Francis Ford Coppola, 59, has always lived his life on the edge. "Give me three tests," he offers, as if he has something to prove. "I'll do anything for you."

In fact, as a permanent outsider, Coppola still has to prove himself to the Hollywood studios that finance many of his movies - and that's fine by him. He cares more about his vision than about his reputation, and he's not afraid to challenge the powers that be: When he thought that Warner Bros. had stolen his screenplay for a feature-length Pinocchio film, he filed a lawsuit. (This past July, the suit was decided in his favor, and he was awarded $20 million in compensatory damages and $60 million in punitive damages.)

Coppola is always trying something new. He's a technologist who tried to build a television-satellite hub in Belize - and failed. But in the course of that adventure, he found an abandoned lodge and turned it into a resort. He's a publisher whose literary magazine, Zoetrope: All Story, emphasizes short stories - a money-losing proposition. But Coppola still believes that the best films begin as short stories.

Now he has major business plans: Within the next year, he intends to open a wine-bar-and-bistro in San Francisco under the name Rosso & Bianco. It will be a Starbucks-like spin-off of the cafe that he now operates at his Niebaum-Coppola Estate Winery in Napa Valley. Why does Coppola take such gargantuan risks with his money and his ego? Because, he says, that's the only game worth playing.

In an interview with Fast Company, Coppola outlined his essential principles of spontaneous recklessness.

The unlived life is not worth living.

It's important to be interested in everything. You have your life - experience it to the fullest. You're eventually going to lose it anyway. I am a very restless personality. If I take time off, I'm likely to do something like build a resort. I can't help myself. That's why I try to make businesses out of all of the things that I enjoy: food, wine, films. My company, FFC Brands, sells my taste. I want to set a precedent for my children. They won't hear me say on my deathbed that I wish I had lived my life differently. I am one big yes.

It's not a gamble unless you go all the way.

Get into situations in which failure isn't an option. Be an adventurer. I based Apocalypse Now on the novel Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. That book defied even the great Orson Welles, who tried to film it but had to abort the project (he then went on to make Citizen Kane). My script, written with John Milius, told the story of an American soldier who travels into the jungles of Southeast Asia to bring to justice a man named Kurtz, who had stepped beyond the accepted limits of morality.

Filming that story was perhaps the biggest risk I've ever taken. To get United Artists to finance the movie, I offered to put up my wine estate and my home as collateral. I lived in the Philippine jungle for 238 days, through guerrilla uprisings and through typhoons in which the rain came down so hard that it hurt. We had too much money and too much film; little by little, we went insane. The stakes were so high that I simply had to succeed.