“Your best idea or work is going to be attacked the most…So you have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas, because otherwise you'll just knuckle under and change it. And then things that might have been memorable will be lost.” Francis Coppola
I love filmmaking but I hate raising money. I’m also not a fan of multi-national corporations that control the rights to music and other content. I'm certainly not alone in that sentiment.
Filmmaking is challenging and complex, yet ultimately rewarding. I’ve produced hundreds of short films and four documentary features, each one a reflection of my creativity and a snapshot of my mindset at the time. While I see strengths and weaknesses in each project, I have no regrets and wouldn't change a thing. But I always know I can do better, and I strive for that.
When asked about his favorite composition, Duke Ellington famously said, "The next one." This reflects his relentless drive for innovation and creation, which I attempt to bring to my work as well.
There’s no benefit in comparing myself or my work to others. My goal is to be authentic and express myself through my art. I embrace who I am, flaws and all. At this point in my life, one of my primary objectives is to help as many people as possible and to bring as much beauty and inspiration into the world as I can. I recognize that this mindset contrasts sharply with companies, especially record labels, whose main focus is profit. But hey, that’s the American Way.
While working on a new documentary about Horace Silver—a project I recently had to abandon—I was confronted once again with the inequities of the music business. During these challenges, I've been reading a fascinating and well-written biography, The Path to Paradise: A Francis Coppola Story* What's most captivating about this engrossing book is observing Francis Coppola’s life as an artist and the process that shapes his work.
I probably wouldn’t be a filmmaker today if not for Coppola. When I was seventeen, I attended a seminar where Francis shared his life as an artist. A year later, I had breakfast with him at the Garden City Hotel on Long Island, where he was shooting The Rain People, his second feature. For that film, George Lucas helped him design a truck that would have all the equipment necessary for his ten person crew to make a film. As he gave me a tour, Coppola told me it wasn’t about the equipment or the technology; it was really about the story. He said that if I wanted to be a filmmaker, I needed to study story and all its incarnations.
Coppola inspired me. Within a few years, he would create such cinematic masterpieces as The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. However, his career has had its ups and downs since then. With the substantial earnings from his early films, he founded American Zoetrope, a haven for creative minds in San Francisco. He even went a step further by purchasing and transforming an existing studio in LA into a state-of-the-art production facility. Unfortunately, the film he made in that studio, *One From The Heart*, was a creative tour de force but a box office disaster, forcing him to sell the studio within a year to pay off debts.
Around the same time, he bought a vineyard in Northern California, which became highly successful over the next few decades. Yet most of his films following One From The Heart failed to capture the brilliance of his earlier work.
Simultaneously, he began writing a screenplay titled *Megalopolis*. Over the past four decades, he has rewritten the script countless times. The fluctuations in his creative life have led him to continually reassess his role as an artist and storyteller, grappling with the question: "What is my filmmaking style?" This has naturally evolved over the years.
Now eighty-five, he premiered Megalopolis at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, this past May. For some, it was a total failure; for others, a masterpiece. To finance the $115 million film, he sold off part of his vineyard.
As long as he stays healthy, I’m certain he’ll continue making films. I’m anxious to see Megalopolis, which premieres in September. I suspect it’s an audacious film that tells an important story in an engaging way, but very different from most of today’s films. In Hollywood, whenever you step outside the status quo, you can expect more damnation than praise.
I am in an entirely different situation. The budget for my films are light-years from a hundred million dollars. I need just a tiny fraction of that. But like Francis and other filmmakers, I must sell myself and my work to prospective funders. I’m basically a one-man band. Other filmmakers have teams in place for each part of the process. In my case, I’m the entire team. And I can report, it ain’t easy carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. In fact, it can be very stressful.
The actual production of a film is challenging in itself but the funding part of the puzzle is rather elusive. Just ask Orson Welles, one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of cinema, who found it impossible to fund his final film, The Other Side of the Wind. It remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1985 and was eventually completed and released posthumously in 2018 thanks to funding from Netflix. Although Hollywood studio heads and successful filmmakers deeply respected his work, Welles struggled with funding throughout his lifetime.
Outside the Hollywood system, which is about to be transformed by AI, there are many filmmakers and few funding opportunities. Yet quite a few films get produced because of the lower cost of production today. So I’m not discouraged. Whatever funds I can raise, I will continue to produce films, although I suspect I won’t be working on any projects involving estates and record labels because getting the rights to historic content is much more costly than I could ever possibly imagine. A lot of my work has involved introducing the world to musicians whose music is about helping people feel better. But to the bureaucratic cog in the wheel the only question is, how much money can we squeeze out of this guy?
It’s all part of the process. This is the path I’ve chosen, and there’s no turning back now. It is truly a hero’s journey, in spite of the money lords.
I’m also certain that AI is going to open up filmmaking to a lot more people. The cost of actually producing a film will be a fraction of what it was just a few years ago. Not to say that all the filmmakers who will arrive soon will be anything like Coppola or Kubrick or Hitchcock. Far from it. That kind of artistry doesn’t come along but once or twice in a lifetime.
What AI Video will do is empower people and their creativity. That matters.
A terrific treatise on Coppola, you as a filmmaker, and film-making in general.
Hey Bret…I’m curious. It seems as if a doc on Horace is such a righteous project that the label, and particularly Don Was, would want to license the music to you for a reasonable sum. We know that the publishers don’t care. They just want their pound of flesh. But there are so many reasons for the label to want to support you. What sort of push back did you get on music rights? And how about the Silver estate. So unfortunate that you had to abandon this project. I’m reminded of Eliane Henri’s doc about Roy Hargrove where any use of Roy’s music was blocked by his manager and Roy’s survivors. The film got distribution ultimately through PBS but the lack of Roy’s own tunes really hurts.