In Quarantine with the Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola
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As quarantines go, Francis Ford Coppola’s setup in the Napa Valley sounded pretty sweet.
I did a couple of Zoom conversations with the film director and winemaker over the summer, and what he described, as I sat by my laptop with yet another tin of tuna, struck me as a sort of Italian-American midpandemic Eden. Coppola and his family were sequestered on the expansive acreage of the old Inglenook estate that he and his wife, Eleanor, had purchased back in 1975, when the Coppolas were flush with cash from the first two Godfather films. And when I say “family,” I mean much of Coppola’s extended clan, including his children and grandchildren and nephews and apparently anyone else with a soft spot for cabernet sauvignon and wraparound porches—about 25 people total, depending on the day, all coming together for group meals and film screenings.
“When I saw this coming in January, I pushed an alert button,” Coppola, now 81 years old, told me. “Now we’re sort of a family bubble.” Naturally I found myself dreaming about those film nights. Every Wednesday and Saturday evening, the Coppola crew would gather in a screening room, as twilight descended upon the vineyards, to parse landmarks by directors like Akira Kurosawa, Yasujirō Ozu, and Andrzej Wajda. (Here at home, I’ve spent much of 2020 introducing my older kids to movies like Big Night and Fatal Attraction and Thelma & Louise, but it’s not the same when you can’t debate camera angles and casting decisions afterward with the director of Lost in Translation and her dad over a bottle of wine.)
Reading those names above, you may be tempted to add Coppola himself to the list of international cinematic greats, but in our Zoom chats I found the man quick to brush off that sort of fanboying. “I do not have God-given talent,” he said. He directed Apocalypse Now and Rumble Fish and The Conversation, yeah, but that was a long time ago, and over the past 30 or so years, he has devoted far more of his hours and energy to making wine than to making movies. Coppola no longer belongs to the “find what you love and let it destroy you” school of creativity. If you’ve ever seen the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness, you know that shooting Apocalypse Now almost did destroy him. Coppola has become, instead, a walking testimonial to the virtues of multitasking—and moving on.
In fact, the risk and reinvention that led to the growth of his little Napa Valley utopia are rooted in the same year: 1979, when Apocalypse Now came out and the Coppola family started making wine in earnest. (Granted, members of his family had been producing wine in their basements and backyards for decades.) “I had spent all the money I had, between these various risky things I did,” he said. Making wine while making movies may sound like a magic formula for going colossally bankrupt (hey, that’s happened to him, too), but Coppola has managed to push through by repeatedly figuring out what the marketplace wants next.
“What is risk, really?” he told me. “Isn’t risk something that you undertake that’s going to depend on timing? There are a lot of gifts I don’t have, but one I do have is a sense of what’s going to be in the future. I have often been right in my estimation of what’s going to happen—in an almost uncanny way.” And so, long before celebrities like Brad Pitt and Jon Bon Jovi got into stomping grapes, Coppola was sensing that the American drinking public might have a thirst for a non-Champagne sparkling white (his Sofia blanc de blancs, named after his daughter), and then, a full 15 years before the current vogue for a portable buzz, he and the Coppola team were selling even more of Sofia in pink cans.
So what does the oracle predict now? Coppola feels that a lot of us are going to come out of this pandemic with a taste for the premium stuff—and a desire to drink it right now, while we can, instead of waiting around for some perfect moment. “I have a wine fridge like everyone. It’s a small one,” Coppola said. “I looked at what I had up here, and I took all the wines out, and I replaced them with all the best wines that I had in the wine cellar. Why not put out the best wines that I have, because I don’t know how much longer I’m going to live?”
Guzzle the stockpile? Yes, this strikes me as an eminently reasonable thing to do. Even when these tumultuous years have ended, I suspect I’ll look back on my Zoom sessions with Francis Ford Coppola as a gentle toast to the possibilities of a second act. “Wine is a living thing,” he told me. “Time tends, just like with a human being, to mellow it.”
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