Francis Ford Coppola’s 7 Most Overlooked Films

Who is Francis Ford Coppola? A wondrous madman? A delicate tyrant? It’s clear he loves chaos and knows you love it too. Is this why he’s so attracted to working with actors who have their own chaotic (often despicable) public personas? Is he drawn to working with and capturing them because he believes they’ll understand him and his process more than others or is he trying to understand something about himself? Maybe both. Filmmaking is his art and art is his way of reckoning with the world around him. It’s why his re-edits are often better than the originals. Time has granted him more understanding and he does his best to transmute that back into the work. Time is also an obsession of his, so much so that to view any of his work without also contextualizing where it sits within his personal history is a disservice to the art and artist.

Time, family, brotherhood, power, conformity vs. rebellion, innovation vs. stagnation —  these are the subjects to which his eyes and heart are most often drawn. Through examinations both narrative and visual, Coppola has spent his life not merely telling stories, but pushing boundaries and barely surviving to tell the tale. Whether it be navigating studio politics to pull off his vision of “The Godfather” or bucking the system and the elements entirely to complete “Apocalypse Now,” the lore behind his films are often just as engrossing as the films themselves. Unfortunately, this has made Coppola easy fodder for the press throughout his career, typically creating judgment around work that hasn’t yet had its day in the court of public opinion. Studios, in turn, have been able to use this image of Coppola as an out-of-control artist to rein him in, at times preventing him from getting anything made or distributed at all. 

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And yet, somehow, he forges on. Through typhoons and bankruptcies, personal tragedies and long hiatuses, Coppola has found refuge behind the lens, producing work of stunning creativity and profound vulnerability. Despite now having directed 23 feature films, really only four or five of them get the appreciation they deserve. It remains to be seen which category “Megalopolis” will fit into, but in acknowledging Coppola’s wider body of work, we at IndieWire have put together this list of his most overlooked films and encourage readers to give them a shot.

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