Art of Darkness

Think like a child.

Children think that they can jump from here to the moon. That's a useful point of view. I've never been a superconfident person. I don't court danger - if it comes, fine. But I am childlike. I try to see things in a very open way. The childlike point of view has great power. Business is a natural outgrowth of play. My greatest gift is my enthusiasm. I get excited about whatever I'm interested in. I'm like a six-year-old.

You have to define success and failure for yourself.

People are shocked to hear that I think of The Godfather series with sadness. I see those films almost as a personal failure. They changed my life detrimentally, even though the world treated them as big artistic and commercial successes. Their success led me to make big commercial films - when what I really wanted was to do original films, like those that Woody Allen is able to focus on.

Don't ask, What does the customer want? Ask, What does the future want?

My company is based on the belief that business should be conducted as if it were an art. The wine business is our most successful operation. We have what is probably the most-visited winery in Napa Valley. Visitors feel like part of my family. We've turned the camera on ourselves. That's what artists always do. Everything I love has in one way or another become a business for me.

I'm expanding the company right now: I'm taking what I've learned from our wine business and applying that knowledge to the entertainment portions of the company. Once you start thinking about brands, you realize that there is no film company that really counts as a brand. A Fox film, a Warner Bros. film, and a Paramount film are all interchangeable. Branding films is not done today - unlike in the past, when each studio had its own individual personality.

I want our film brand to give people a certain promise of quality, and I want to keep that promise by emphasizing the two most important aspects of the cinema: writing and directing. We're going to focus on making films at a certain budgetary level - films costing $12 million or less. Such films can have all of the production quality, all of the finesse, of the $40 million films that open every Friday.

Being spartan not only greatly reduces overhead but also destroys the hierarchy that affects a company when its people care only about their bonuses. In that kind of company, people start to play the game safe: "Let's make another Mission: Impossible." I don't hire people who play it safe, and I destroy systems that encourage the instinct for security.

Success means living the life of your heart.

People ask me, What would you do if you had Bill Gates's fortune? What if you had $50 billion dollars? My answer is, I would use it to borrow $500 billion, and I would build the city of the future. That city would be a beautiful place for people to live. It would support creativity, education, ritual, and athletic perfection. In the future, what will occupy people won't be work; it'll be study, art, sport, and festival. We ought to start gearing people toward those priorities. If people can see something attractive, then they'll want it. And if they can see it and want it, then they can have it.

Always work on an epic scale.

Henry Ford wasn't just designing cars; in effect, he was designing cities as well. Early in my career, I discovered the art of treating money outrageously. If you spend $1,000 recklessly, it will feel like $10,000. Everything will seem bigger and more exciting. In that spirit, I don't deny myself anything. And I don't say no to anything.

Whenever you get into trouble, keep going.

Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos: You go over budget; you wear people out. In the middle of filming Apocalypse Now, Marty Sheen had a heart attack. For the first time during the making of that picture, I became scared. But we improvised: We used a double and shot a lot of the material from behind. When I couldn't build a satellite network in Belize, I built a resort instead - another double, so to speak. To keep going in a crisis, do a 180-degree turn. Turn the situation halfway around. Don't look for the secure solution. Don't pull back from the passion. Turn it on full force.

While making Apocalypse Now, we had banished screenwriter John Milius from the set. Then we invited him back - to the great relief of the cast and crew, who thought I had gone mad - and he came to see me. About that visit, Milius later said, "I felt like a general going to see Hitler in 1944 to tell him that there was no gasoline." But I turned the situation around. I said to Milius, "This will be the first film to win the Nobel Prize." I got him all excited. When he left that meeting, he was saying, "We're going to win the war! We don't need gasoline!" He would have done anything.

To learn more about Francis Ford Coppola's projects, visit the Web www.zoetrope.com