Francis Ford Coppola

“I have a special affection for Rumble Fish because I thought of it as the antidote to the saccharine sweetness of The Outsiders. And my goal was to make Rumble Fish as an art film for kids... It turns out that Rumble Fish... Had a destiny that I didn’t even know about. A lot of young people from Latin America... Went to this one theater to see this weird movie called Rumble Fish... It inspired a whole generation to become filmmakers and novelists.”

“Okay, well, here we go to Miss Arzner. And this particular film is Dance, Girl, Dance. And Miss Arzner was my directing teacher at UCLA. I learned so much from her, but one of the things that I repeated to my children, which is really important, she said that always sit in the same place next to the camera... Because you’re right there and you can not only see the cast very well but you can look up and you can see the camera operator... More important than anything, you sit there because the...”

“I’m very attracted right here to The Complete Jacques Tati. Jacques Tati was a wonderful filmmaker who believed in a film he wanted to make and used his entire fortune... And it came out and it was a big flop, and he died sort of penniless, not realizing that this film he put everything up for, which was called PlayTime, was going to be considered today the masterpiece that we consider it. And more than a masterpiece because it’s a gift of a really good time, a really– lot of fun for everybody.”

“Well, Noël Coward is a wonderful playwright and songwriter. And, when I did The Godfather, I sort of got to be so well known at a young age that they wanted me– They offered me many opportunities to direct operas or plays. So I did do a play, and it was a play by Noël Coward called Private Lives. And I did it with a sort of unusual twist to it. And I’m going to apply that same twist on this new material that I’m looking at.”