MARRAKECH, Morocco — While in Morocco to lead the main competition jury at the Marrakech International Film Festival, director Francis Ford Coppola impressed the audience at the opening day’s press conference with his perceptive comments on current events and the state of cinema. “The language of cinema was invented at the turn of the last century by pioneers who were free to experiment but today you can’t dare to experiment,” he said. “People who control the motion pictures want to make (profitable films). Now we’re at a turning point: As artists we can change the world but to do that we need to be free to experiment.”The next day, Coppola — a great conversationalist — sat down to talk to a select few members of the press about anything and everything. The conversation was long and winding, incorporating quotes from Voltaire, his reading on the Middle East, technology, and the future cinema. Here are some of the highlights.Is there a future for the cinema?“Cinema is in its infancy. The thing that makes it difficult is that we imagine the cinema as it is now, and we’ve been comfortable with it for the last 50 years. The truth of the matter is it, like everything else, will evolve and change. I have thoughts and think about it, but definitely the golden age of the cinema has not yet come. Certainly in the 100-something years there’s been such an abundance of greatness, when you think about it, in such a short time. I often think that the cinema was an art form waiting to happen and of course needed technology to make it possible. So when it did happen there was this rush of creativity that produced arguably 12 or more masterpieces in the silent age and more in the subsequent years. When people ask me what is the greatest movie ever made I say, “Where do you want to start?” So it is a rich, rich literature, I feel it is only beginning. But that requires that we loosen our idea of what a film — we’ll call it a film still, even though it’s not film anymore — specifically has to be. We perhaps don’t allow what it can be and what it will be. I always like to imagine you, sitting here, not even films you would make but that your great –grandchildren will make. How marvelous would it be if we could even get an inkling of what that would be?Coppola’s plan for the cinema of the future“Cinema is too interesting and too big for 3D to be everything. You remember, they were announcing that everything was going to be 3D. I was thinking about it and realized what we’ll call “cinema of the future” will change in a couple of areas. One, as always, [will be] the writing, and by that I mean the screenplay. Not the form of the screenplay but the act of committing to paper the plan of what your movie will be, just as the theater or dramatic writing changed over many years. The novel changed dramatically over the years in areas of point of view, stream of consciousness with [James] Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The very screenplay, how we approach it, we’re starting to see it, even in the movies I’ve seen here — how a screenplay is organized and how the project is put forth in writing. There is tremendous opportunity for innovation and evolution, just as it happened with the novel. Then, the phenomena of the documentary form, or what we think of as the documentary form. If you go back originally, you know, it was never really purely documentary. They did retakes and staged things in “Nanook of the North”…. That is an exciting future, the reconciliation of the documentary form with the classical fiction form. Then there is the fact that the cinema is digital, meaning that the projectors are digital. It’s impressive to think of what they are now compared to what they had been. They don’t take cans of film, therefore the films don’t have to be edited. They’re digital files. And if it’s a digital file that means they can be different every night, or they can be performed live. So that takes me to another branch, which I call live cinema for lack of a better word, which is very different from live TV.”When will cinema grow up?“Reading a lot of fiction and non-fiction I’m always struck with how more interesting they can be in that format. I go see a movie, and how it has to do it all in two hours, and how it has to be melodramatic to satisfy an audience. I wonder when cinema can really grow up to really be the literature of the people, of our time? It could be literature, but it’s not even classified as that, it’s entertainment. Certainly, the filmmakers have no control. They’re just trying to get another job.”Contemplating his legacy“It is odd to me that some of those films are thought of so well. I think what I did have was I wasn’t afraid. When you make a film sometimes you rub people the wrong way, because it’s different. It’s like those painters from the Belle Époque who were doing these pictures and they couldn’t sell them on the street corner. They couldn’t get arrested. Art always changes very quickly. I like to say the avant-garde art becomes the wallpaper. It just changes. That happens with film as well.”Stream of consciousness cinema“I was looking at the New York Times [recently], seeing all the movies and it was occurring to me they all look like sausages — here’s this movie, here’s this movie. Now that I’m old and it doesn’t matter, I’m sort of independent, I was thinking I really don’t want to make a sausage. I just want to make a stream of what I’m thinking about, what I’m feeling. Maybe for me cinema will just be one long project, one more film while I’m alive that will go on and on.”The collapse of the old system“There is not television and cinema anymore. It’s all cinema: it can be under a minute or over 100 hours. I believe that the entire industry will have new ownership in three or four years. It won’t be owned by the people who own it now; it will be owned by a different group desperate for real content, which is of course the Internet companies. They will be in the movie business. If that will be better, I don’t know.”
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