, not only do you have the benefit that the lower the budget the more ambitious or interesting the ideas can be, but you’re free to do what you want, and you also can cast someone who’s not so well known but who might be right for the part.

Everyone who has bought a bottle of my wine is essentially a producer of my movies because without the wine, there would be no movie.