Francis Ford Coppola Opens Up About How Philosophy Has Inspired His Life and Career

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1:04Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

1:55Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm going to just get into today's episode pretty quickly because it's absolutely insane that I got to interview this person. And it's literally the first podcast they have ever done. So I feel incredibly fortunate. It was one of my favorite conversations I've ever had in my life. I could barely believe it as it was happening. and the idea that I was just swapping stoic quotes and book recommendations and, you know, about our favorite novels back and forth with the one and only Francis Ford Coppola, the greatest movie director of all time, the godfather of the conversation apocalypse now.

2:40And then this new movie Megapolis, which is literally about the Catalan conspiracy in ancient Rome, Cicero, Catalan, Cato, Caesar, just one of the most crazy events in history. But before I get into all that, I want to go back. I want to tell you a crazy story about how this crazy thing happened, because it's a peek into an earlier chapter in my life that not all of you know about. As you know, I dropped out of college, 19, and I worked for Robert Greene, but I had a day job. I wouldn't drop out of college just to be a research assistant. My parents would have killed me even more than they did try to kill me.

3:18I needed a day job. And actually what sort of pushed me over the edge is that I'd been working that summer as an intern at a talent agency in Beverly Hills. And I got an offer to work at a desk. Basically, I was an assistant. So I answered the phones. I got coffee. I prepped for meetings, like everything you saw in Entourage or whatever. That was what I was, except for I didn't have to dress up that much. But I was one of the most out of place people you could imagine there. It's not something I'd predicted I would ever do. It's not something I've been trained for. It's not something I was super familiar with.

3:51And I basically had one friend in the office. There was one other person who was kind of as out of place as me, not well suited to be an assistant and, you know, not made for that life, made for more interesting things, let's say. And that guy's name was Eddie Bernard. We would chat when we weren't sort of slammed answering the phones and things weren't going crazy. We hung out every once in a while. We actually went to an Iron Maiden concert. I still remember it to this day because we were watching Maiden play at the forum. And they threw a drumstick into the crowd and Eddie caught it and he gave it to me.

4:25And he had some connections. And so he got us the ticket. So I've known Eddie, I guess I worked at the collective in 2006, 2007. So I've known Eddie a long time, man. It was crazy. So we stayed in touch. We'd text every once in a while. We'd talk on social media. And then a couple of years ago, Eddie just sends me this message. He's like, hey, man, I got someone you want to talk to. I got this cool new job. And I was like, what are you doing? And he's like, oh, I'm working for Francis Ford Coppola. And I said, what? What are you talking about? And indeed he was and is and has become sort of indispensable to Francis.

5:02Eddie's the best. So I totally see why they work together. But what an awesome fucking job. And so he said, hey, Francis has this new movie coming out. He's never done anything like a podcast, but I think you should have him on. And this is crazy, but like he's really into stoicism. I said, what are you talking about? And he said, yeah, this movie, his new movie, Megapolis. It's all about Cicero. And I was like, what? What do you mean it's about Cicero? And he was not joking. Megapolis is basically this sci-fi drama, but it's actually a Roman epic set in this sort of modern America. And it's also based on someone I'm equally fascinated with, which is the great Robert Caro.

5:42It hit me as I was interviewing Francis that I would have been reading Robert Caro's The Power Broker at my desk at The Collective, which is where I worked. And now I'm interviewing someone who made a movie about this, one of the greatest directors of all time. So this is Francis's first ever podcast. And we talked about a bunch of stuff. We talked about how ancient Rome influenced him. We talked about his vision, how this movie evolved over time. We talked about a bunch of classic literature. We nerded out about books. Told me about Mark Sturilus' influence on his personal life, his reflections on his legacy, some of the tragedies in his life.

6:22I was just absolutely blown away by the opportunity to do this. And I'm really excited to bring it to you. So Megapolis is in theaters on September 27th. You should go see it. It's incredible. And you can follow him on Instagram, which Eddie brought him to, which is awesome. At Francis Ford Coppola, you can see Megapolis in theaters everywhere. I'll link to the trailer in today's show notes. And I'll link to a bunch of the stuff that I mentioned throughout the interview because we nerded out about some of our favorite books, some of our favorite authors, some of the Stoic stuff. And without further ado, I'll just get you into this interview because it's a once in a lifetime thing.

7:14so i i wanted to start with the the catiline conspiracy because it's such a fascinating thing to me that i feel like very few people know about but was arguably one of the most famous events in Roman history, and the founders were all intimately familiar with it many centuries later, but it's been largely forgotten today. Well, it has to do, I think, with the nature of history is that it very often is twisted by whoever the victor was to make it turn out in a prepared way. And the Catalan conspiracy, there are a number of accounts. The most famous This one is Sallust, I think. But also Suetonius talks about it and presents it in a different light.

8:04So these historical events really are based on interpretation having to do with who ended up with the power to write the history. Are you familiar with this lady? I think she's still living. Mary Beard, who's sort of one of the... Well, I had at one point asked her to read my rough script, which was, you know, you could say was taking America as a historical counterpart of Rome because we were founded on Roman ideas. And my original idea, well, oh, what if the Catalan conspiracy was something between Mayor Koch and Walter Gropius, you know, who was an architect who had come to America? That was how it was beginning to emerge in my mind.

8:51Mary Beard said something to me very interesting. She said, well, the most successful Roman adaptations were done by George Bernard Shaw because he took great liberties. In other words, he sort of, like in his famous Caesar and Cleopatra, he just made it up, you know, based on what he thought made sense. And so she suggested that I was trying to follow the history a little too carefully. And she advised I took more liberties. And she said, read the Suetonius account of the Catiline conspiracy, because in it, young Caesar had more to do with it than history knows. And as he was the young Caesar, as you know, at the age he was, was really an accomplice of Sergius Catiline.

9:42And that's when she said, you know, you can even call the character Caesar because, you know, frankly, she said, when you give this out to people, they don't know who the hell Sergius Catalan was, but everyone knows who Caesar was. Sure. So I took her advice and I did a draft where I sort of just was more free with what I was saying. And of course, you know, I mean, just to shut up for a minute, but since it was ultimately in the Catalan conspiracy, it was Catalan who survived. He sort of wrote the history. Cicero, you mean. Yeah. You know, just like with Cleopatra, I mean, Augustus writes the history and made Cleopatra be this sexy seductress.

10:24But in truth, Cleopatra was a genius. But she doesn't get credit for it because no one on her side, you know, wrote the history. So I rewrote it according to this suggestion, and I made Caesar more the way he appears in the movie. But that was taking great liberties with history. Yeah, it's sort of a prequel to the most famous event in history, which is sort of Rome Civil War and the assassination of Caesar, because you got all the main characters. You've got Caesar, you've got Cicero, you've got Cato, and then Crassus, and then of course Catalan. And we've just sort of forgotten all about these sort of preceding events.

11:05One of my favorite books is this book called The Storm Before the Storm. And if the idea is that we kind of just see Caesar crossing the Rubicon one day as if it just popped into his head, as if there wasn't all this history and all these other events leading up to this other major event. Yes, absolutely. I'm going to get that book. So thanks for the recommendation. Yeah, you could argue, though, I think your point about it, it comes down to who tells the story. Catiline's biggest mistake, aside from, you know, trying to lead an insurrection, is that he attempts to lead an insurrection when the government is led by Rome's greatest writer and speaker.

11:48That was a fatal error right there. Also, history tends to ignore some other events that had happened before, which is the whole period of, I don't know how to pronounce his name, but Sulla. And who is the, there was another general after Sulla. Marius. Marius. And that was a very traumatic period of Roman history and with the Sulla proscriptions and what went on. And Catalina, Sergius Catalina, actually was an errant general or participant with Sulla, which, of course, most people today know nothing about. They talk about, you know, Caesar when they make the comparison of what's going on in America today.

12:32They don't allow that there was a terrible period of Sulla and prescriptions. and whoever you declared was a traitor, you got all his property. So there's a lot about Roman history that isn't commonly known. I mean, obviously. And at our time of our founding, of course, any intelligent young man had Latin training. So they knew a lot more than we know today. I was so struck by rereading some American history. And when Aaron Burr sort of comes onto the scene, he is like universally referred to by all the other founders as a kind of modern Catalan. And they would have known your average person when they heard that insult would have known what that meant.

13:24Whereas today, if you if you called some modern political figure a Catalan, people would be like, what are you talking about? You, by the way, ever read Gore Vidal's book on Aaron Burr? No. Another great book. Vidal was brilliant for all his other complications. He was a great scholar, and he wrote a beautiful book on Aaron Burr and also on who was the first Christian emperor. Oh, Constantine? Yeah, well, a lot of what I learned, I learned from Gore Vidal. Interesting. So have you always loved Roman history? Well, you know, I didn't. I was a very poor student. And in fact, I was such a bad student, but partly because my father was always moving and I was always the new kid in school.

14:12And I used to get, in those days, if you had a bad report card, which I got every term, you'd get a beating. I got a beating from my father with a strap. And he said to me once, I remember, if you don't get better grades, I didn't have, I wasn't smart enough to say, but dad, you take me out of school every six months. which was my defense. But he always would threaten me. He said, if you don't get better grades, I'm going to send you to a Jesuit school where you get a beating if you don't get grades. And boy, do I wish I had been sent to a Jesuit school because I would know Latin and Greek. Yes.

14:50And what a gift that would have been if I could read Latin and Greek, which you got in a Jesuit school, you know, if you went to one of them. So my sadness is I was a bad student. You know, I couldn't do anything that I really had. I wanted to be a scientist. My father said, you cannot fail algebra twice in a row and be a scientist. So. Did Roman history seem part of your heritage as an Italian? I'd just be curious. Like, I see it as sort of just the ancient world. I'm not seeing this sort of, I don't see it as a, so much as a place, right? I see the Roman Empire. I'm not thinking Italy, but I'm just curious, what's your perspective?

15:32Well, as a kid, I remember my name is Francis, but I was really named after my grandfather, Francesco. And when I was a kid, being an Italian was sort of like there were certain neighborhoods you couldn't move into. And my parents didn't teach us the language and gave us an anglicized name. My brother was Augustino, but we called him August, August Augie, and I was Francis. And that was to avoid this, you know, that we were low-class Italians. We couldn't move in. My mother always said, oh, but you're an American, and America is the greatest country in the world. But my father would say, but you're also Italian.

16:12And the Italians contributed to all the great literature and music and opera and classicism. And of course, I was born in 1939, so this is when World War II was going on, and the Italians were, you know, allied with the Germans. Not the good guys. But, you know, interesting thing, which I'm sure you know, is that the figure who really went back to ancient Rome and sort of resurrected fascism was D 'Annunzio, the poet. And he was the one because he was a brilliant, he knew about history. And Mussolini, who was a journalist, was imitating D 'Annunzio with all the Heil and all that stuff. And Hitler was imitating Mussolini.

17:00So it really goes back to an Italian poet, Gabriele D 'Annunzio, who resurrected the fascist idea as it existed in modern world wars. Interesting. Yeah, there's always been this battle to sort of say who owns these stories, not just who tells the story, but then who owns the figures and who gets to claim to be a descendant of them. And then, yeah, art has been this process of writing and rewriting and retelling these stories from different perspectives. So what is your ultimate read then on the Catalan conspiracy? I tend not to love Cicero. Of all the sort of ancients, I find the more I read about Cicero, the less I like him.

17:46He seems kind of obnoxious and annoying. No question. I mean, the reason he emerged in my mind is because the famous anti-Catalan speech is something every Latin schoolboy knows. And so I wanted to get that in my movie word for word, which I did. Have you seen my movie yet? No, I haven't seen it yet. I'm very excited. We have to show it's definitely unusual. It probably does more of what I wanted to do than I realized. Because, you know, when you're making an unusual movie or a movie you don't know how to make, which is usually what I find myself doing, the movie starts making itself. and you start following, you know, you start saying, well, let's do more of that and less of that.

18:34And little by little, the movie is, if you know what you're doing, then you just do what you know how to do. But if you don't know what you're doing, which was when I made Apocalypse Now, I had no idea what I was doing. And Megalopolis, I had no idea what I was doing. So little by little, I was following what the film was suggesting. And we would look at the stuff, all of the collaborators, and we'd see some really weird stuff that we had shot to get going. And we'd say, let's do more of that. So there's kind of an emergent property when you're following the story? Yeah, you and the collaborator, first of all, as you know, theater and cinema is a collaborative art.

19:16I mean, it's not one guy sitting alone writing a book. It's a team of people who are creatively collaborating together, which is thrilling. Sure. I've often said that collaboration is the sex of creativity because, I mean, to work with a dozen other people who are talented in maybe specific fields, but all of you together are coming together to make this group art, which is what theater is. It's a group that you belong to. And, of course, as the director, you're sort of the ringleader perhaps, but you're really also a follower of what the actors are doing, what the composer is doing, what the visual artists are doing.

20:03So it's a very exciting project. But you sit together and you evaluate what you're getting. And the process of when you say, let's do more of that and less of that, is the film telling you how to make it. In other words, you as a group are recognized. Like in Apocalypse, did you ever see Apocalypse Now? Of course. There's a scene in the apocalypse now where all the boys are on the boat and they're all stoned and they're setting off smoke grenades on the boat, the red ones and blue ones. The purpose of smoke grenades, why they're colored, is on land. If there's a safe place for the helicopter to come down or an unsafe place and don't land here, you set off a red smoke grenade.

20:48And if it's a safe place, it might be a blue or if it's yellow, it's be careful. Smoke grenades are like a code, but on the boat, there's no purpose for a smoke grenade. They would have them because when they got on land, they might need them. But the boys were just sending off the smoke grenades in the wind because they were stoned and it was beautiful. So we all saw that in the dailies and we said, let's do more of that. And little by little, apocalypse now started to become more surreal. and that's how the movie is leading you and in fact when i got to the end of apocalypse now i had no idea how to end it because it had become so surreal that the ending which was a typical big battle scene ending was no longer appropriate and brando who was such a smart guy a brilliant man said to me oh you've painted yourself in a corner haven't you he realized that i had taken the film so far off into the surreal that a normal ending wouldn't work.

21:53Well, the same thing happened with Megalopolis. As we looked at it together, we collaborators, there was a lot of weird stuff I'd do just to get going, you know, to sort of, you do the first few takes and you might do some unusual things to sort of spur everyone's creativity, and then the later takes get more and more normal. Well, we started saying, we all liked the early takes, which were the weirder ones. We said, well, let's do more of that. And it's that, let's do more of that and let's do less of that that starts to determine how the movie gets made.

22:35We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at The Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr.

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25:37Let's talk about the oration real fast. I have a chunk of it here. When, oh, Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patients? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there an end of that unbridled audacity of yours swaggering about as it does now? shame on the age and its principles. It's just so amazing. Whether it was fully deserved or not, you can't argue with the brilliance of Cicero. No, and it was that speech that was my hook. I said, can you imagine being in New York and having Mayor Koch saying that to Robert Moses? Sure. Yeah. That was in a nutshell. You know, sometimes you make a movie because of a sentence that you hear.

26:24In Apocalypse Now, the sentence that made me make that whole movie, and pardon my bad language, is I read a quote where a general, or someone says, we teach the boys to drop fire on people, but won't let them write the word fuck on their airplanes because it's immoral. I said, that's Apocalypse Now. You know, sometimes it's just one sentence. And so this this Catalan oration, which was in Latin and every schoolboy in America, every schoolboy knows that. I said, what if I could do that? And that led to the whole movie. Yeah, it is kind of amazing. I've been talking about this, like whether or not you actually needed to learn Latin or Greek these days.

27:10The magic was the way they taught it for so many hundreds of years was that you had to repeat these magnificent sentences and epigrams and ideas that were kind of over and over but like when i learned spanish in in high school it was like where do you want to go to lunch you know where do you live where is the post office yeah yeah donde esta la biblioteca you know you're not learning the greatest uh turns of phrase ever coined by human beings and i wonder if that's why languages are so uninteresting to most school the schoolboys in in our founding of our nation were reading caesar the gaelic wars he had the whole thing they knew it by heart yeah washington was the only founder who hadn't read the classics in greek or latin he was considered not as smart because he only read them in english and jefferson on the contrary yes but jefferson was not a stoic jefferson was an epicurean Do you know much about Epicurus?

28:12You've given me such good tips. I feel that this kind of conversation, I owe you a few good ones. Tell me about Epicurus. I know a bit about him. I think he also gets a bad rap. He gets a very bad rap because Epicurus did not believe in life after death. Part of the Epicurean philosophy is he talks a lot about it in a beautiful way. He says, you know, when death comes, you don't exist. Well, of course, the Catholics had their biggest business was the paying of, what do you call them? Get out of hell cards. What is that called? Indulgences. And indulgence. Yeah. So the Catholics basically wanted to bury Epicurus, whose philosophy was much different than people.

28:56People think Epicurianism is to be fat and just go to feasts and eat. That's not at all what he was about. Yeah. Anything of Epicurus or even a Roman poem that was about Epicurus was banned and disappeared. And it only turned up in the 14th century in some monk's library for the reason you said is because just like people used to have to recite it over and over again, they used to have to just copy the text down over and over again to practice. There's a wonderful book that I recommend to you that you'll thank me a million times. It's a good read. It's called The Swerve. Have you ever heard of it?

29:39Yes. Incredible book. Oh, you read it? Yes. Stephen Greenblatt is a treasure. Yeah, he wrote it. He's a Shakespearean scholar, but he wrote The Swerve, and it was an eye-opener for me. I then became an Epicurean because so much of what's in the Epicurean's philosophy has nothing to do with, in fact, he famously said, if I had a glass of water and a biscuit, I would be eating as well as Zeus, you know. So fortunately, Thomas Jefferson was an Epicurean, and that whole idea of the pursuit of happiness in our, appears nowhere else on Earth, except the American, whatever, written by Jefferson, is right out of Epicureus.

30:23So I don't have to give you a tip because you already know. No, no, and I'm so excited having read The Swerve. I don't know if you've been following this, but in Pompeii, some of the things that were frozen in the ash were libraries. And they're starting to be able to uncode some of these scrolls with these cameras and with AI. And they think they may have a whole Epicurean library there. What a treasure that would be, my goodness. Yeah, we could have totally missed what Epicurus was actually about. We don't really have that much from him. But we have that poem. What's the Roman poem? Danatura?

31:02Lucritius. Yeah, we have that. That's what the swerve was about. They found that poem, and that poet was the inspiration of Dante and all the great Roman writers. I have a quote from Epicurus that I think you would love because it goes to what you were just saying. I ended one of my books with it. This is the last letter he wrote. He said, on this happy day, which is the last day of my life, I write the following words to you. Cicero would say that, you know, to philosophize is to learn how to die. Epicurus seems to have done it very well. So we see him as this guy who's trying to avoid pain and love pleasure, but his brilliance was really his ability to find pleasure in ordinary, even painful situations.

31:48Yes. I don't consider myself a Stoic, but I consider myself an Epicurean. But I'm a Stoic too, because basically what I know, I know, and what I don't know, I ignore. The Roman poet Juvenal said that between the Stoics and the Epicureans, there was only a shirt. Like one of them wore a shirt and the other lived a slightly harder life. But they were actually much more similar than we think. Yeah, I certainly think so. You mentioned Shakespeare. Greenblatt wrote this amazing book called Will in the World. That's incredible also. And he has a book called Tyrant, which I love. But I was thinking, a common theme between this movie and then, of course, Apocalypse Now, but is also the theme of Shakespeare is the ability to find old stories and then place them in a new context, but use the arcs and the characters and the morals.

32:43Talk to me about the job of an artist to sort of find and then reimagine old stories. Well, for me to do that, I would have to bring in another giant into the picture, who is the German Goethe. And what Goethe said, and he was, of course, of big influence to our wonderful American Emerson. This game is a tag game. And Goethe's position was whatever he read and whatever he learned, it was only that which he could use in something that was important. And I believe that because, you know, I have a pretty good memory. And I wasn't a big reader as a youngster, but as I became older, I started to read much more.

33:28And I had this habit of whatever I was working on, I would try to find something that was nothing like it, so I could rest my brain. But what happened is when I would read something that was nothing like what I was working on, instead of it resting my brain, it made me want to change what I was working on to be more like what I was reading. And that kept happening because I would be choosing, you know, I deliberately choose things that had nothing to do with what I was working on. For example, at one point, I chose a Chinese, great Chinese book that is well studied and loved in China called The Story of the Stone or The Dream of the Red Mansion, written in the 16th century.

34:17And I found myself trying to change megalopolis into being more like that which i did because that was one of the few books i ever read that the dream life of the characters was as important as the waking you know we all dream and then we get back to what our life is but who knows whether whether our life is the dream life and not the and that and in this chinese novel which is a beautiful book the dream of the red mansion uh the dreams are part of the character's story and so i made megalopolis more like that so so i found that whatever it was that i was supposedly trying to get my mind off the movie it was in fact i was bending my mind to make the movie more like that and that happened a lot and one of the reasons why the film is so unusual do you know anything about the uh that whole period with Emerson in America.

35:13It was before the Civil War that they were called the Transcendentalists. Of course. They were interesting because they were men and women working together with really sort of the first time intellectually as partners, as intellectual partners. And they were, of course, the light of learning in those days was the Germans, was Goethe and all of those guys. And so they were all reading and translating Goethe into English. And Goethe's whole position was that what you read was only important as if you could make use of it, if you could put it in your work. And that's what I believe. I believe that whatever I think is great in the cinema, which there's a lot that's great, people ask you, what are your 10 favorite films?

36:01I say, they ask me what my thousand favorite films, or who are the greatest filmmakers, what's your list of the top 10 great filmmakers? I say, I'll give you 500, you know, that it's too abundant. If you look at literature as what you're able to take from and be inspired by and copy even, you know, I don't know who was that said, it says, poor artists borrow, great artists steal. I don't know who that is. But that was what Goethe did. He wrote a book called, what the hell was that called? Wilhelm Meister. And that was him stealing from Shakespeare. That was Goethe saying, I want to be as much like Shakespeare as I can be.

36:44When Shakespeare is stealing from Plutarch and from Montaigne and from these sort of Danish legends. And other plays. They were all stealing from each of them. Marlowe. And in fact, I think Stephen Greenblatt is writing a book on another playwright. So you see your movies and your thinking as products of all that you have read and consumed and all the great stories and myths of history. I certainly don't think it's something of mine. I am the, yeah, it was what it did to me. And I once read an obscure book by Balzac. I don't know where the hell I found it, in which someone's talking to Balzac and says to him, you know, a lot of the young writers are just stealing your stuff.

37:35And Balzac said, that's why I wrote it. This is because if they take my stuff and make use of it, then I will live, I will be immortal in their work. Balzac understood that this is a process that the young are inspired by the old and then they become old and they inspire. And it's sort of like having a great-grandson or a great-great-great-grandson, is that you live through them. And artistically, what Balzac was saying and what Goethe says is that by taking and being inspired by these great artists of the past, who were probably inspired by a great artist, it all goes back to, you know, Sappho and those kind of people, you know, and Homer, whoever the hell he was or she was.

38:22they live through us that's why when you tell me that they may have discovered more of epicurus i mean imagine if someday we get lucky and discover more of aeschylus or more of so we have like we have like seven plays of aeschylus and he wrote 300 i was just reading this book called papyrus i'm just so excited to tell you this i was just reading this book called papyrus which is about the history of paper and the early writings and one of the things the woman is saying is that those scrolls, because they weren't books, so they weren't like books on a shelf, they were in these scrolls. And the boxes you would keep those scrolls in, she says, most of them held seven scrolls.

39:04And so the reason they think we only have like seven plays from Aeschylus is that just a single box. Yeah. But imagine if somehow somewhere with our technology, like with you mentioned in, imagine we find more Aeschylus or more Sophocles or more Euripides or more someone we never heard of. It's thrilling. It's so thrilling. I mean, they discovered Gilgamesh like in the 1800s. I love Gilgamesh. It's all about how the teenagers are not listening to their parents. Did you ever read that wonderful Persian book called Shana Hama by Verdozzi? That's like Gilgamesh. It's an early Persian. It's great.

39:50The thing about these things like Gilgamesh is they're like 7 ,000 years old, but they're great reads like Homer. Yeah. My son is eight, or he's turning eight, and he's obsessed with the Odyssey. And he loves all the jokes. He's read comics about it, and he listens to music about it, and he's read these different translations together. And there's just something amazing about watching a young person get excited and lit up by the jokes that were, you know, passed down orally for thousands of years, and they still work. Like, the timelessness of it is incredible. I think Gilgamesh is a good example.

40:28That also is like that. And this book, Shadahama, the Persian, is called The Epic of Kings. It's another one like that. They're great reads. Yeah, the Bhagavad Gita is, of course, another one, just these myths. And yeah, to think that we have thousands of years of continual use and discussion in Western civilization of the Odyssey, so it's so much more familiar with us. But to think we've only had like 150 years of Gilgamesh because it was lost for so long, it doesn't have the same cultural prominence, but that doesn't mean it's not as brilliant and it doesn't teach the same lessons. Are you familiar at all or interested in Sanskrit and ancient Indian myth?

41:12Have you ever heard of a woman named Wendy Doniger? No. She's pretty much the world's expert on that subject, a woman. The first girl I ever kissed. I was not the first boy she ever kissed. I was 17, she was 16. But she went on to become this. Wow. I still know her. She's a great, brilliant lady. I've been reading a lot about T.E. Lawrence lately and sort of Lawrence of Arabia and the epicness of that life, you know, sort of feeling like it was plucked. Like he talks about in the intro, his intro in the Odyssey, he says, to be able to translate the Odyssey, you have to be able to have killed people and you have to have fought lions and been attacked by pirates.

41:58And just the sort of tradition of the epic stories that we have is just such an incredible thing. What's the name of the woman of that time who was around with all those guys? There's a famous English woman who was there with Lawrence. yes uh gertrude bell i think i think it's gertrude bell yeah she was a she was another figure she well alec guinness in lawrence of arabia played faisal too yeah and faisal too was a great great great man and i think gertrude bell knows what happened to him because he vanished very mysteriously faisal too i also i was fascinated i had no idea that basically after he becomes the most famous man in the world.

42:39He just enlists in the British Air Force, and he's a mechanic for like 10 years. Amazing. And like the fame sort of breaks him, but he decides just to do manual labor as a way to kind of reset himself. His life is itself almost a kind of a Greek myth. Well, there are some extraordinary human beings that, you know, I've had the pleasure of, But I'm so old now because you're obviously a young man, but I'm so old. I actually met some of these people, you know. I mean, I met one of the most extraordinary people I ever met. I know he's an actor and everything is Marlon Brando. He was a he was a one of a kind.

43:18Who else like that stands out to you? Like the people that your life intersected with? I met Marcel Duchamp when I was 16. He was he was fascinating. Some other figures were less less famous. a man named Fred Cole, who was an early founder of a television drama, Fred Cole. Of course, a lot of filmmakers like Jean Renoir and Billy Wilder and people like Jack Warner and Daryl Zanuck and Samuel Goldwyn, some of those people. Did you ever meet F. Scott Fitzgerald? I never did, no. And the authors, let me see, who did I ever meet? I'm in love with Edith Wharton. And I have a big painting of her, but I never, I went to her house in Connecticut.

44:05She was one of the greats. In literature, I'm trying to think. This is probably interesting only to me, but did you ever meet John Fonte? Yes, very well. He was a wonderful man. He's my favorite. Well, did you ever see that beautiful film with Rick Conte and about the, is it Billie Holiday or someone where he's a writer and his father is a bricklayer and comes. Full of life? Full of life. Yes. Yeah, I knew John Fonte. He was a nice man. Wow. I think Ask the Dust is maybe my second favorite novel. That's a beautiful book. Yeah. And you know who knew him? He just passed away. Robert Towne. Did you know who Robert Towne is?

44:44Yeah. He was a great. Yeah, because I think that's one of the most incredible stories in all of literature, that there's a copy of Ask the Dust in the Los Angeles Public Library, and both Townes and Charles Bukowski stumble upon it and they rediscover this book that was basically lost because Hitler had bankrupted his publisher. Right. Interesting. I love that movie. I love full of life. And we bought the rights for Ask the Dusk and Bob Town was very much... You know, I have a big brother syndrome. I had a brother who was five years older than me. He was a wonderful older brother. You know, he wrote stories and whatever he was, I wanted to be the junior version of.

45:29So he wrote stories under the name August Floyd Coppola. So when I copied him and tried to write stories, I would use my middle name the same way, Francis Ford Coppola. So The Godfather became such a success that I became so suddenly famous that he couldn't be August Floyd Coppola anymore because it looked like he was imitating me. but I was imitating him. And all my life, I looked for those older brothers who could guide me. And that was a role that Bob Town so kindly helped me so much. When I made The Godfather, everyone hated the movie. No one said a good thing about it. And the first person who told me that there was something to it was Bob Town.

46:15And he said, there's one thing that you can do to make it better. And I I said, what is that? He said, there should be a scene in The Godfather between Brando and Pacino, father and son. I said, well, that doesn't exist in the book. Could you write it? And he said, I'll write it for you. And he wrote that scene. Wow. Wow.

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48:48My other favorite Hollywood novelist, and maybe you know this person too, so I'm just nerding out here. I love Bud Schulberg too. What Makes Sammy Run is incredible, but I love The Harder They Fall is, I think, is actually his best one. And then he wrote one about his time with Fitzgerald also. I wrote a screenplay, a very unusual screenplay for The Disenchanted, which he loved. No, really? I told the story not in flashbacks, but in flash forwards, which was very unusual. I wish I had that script. I don't have it. But Schulberg liked it. Well, this brings us full circle because Marcus Aurelius makes a brief appearance at the end of that book.

49:29I think it says something like, and then he was ceased to be whirled about. As the Fitzgerald character dies, he is ceased to be whirled about. So this sort of through line of the Stoic philosophy brings us full circle here. Well, as I think everything does. You know, I've had an interesting experience, as I told you that, you know, I always am looking, even now, you know what I'm reading right now? I'm maybe a third into it. Tender is the Night. Ooh. What do you think? Well, it's beautiful writing. I'm trying to – there's a little bit of a controversy because I'm told that there are two versions of Tender is the Night, that it wasn't successful at first.

50:13So he and his editor straightened out something. I guess I don't know which version I have, but I think what's unusual is that in the original Tender's the Night, there's a huge flashback in the middle of it that goes back and tells the story of Nicole and Dick Diver. And I don't know what's going to happen. And maybe I don't know which one I have. Yeah. Have you read Tender's the Night? I have. I've read it in high school, but I don't remember which one I read. That's the thing. it, I hate it when the publisher changes it because then you don't know which one to read. I have a funny thing that'll make you laugh is that so usually when I'm reading a book, and I'm finished with Megalops now, so what I'm reading is not going to change it because it's going to be shown.

51:05But I am, you know, as an 85 year old and as a man who wonders whether or not my life, whether or not I'm really some sort of solipsist movie director whose life is the movie he's making because you know when I was young and I made The Godfather everyone critics and stuff said oh he's like Michael Corleone this director he's conniving and he's he's silently taking over then I made Apocalypse Now and they said well he's a megalomaniac he's making this he's Kurtz he's like Brando and and then I made a movie called Gardens of Stone about Jimmy Conn is an officer who befriends a young cadet in the squad that buries the dead and loses his son.

51:59And while I was shooting the movie, I'd lost my son. And I really remember thinking, my God, am I cursed? I have to live every movie that I'm making? I'm making a movie about a guy who loses his son, who I have to lose my son? like what is this is too weird you know and and recently i i sort of came back to wondering as i approach as my family in italian says vicino a morte which means the vicinity of death that's the age when you start to be in your middle 80s and used to be in your 70s now it's getting later and i began to wonder i said gee maybe maybe i'm a sort of solipsist movie director and And, you know, I lost my wife recently who I loved dearly.

52:46And what about love? Who are these people I love? Well, maybe they're aspects of myself. They're characters in this movie I'm making about myself. And perhaps, you know, we all know that it's better to write the story from the ending the other direction because you don't understand life when you're a kid. and many philosophers like Kierkegaard and others have said that, you know, we live our life from young to old, but you can only understand it if you look at it from old to young. So I put into Google, what's a book I can read that can make me understand my life as a solipsist? And I got an answer.

53:26And it was, you know who Charlie Kaufman is? Yeah. He's this wonderful, crazy screenwriter he wrote a book a novel called ant ant kind uh a seven eight hundred page book called ant kind and that's what google said you know if you want to read something about being so i got it and damned if you know as i said everything i read changes my movie but this book is changing my life because it's so I finished it after 750 pages and it was not it was not unsatisfying and the ending was was sort of interesting and I don't suggest to read it although it's hilarious because it's a long it's a long read but that's my my latest experience is reading this crazy Charlie Kaufman novel.

54:17Well I love that and and speaking of books just because I know he's a through line in the movie. One of the characters quotes him a few times. What's your relationship with Marcus Aurelius' meditations? He's quoted a number of times in the movie. I wrote down every time. There's a beautiful scene where a father and daughter, sort of the Cicero scene. And she says at first, it is the responsibility of leadership to work intelligently with what is given and not waste time fantasizing about a world of flawless people and perfect choices. And that's sort of appropriate for the Catalina character who's a futurist.

54:56And then she looks to her father and she says, the object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding herself in the ranks of the insane, which is very appropriate for today. And then she kisses him and she says, finally, the universe has changed. Our life is what our thoughts make it, which is Marcus Aurelius, the great Marcus Aurelius. It is. What a great. Yes. What a great emperor Rome had. What a terrible son he had. Yeah, you could argue that Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus is maybe too generous, like he was actually worse. He was worse. He was worse than Caligula, if anyone could be worse than Caligula, or Nero.

55:41Yes. I'm fascinated with that. How does such a great man raise such a terrible son? Well, it comes down to how many wives did he have? Who was Comedis' mother? Faustina. Marcus only had one wife. We're told he loves her deeply. There's some rumors that she's unfaithful, but we're told he loves her deeply. The problem, I think, is Marcus Aurelius buries six of his 11 children, which I don't know how a family could possibly withstand that kind of tragedy. You know, in the old days, I mean, a generation before us, people usually had six, seven, eight kids, and they lost two. I lost one son. And I tell you, it's a sentence of 30 years before the first thing you think in the morning, did it happen?

56:32Did it really happen? And it's only after 30 years that it wasn't the first horrible thought I had in the morning. It made me think of that great Aeschylus quote. There's an Aeschylus quote about how the pain drips on you drop by drop until by the awful grace of God. It took me 30 years for the horror of realizing I lost my son to not be the first thing I thought of in the morning. I've sort of thought that when people say Marcus Aurelius' writing is depressing, I think that this guy got out of bed at all in the morning after the tragedy and death and pain that he felt. Actually, he must have been the most hopeful, optimistic person who ever lived.

57:16I lost this wife of 60 years, and it's sort of devastating, but there was a Marcus Aurelius quote that really lifted me, which was, if you lose, I don't know literally, but you'll know it. If you lose a loved one, honor her, and in a sense, try to be more like her, and then she'll live in your actions. And so my wife was very good, and I just try to be like her. And when I try to be like her, I, you know, like she was very, if someone was alone or sick or something, she'd call them up and be comforting to them. And I'm not like that, you know. So I started to do that. People that I know, some guys my age who have no grandchildren are just there and call them up and say, how are you?

58:10And being like her. And they were so pleased. Oh, it's so kind. And I keep my wife in my life with Marcus Aurelius advice by trying to be more like her. I find that absolutely beautiful. Oh, man. That Aeschylus quote you just mentioned, I was just writing about this last week because did you know that RFK found out that Martin Luther King had been assassinated? He was giving a speech in Indianapolis in a in a black neighborhood and he could feel a riot coming on. And he he quoted that speech to them and he spoke about his own loss of his brother. And that was one of the few cities in America that didn't riot.

58:53And so, again, these ideas from the classics coming right back to modern life and being of use. It's such a such an incredibly wonderful and important tradition. Well, someone sent me that quote when I lost my son, and it was the only quote that I understood emotionally, that ultimately it drops on you drop by drop until by the awful grace of God comes wisdom or something, whatever it came. Yeah, I think before that, Escalus says, you know, we suffer unto truth. That's the only way that we learn the important things about life and about existence. suffer into truth. How beautiful. Well, the loss of a child is not something I would wish on my worst enemy.

59:39In fact, I don't even have any enemy. I find everyone in my life who maybe did me wrong had reasons in their story to do it. The only person it's tough to forgive is yourself. How many years have you been married? I have been married for, let's see, I think we're approaching 10, but I've been with my wife for 20 years. We met in college when we were 19 years old. I hope in my movie, they ask in the story, she says to the character of all the institutions, your utopia wants to preserve, which is the most important to you? And he says marriage. You know, marriage is going to change because everything around it is changing.

1:00:24But I do hope we can preserve it because there's something so more beautiful about it than meets the eye at first glance. You know, it's funny. I had first read Marcus Aurelius in college a few weeks before I met my wife. And I remember we were on our first date and I was telling her about this book that I'd read. We were talking about it. And so many years later, I go to the shelf to pull down a copy of Meditations. I was going to get something out of it. And I found a receipt inside. And I learned in that moment that my wife had went and bought herself a copy from Barnes & Noble like a few days after we had met.

1:01:07How wonderful. Yeah. I have a beautiful set. You know what I own here? I can show it to you right there. I have the Loeb Library. Oh, all the little green and red and blue ones? The whole thing. The whole wall is covered with it. I only wish I could read either Latin or Greek because everything I have is in Greek. I have the whole thing. Yeah, every other page, right? One page is English and then one page is the original. Those are just beautiful little books. I have the whole thing. I'm very proud of it. I wish I could read it. Well, Francis, this has been the treat of a lifetime for me. I have one kind of last question for you.

1:01:41This might be a big one. I'm curious. Okay. You basically make this enormous bet at this point in your life and career. You go all in on this, this idea, which you've been working on for something like 40 years. How does an artist know that this is the thing and they haven't lost their mind? Right? Like I imagine there must've been moments where you doubted yourself or you thought this isn't going to work. It's too hard. How does an artist know what is the big swing that they have to take? And then what is, you know, a feel too far? You don't know. I'm more interested. If you said to me, what do you want?

1:02:24You want$1 ,000 or you want$1 ,000 million or you want$1 ,000 friends? I'll say, I want the friends. I don't value money. There's too many times in history where people had buckets of money and couldn't buy a loaf of bread. yet there was a friend who said, I'll give you half of my bread. And I believe that we are all one family together. And I don't think in the future there's going to be money. I think it's going to be us doing things for each other that give us pleasure. Also, I realize, you know, the biggest gamble I took was Apocalypse Now because I was on the hook for it and interest was over 20%.

1:03:07And people are still seeing apocalypse now. And I feel pretty confident that no matter what happens, people are going to be going to see Megalopolis for the next 40 years and maybe a period where it's an apparent disaster. But over time, you know, I once read an article that James Joyce was talking about Finnegan's Wake. And he said, I'm going to put so much interesting stuff in this that is going to take 50 years for people to figure out what's in it and they'll sell the whole time. You know, it's sort of like that. If you make a work, I believe that megalopolis is rich in what's in it and that people will see it again.

1:03:51And it's not boring. It's not like most people who see it or don't like it, if you say you want to see it again tomorrow, they say yeah, because it's never boring and there's always something new like Apocalypse was. So, you know, I feel sanguine. I didn't make it to make money. I made it for people to change how they feel about one another. And, you know, there are a lot of things that are never said publicly. You know, I asked Stephen Greenblatt, I said, has any philosopher ever said the human being is a genius species? The human being is beyond by light years any other intelligent creature we know.

1:04:33He said, well, there was one guy named Miranda de la Pica de la Miranda who wrote something called The Origins of Man, but he got put in prison for it. To get out, he had to say that, yes, the human being is an incomparable genius, but God made him so that someone could appreciate how great God was. And that's how they got. But he died at 39. Did you ever hear of him? No. Miranda de la Pica, his name is. And he's the only one who's ever said what this movie says. This movie comes right out and says it to your face. The human being is beyond a creature that is beyond being admired. It should be, you know, we are great.

1:05:21What we can do is great. There's no problem on this earth that we can't solve, that if we just could employ our gifts to it. and I believe that to be there. What other creature can do what we do? I'm sitting here on a stupid device talking to you where God knows where you are. I get the feel I know you. And we made this thing, primates crawling around in the jungle. How did we do it? We are geniuses and we are one family. That's what I feel. And that's what Megalopolis basically says. I respect and I appreciate the bet. My friend, the filmmaker Casey Neistat said to me once, look, if all we cared about was money, we would have gone into advertising.

1:06:06And he said, you have to remember, you don't make work to make money. You make money to make more work. And that's kind of how I think you, if you're not going to go all your chips in on something you cared about, what was the point of accumulating all the chips in the first place? Totally. And, you know, those chips are nothing. My real chips are my children. And what we're talking about is whether or not there's going to be a habitable world for them. I have a great grandson. He's 15 months old. What kind of world is he going to live in? If we're going to destroy it in front of our eyes, you know, I don't know.

1:06:45My dream is that this movie, every Thanksgiving people are going to see, I don't know, every New Year's, people are going to see Megalopolis. And at the end of seeing it, instead of after saying, well, I've decided I'm giving up smoking or I'm going to lose weight or I'm going to behave better. I want them instead to say, is the society where we're living in the only one available to us? And what what can we do to make it better? And every Thanksgiving, that's going to be the conversation. And that would be utopia, because if we had that conversation, we would make it wonderful. That's a lovely idea.

1:07:22And I hope that happens also. Francis, thank you so much. This has been incredible. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.

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