Eleanor Coppola is remarkably youthful at 81.
Elegantly dressed in navy pants, a beige jacket and sporting spiky white hair, the matriarch of the famous Coppola clan is about to return to her northern Californian homestead and the historic winery which she runs with her husband, Academy Award-winning director Francis and worked hard to restore. So she is in a bit of a rush.
“Tomorrow I’m doing a wine lunch for women sommeliers, people in the wine industry,” she explains animatedly. “I do like to participate in that.”
Is she a feminist? She laughs. “Well it sort of seems like a bad word. I hope at this point you feel like you can wear all hats and you don’t have to be an -ist of anything. You can get to be anything you want.”
Still, if you’d asked her 26 years ago if she could have imagined presenting “Paris Can Wait,” her feature directing debut at 81, she might have laughed then too. That was around the time in her life when she made her previous film “Hearts of Darkness,” an Emmy-winning fly-on-the-wall documentary about her husband and his legendary difficulties making “Apocalypse Now.”
She also wrote two tell-all books, “Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now” and the highly personal “Notes on a Life,” where she dwelled on the death of her eldest son, Gio, in a water-skiing accident at age 22 and of course on her other kids, director and screenwriter Sofia, whose film “The Beguiled” is in cinemas now, and producer Roman.
The next project
There came a time though when she wanted to make a feature film of her own. “You know, I suddenly noticed that I was in my 70s and I might not live forever. So why not try it? Why not go for it? What’s the worst that can happen?”
Eleanor had put her own artistic inclinations aside when in 1963 she married the man who would go on to make “The Godfather” trilogy. They had met on his directing debut, “Dementia 13,” where she was working as an assistant art director.
“I was always a very independent person. I’m a few years older than Francis. So when we got married [she was pregnant after a brief courtship] I was shocked to discover how traditional he was as an Italian man. I mean Italians eat spaghetti and I didn’t know anything else [about them]!”
“He really wanted me to be the wife and take care of the family and make a nice home, but I was wanting to do my own experimental art projects. I was kind of bursting out into the next phase of women wanting to be more independent. I finally learned how to do my artwork at home. I have an attic so I could put the kids down for a nap and do something for an hour and a half.”
Making the movie
“Paris Can Wait” is personal, but in a light-hearted way. The story is based on a road trip that actually did occur after the Cannes Film Festival in 2009. Eleanor had caught a cold and Francis had to do some business in Budapest, so he had his usual driver, a frisky Frenchman, take her. The ever-luminous Diane Lane essentially plays Eleanor, as she drinks and dines and takes photographs across France.
“We got in the car and he immediately said, ‘We must have lunch,” she recalls, chuckling. “While we were having lunch, although I don’t speak French, I could tell he was making a hotel reservation [implying he was planning on sex] but I wasn’t afraid because I knew he’d worked with Francis for years. It ended up being this several-day adventure.”
“I got back home and I was laughing about it with a girlfriend and she said, ‘You know that’s a the movie I’d like to see.’”
Eleanor calls the film “an ode to slow.” “It’s about taking a break from the hustle and bustle, driving through the lavender, having a nice lunch on a terrace and seeing a beautiful Roman aqueduct.”
While there was panic when her nephew Nicolas Cage, whose presence helped in the financing, had to pull out due to filming commitments, Lane, an actor in four of Francis’s films, enlisted Alec Baldwin to play the Hollywood heavyweight husband.
“It was a deep pleasure to get to know Diane in a different way than just having this beautiful person in my kitchen,” Eleanor chuckles.
(Lane likewise sings Eleanor’s praises, honoring her “participation and patience in nurturing the backstory of such an illustrious family, because as we know behind every great man….”)
That great man
Francis largely kept his distance during filming. “I didn’t want to make a vanity piece, though he helped me with some final financial contracts that I really didn’t know how to do,” she says.
Roman, the Oscar-nominated writer of Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom” who produces his sister’s films, made a few suggestions. “I asked him if the car breaks down what shall I do? ‘He said, ‘You know, Mom, you can fix it with pantyhose!'”
Over the years Eleanor has warmed to her husband’s idea of a close-knit brood. “The family is a grounding place for him. We have six grandchildren and he really enjoys and wants to have that big Italian Sunday dinner. He wants to bring everybody together.”
How does she keep it all together?
“I don’t know. Francis and I have just passed 53 years and people ask, ‘What’s your secret for a long marriage?’ And we both say, ‘Don’t get divorced.’”
Don’t think about it?
“You think about it plenty, but you don’t do it! Ha ha.”