Coppola discusses theater v. film debate
By Alex Wen
Dec. 3, 2003 9:00 p.m.
It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that Francis
Ford Coppola is arguably the most famous, if not the most
successful alumnus ever to have walked through the hallowed halls
of UCLA’s prestigious School of Theater, Film and Television.
And while Jim Morrison might have famously dropped out of film
school, the illustrious Coppola steadfastly stayed the rigors of
the course, excelling as a graduate film student. Coppola earned
his master’s of fine arts in film directing from UCLA in
1967. What’s lesser known in Coppola folklore is that the
Academy Award-winning director was originally a theater major, who,
if fate hadn’t intervened, would have in all probability gone
on to graduate study in drama at Yale. Coppola, however,
didn’t entirely abandon his first love, and has credited his
theater training with having honed his dramatic talent for cinema.
“Bringing to life an evening of theater is the greatest
challenge ““ and best training ““ young directors, actors
and dramatic writers can have,” he said. And to drive the
point home, the master filmmaker has lent his famous moniker to the
Francis Ford Coppola One-Act Marathon, a pioneering UCLA program,
and an annual event on campus since 1998. Ңbull;Ӣbull;Ӣbull;
dB Magazine: Tell us a bit about you making the
switch from theater to film. Was it an effortless natural
progression? Were there any “hiccups” in making
the transition?
Francis Ford Coppola: I was planning to go to the Yale School of
Drama for graduate work. But one afternoon I was walking alone on
the (UCLA) campus and noticed a sign in front of the Little
Theater. It read that there was going to be a screening of Sergei
Eisenstein’s “October: Ten Days That Shook the
World.” So realizing that it was going to start there and
then, I walked in. Only a few people were in attendance, but I
stayed throughout the entire long, silent film. When I came out, I
resolved to be in film, and changed my plans from Yale to the UCLA
film school.
dB: Obviously, you’re a very successful filmmaker, but
is there any part of you that still misses the intimacy or the
immediacy of the theater?
FFC: I love the theater, its traditions, history and especially
its literature. For a while I fantasized that I could work in both
forms, but in reality now all I am interested in is the cinema.
dB: The Coppola One-Act Marathon seems like a great way to
encourage synergy between two closely related art forms. Why
do you think it’s taken so long for someone to have come
up with an idea and a program like this? By and large, are you
satisfied with the level of “cross-pollination”
between the theater and film departments at the college
level, say, in a university like UCLA?
FFC: For some reasons, all over the world wherever there’s
a film school and a theater school in close proximity, or part of
the larger institution, they never seem to work intimately
together. I don’t know why. Perhaps at that student level
there’s a distrust, or competition or the feeling that the
“types” are very different. Yet, theater is
cinema’s ancestor, and they both are primarily the marriage
of two disciplines: acting and writing. It would seem that
they’d be most compatible, but that’s rarely so. I
felt that before student film directors begin worrying about
cameras, editing machines and showing their work to audiences way
after they’ve made it ““ often many many months ““
they ought to have some primary experience working just with acting
and writing, and in a way that puts it before an audience right
away, so they can learn from witnessing what happens.
Interview conducted by Alex Wen, dB Magazine
reporter.
