NEW YORK — Francis Ford Coppola will press his hands and feet into the cement outside the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles on Friday, but his imprint on Hollywood, the movies and American culture has long been set in stone, even if the chameleonic writer-director remains perpetually in flux.
The ceremony will be part of the TCM Classic Movie Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday in Los Angeles and runs through Sunday. The festival, put on by that great cable outpost of commercial-less cinema, Turner Classic Movies, will fill four days with screenings of classic films, including Coppola’s own “The Conversation.”
Such honors are self-evident for Coppola, the director of “The Godfather” trilogy and “Apocalypse Now.” But the 77-year-old Coppola doesn’t often pause for tributes; he’s too busy working.
After a long break from the director’s chair, he’s made three idiosyncratic and exploratory films in the last decade (“Youth Without Youth,” ‘‘Tetro,“ ’'Twixt”), none which are the kind of films expected of filmmakers in their later years.
He’s also for several years been working on an even more experimental and ambitious film, “Distant Vision,” a multi-generation saga about an Italian American family. Ring a bell? But Coppola, more interested in the future than the past, wants to make it in what he calls “live cinema.”
That was one of things Coppola discussed in a recent interview where the director assessed the current state of movies, his penchant for re-cutting his films (including a new version of “The Cotton Club” he’s just finished) and, above all, his robust life in cinema as an eternal student. “For me now, I have no motive other than to enjoy the thrill of learning about the cinema,” he says, “and being able to participate in it.”
When you reflect on your career, one of such chapters, what do you see?
Coppola: I always thought of myself, or charged myself, to be searching and to be somewhat experimental. I didn’t just make one style of movie and then just stick with that. Every film I made I approached differently according its theme. Whereas the “Godfather” films that I’m probably best known for had a certain classic, Shakespearean style, “Apocalypse Now” was totally different. Almost a different person made it. “One From the Heart” was yet another experiment and “Rumble Fish” was another. I always was trying to learn about cinema by approaching it experimentally and trying to uncover what it was that really connected with me. And I’m still doing it at age 77. I’m still trying to look at it from the standpoint of: What can I learn?
