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Cinema has always been a business of risk and reward, and few filmmakers have experienced the best (and worst) of both worlds like Francis Ford Coppola.
Undoubtedly one of American cinema’s greatest-ever directors, Coppola has multiple masterpieces to his name that have transcended generations. The Godfather, its sequel, Apocalypse Now, and The Conversation are all stone-cold classics that deserve every bit of the adulation that’s been thrown their way since they were first released, but the auteur wasn’t one to take the easy route.
No stranger to troubled productions, Coppola inadvertently made things worse for himself when he tried to push the medium forward. One from the Heart and The Cotton Club were the results of what happens when a creative puts everything on the line to realise their vision and try to usher in a revolution, and all he had to show for it at the end of the day was financial misery and bankruptcy.
Still, Coppola has always been a purist, even when the chips were down. He took several jobs solely for the money and made no bones about it, but the entire time he worked for cash and helming experimental micro-budget pictures, he was quietly working away on Megalopolis in the background.
That didn’t turn out too well either, but an octogenarian selling off part of their lucrative wine empire so they can fund a decades-in-the-making passion project on a budget comparable to a studio-backed blockbuster, deserves to be commended, regardless of how fiscally irresponsible it turned out to be.
Everybody knows that Coppola despises Hollywood’s shift into effects-heavy and crowd-pleasing entertainment, which must have caused him plenty of internal turmoil when George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were two of his closest friends in the business. The age of escapism proved ironically inescapable, and he could do nothing about it.
“Now it’s people saying; let’s make movies that have incredible chase scenes, that have violence. Let’s make Die Hard,” he ranted to David Breskin in 1991 when he was discussing Megalopolis to give an indication of how long his recent folly was in the works. “That’s not coming out of young men and women involved in something alive; that’s not alive.”
Coppola clearly wasn’t a fan of Bruce Willis’ John McClane crawling through the air vents of the Nakatomi Plaza in an attempt to thwart a terrorist threat, but plenty of people are, which is selling Die Hard very short when it’s one of the greatest action movies ever made and one of the most popular and beloved films of the 1980s.
While it’s true that many action flicks feel like they’ve been developed and made by a committee before rolling off the production line, Die Hard isn’t one of them. It’s a classic for many good reasons, even if Coppola doesn’t think there’s an ounce of vibrancy or life to be found within.
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