I think the part I liked the most from this interview was where he gave the two rules for life he has: 1. never lie, 2. date every piece of paper he writes anything on, for posterity.
There's a neat 10 minute fragment of an interview with him on youtube [1], about the notebook he made prior to filming The Godfather. He took the paperback copy of the novel, which he'd annotated, cut the pages out and pasted them onto larger pieces of paper so he'd have more margin to annotate in, and put the whole product in a huge three-ringed binder that he relied on more than the script itself when filming.
The amazing thing is that at age 84 and having not made a film in over a decade, Coppola has used a considerable amount of his own personal wealth to film the sci-fi epic Megalopolis, from a concept he came up with in the 1980s. Adam Driver stars, filming is wrapped, and it comes out next year. Should be interesting.
>In a series of Instagram posts in July 2023, Coppola stated that the film had been heavily influenced by the following books:
Bullshit Jobs, Debt: The First 5000 Years, and The Dawn of Everything, all works of the anthropologist David Graeber;
The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse;[7]
The Chalice and the Blade by sociologist Riane Eisler;
The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama;
The War Lovers by Evan Thomas; and
The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt.[8]
What struck me is his processes of doing all his writing in the morning "because no one has had time to call me up and hurt my feelings." It sounds kind of silly, but it also makes a ton of sense. It's so hard to be creative and in a flow state when you have other thoughts (especially personal relationships) encroaching on your focus.
I got to go listen to Michael Chabon give a lecture once, and he also does all his writing in the morning. 4 hours of uninterrupted writing every day is all it takes to be an author, he said. But it's critical that it's uninterrupted and that it is every day, even if it sucks and you aren't in the mood and you only get one ok page or one good paragraph out of the whole 4 hours.
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[ 324 ms ] story [ 870 ms ] threadThere's a neat 10 minute fragment of an interview with him on youtube [1], about the notebook he made prior to filming The Godfather. He took the paperback copy of the novel, which he'd annotated, cut the pages out and pasted them onto larger pieces of paper so he'd have more margin to annotate in, and put the whole product in a huge three-ringed binder that he relied on more than the script itself when filming.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awce_j2myQw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalopolis_(film)
>In a series of Instagram posts in July 2023, Coppola stated that the film had been heavily influenced by the following books:
Bullshit Jobs, Debt: The First 5000 Years, and The Dawn of Everything, all works of the anthropologist David Graeber; The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse;[7] The Chalice and the Blade by sociologist Riane Eisler; The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama; The War Lovers by Evan Thomas; and The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt.[8]
I got to go listen to Michael Chabon give a lecture once, and he also does all his writing in the morning. 4 hours of uninterrupted writing every day is all it takes to be an author, he said. But it's critical that it's uninterrupted and that it is every day, even if it sucks and you aren't in the mood and you only get one ok page or one good paragraph out of the whole 4 hours.