I am shocked he has to put his own money into this movie. It must be really off the wall for a studio to not invest in that. Studios are generally willing to raise money for movies by big name directors even if they haven't had a hit recently (see how Terrence Malick keeps getting to make big expensive movies, most with a-list stars despite not having had a commercial or widespread critical hit since the late-90s).
We could as well skip the movie and start the debate right away.<p>>What he dreams about, he said, is creating something like It's a Wonderful Life—a movie everyone goes to see, once a year, forever. “On New Year's, instead of talking about the fact that you're going to give up carbohydrates, I'd like this one question to be discussed, which is: Is the society we live in the only one available to us? And discuss it.”<p>>>One is her father who raised her, who taught her Latin on his lap and is devoted to a much more classical view of society, the Marcus Aurelius kind of view. The other one, who is the lover, is the enemy of the father but is dedicated to a much more progressive ‘Let's leap into the future, let's leap over all of this garbage that has contaminated humanity for 10,000 years. Let's find what we really are, which are an enlightened, friendly, joyous species.’<p>Is this a "French Connection" situation and it takes FF Coppola's soul to make it a tradition? HN already has all the infrastructure to establish the tradition of discussing this question. Is this a tradition worth establishing? And if so, what does it take besides making a submission?
He seems to have bet his whole life and at the end he seems to have won. I wonder why he doesn't do a crowd funding, I am sure he would raise the money easily and not have producers on his back.
If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend Coppola’s film Peggy Sue Got Married. It’s not as well known as some of his others, but it’s incredible. Funny and poignant at the same time.
It’s been 30 years since he saw commercial success with Bran Stoker’s Dracula, no one is lining up to invest given his more recent track record.<p>Still, he pulled off Apocalypse Now under similar terms and $120m is enough to do a great movie with great talent. IIRC his script is from the early 80’s at the end of his golden age. I’m looking forward to seeing it.
Well if it does 50m back and he makes 10 million a year from his wine portfolio(probably more) in 5 years he'll get back to 0 on the 100 million so its a bet but it's not the end of the world. Also, at late life legacy matters most then money to accomplish what you want before the end of the biological clock.
Love all his movies. But...<p>This sounds like a project a developer would do, that's just a bit too much. One that has too many features. One that said developer has been thinking of for the past 10 years.<p>The passion project.<p>And passion projects generally fail.
It's definitely a bet... something I realized in the past few years is that expensive Sci-Fi movies (excluding superhero franchises) don't usually make their money back.
><i>Even the talented people—you could take Dune, made by Denis Villeneuve, an extremely talented, gifted artist, and you could take No Time to Die, directed by…Gary?”<p>Cary Fukunaga.<p>Cary Fukunaga—extremely gifted, talented, beautiful artists, and you could take both those movies, and you and I could go and pull the same sequence out of both of them and put them together. The same sequence where the cars all crash into each other. They all have that stuff in it, and they almost have to have it, if they're going to justify their budget. And that's the good films, and the talented filmmakers.</i><p>It is interesting but when I watch Denis Villeneuve last films I really ignore all this genre thing because I'm so at awe of his execution. Similarly, when I first watched Tarkovsky's Solaris I quickly lost track of the plot but was drawn to the uniquely crafted cinematography and hypnotized by the deliberate manipulation of pace; at the end I was watching a movie by itself instead of contrasting it with my reading experience beforehand.
The same could be said about the seamless implementation of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" into the Vietnam setting of "Apocalypse Now"<p>[Arrival has imho a very noticeable weak plot, it is only when you read the short story "Story of your Life" that it fits nicely in. Nevertheless once you ignore that apparent flaw, it is a wonderful shot movie.]<p>The "marvelisation" has gone so absurd that here you are in 2019 after dozens of franchises watching "Joker" (in parallel with another Joker version at the backdrop of Ledgers last peformance) which subversively utilized the marketing ploy into tricking the audience watching a deeply disburting indie-film about the chasms of our society depicted in a masterfully balanced unstable character drawing by an actor using nearly his whole skill set.<p>Cervantes as a prisoner of his time quite successfully played with the readers expectations of "chivalry romance" (a popular franchise back then) to express himself artistically in a new way we now call a "novel". You laugh and cry at the same time when reading through the book, a comedy, tragedy, persiflage, psychoanlysis, slap-stick ... it really is a mess.
Embrassing the mess is not something you can persuade "rational thinking" types in the movie industry making the decisions, so you trick 'em. Unfortunately nowadays you have to do a lot of lip-service. I don't know about Chloé Zhao but "The Rider" and "Nomadland" were great movies, I wonder what "Eternals" meant to her aside the recognition of entrusting her with a 200$ million budget.