Words From the Wise Francis Ford Coppola

The Godfather speaks

Francis Ford Coppola is the legendary director responsible for The Godfather, among many other classics. He doesn’t make movies very often, but when he does, they’re often something special. His latest labor of love is Megalopolis, a movie that’s been 40 years in the making. The budget of the movie is $120 million, which he financed by selling part of his winery business. That’s some next-level passion right there. Megalopolis doesn’t seem to be out in India yet, and I can’t wait to watch it.

Since the movie is out, Coppola has been doing a bunch of interviews. I heard his conversation with Ryan Holiday on The Daily Stoic podcast, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I wanted to share a few parts that stuck with me.

One of the reasons why I was drawn to this conversation was because The Godfather was one of the earliest novels I read. I still remember vividly, it was a pirated copy because I couldn't afford the original at that point. I think I read the novel first and then watched the movie later, but I loved both. After reading The Godfather, I went on a Mario Puzo binge. I think I read all of Mario Puzo's novels as I was preparing for one of my BCom final semester exams because they were so addictive.

Before I share parts from podcast, I wanted to share a few things from the movie’s press conference in Cannes Film Festival. There were two parts that really stuck with me.

A good life

This was such a beautiful answer, especially the part in bold:

Journalist: What fear did you have to encounter in order to keep your vision the way you wanted it to be?

Francis Ford Coppola: Well, you know, I knew the film was not like other films that are out there. I couldn't say, "Well, let's make it more like such and such," because I didn't have an example. But it's how I felt the film should be, and since I was paying for it, I thought I was entitled to... Roman, you answer it for me. My son is my collaborator.

Roman Coppola: I guess the question is whether you had fear to overcome, and it seemed like you were fearless doing it. You were on the precipice of the building, and you looked over, and it...

Francis Ford Coppola: Did I?

You know, in the end, there are so many people who, when they die, say, "Oh, I wish I had done this, I wish I had done that." But when I die, I'm going to say, "I got to do this, and I got to see my daughter win an Oscar, and I got to make wine, and I got to make every movie I wanted to make." And I'm going to be so busy thinking of all the things that I got to do that when I die, I won't notice.

The other part was his answer about money:

Journalist: Where are you now with risking your own money on the film?

Francis Ford Coppola: I don't care. I never cared about money. You know, one of the reasons why I had the line of credit that I did—to be able to do this—is because in 2008, during the great—you remember that financial crisis around 2008—I borrowed, in those days, $20 million to take a winery and build a winery where children could do something when their parents were drinking the wine.

So I built a winery like Tivoli Gardens in the great, wonderful Denmark, with swimming pools and games, because I figured, well, if the kids could go, then the grandparents would go because they want to watch. And this absurd risk of $20 million created a place that now every winery tries to duplicate, in which people go and spend all day.

And so I just took the money from that—that I wouldn't have had had I not taken the risk—and I put the risk in a movie. So I have no problems with the financial aspect.

Also, another thing: my children, without exception—Sofia, Roman, and my granddaughter Gia—they have wonderful careers without a fortune. They don't need a fortune. So no matter what happens, aside from the great winery Inglenook, which we still own in the family, we're fine, fine. It doesn't matter.

You know, all of you—the money doesn't matter. What's important are friends, because a friend will never let you down. Money may evaporate.

The underlying theme of both is answers is a sense of “enough.” It’s an idea I’ve been thinking all year long and I even wrote about it recently. I think questioning yourself about what’s your enough is a non-negotiable part of a meaningful life.

I was telling a friend recently that you need a philosophy of money in life. You need to know what money is for and put it in its place. Otherwise, money will always loom large and occupy all available mental space and stop you from even thinking about the meaningful aspects of life.

Money is also a very corrosive substance. Left unconsidered, it will slowly corrode all that is good and wonderful in life. In other words, money is a means to an end, and that's it.

Inspiration Everywhere

At the beginning of the podcast, Coppola explains the inspiration behind Megalopolis, and I related so much with it:

Ryan Holiday: Let's talk about the oration. I have a chunk of it here:
"When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now? Shame on the age and its principles!"
It's just so amazing, whether it was fully deserved or not, you can't argue with the brilliance of Cicero.

Francis Coppola: No, and it was that speech that was my hook. I said, "Can you imagine being in New York and having Mayor Koch saying that to Robert Moses?" Sure, yeah. That was the—that was in a nutshell... you know, sometimes you make a movie because of a sentence that you hear. In Apocalypse Now, the sentence that made me make that whole movie—and pardon my bad language—is, I read a quote where a general, or someone, says: "We teach the boys to drop fire on people, but won't let them write 'fuck' on their airplanes because it's immoral." I said, "That's Apocalypse Now!"

Yeah, yeah. You know, sometimes it's just one sentence. And so this Catiline oration, uh, which was in Latin—and every schoolboy, you know, in America, every schoolboy knows that—I said, "What if I could do that?" and that led to the whole movie.

Oh, the context for this part is that Megalopolis was inspired by the Catilinarian Conspiracy, which I know nothing about. So here’s the reasonably trustworthy ChatGPT explaining it to me. The orations that Holiday is referring to are the Catilinarian Orations:

The Catilinarian Conspiracy was a plot led by the Roman senator Lucius Sergius Catilina (Catiline) in 63 BCE to overthrow the Roman Republic. After losing an election for the consulship for the second time, Catiline, who was deeply in debt and driven by political ambition, sought to seize power through violent means. He gathered a group of disaffected aristocrats, veterans, and the poor, promising them debt relief and political reform. The conspiracy involved plans to assassinate key Roman senators, including the consul Cicero, and to incite widespread unrest in Rome by burning parts of the city.

The plot was exposed when Cicero, one of the sitting consuls, discovered the conspiracy through informants. Cicero gave a series of speeches, known as the Catilinarian Orations, in the Senate, denouncing Catiline and his followers. These speeches rallied support against Catiline, leading him to flee Rome to join his army of rebels. Cicero then had several of Catiline’s co-conspirators arrested and executed without trial, an action that stirred controversy. Catiline himself was eventually killed in a battle against the Roman army in early 62 BCE. The conspiracy and its suppression highlighted the tensions within the Republic at the time, foreshadowing the larger conflicts that would lead to its eventual collapse.

The reason why I related with this part of the conversation so much is because pretty much everything I’ve ever written has been due to something I read or heard randomly. I’ve never sat down, had an enlightenment moment, and banged out a masterpiece of a blog post. All the ideas that I have written about have been found in the wild.

Now, I want to be clear that I don’t mean to compare my dumb newsletter that three people accidentally click on to Francis Coppola’s masterpieces, but all I’m saying is that I relate to him when he said, “Now, the sentence that made me make that whole movie—and pardon my bad language—is, I read a quote,” and “You know, sometimes it's just one sentence.”

If you’ve been accidentally clicking on my newsletter and been accidentally reading my posts, you’ll notice that it’s mostly me sharing my takes—which nobody asked for—on things I heard, watched, or read.

It’s gotten so bad that I see a blog post everywhere. Whether I’m talking to people, contemplating death in a hospital, procrastinating at work, watching some guilty pleasure, crossing Silk Board, savoring the sweet filthy stench of Bangalore, or letting a stinky fart rip in a crowded room, I think, “Ooh, that would make a nice blog post.”

But on a serious note, considering how terribly unoriginal and remarkably below average I am in my life, I’ve found it incredibly helpful to put myself in situations where inspiration kicks me in my metal nuts. One of the reasons why I started writing is because I would try to read, watch, and listen so much, I would have this uncontrolled urge to subject the world to my horrible takes.

Originality

This part of the conversation was one of my favorites and something that resonated with me deeply:

Ryan Holiday: Well, let's talk because you mentioned Shakespeare. Greenblatt wrote this amazing book called Will in the World that's incredible also, and he has a book called Tyrant, which I loved. But I was thinking, you know, a common theme between this movie and then, of course, Apocalypse Now, but is also the theme of Shakespeare, is the ability to find old stories and then place them in a new context but use the arcs and the characters and the morals. So, talk to me about the job of an artist to sort of find and then reimagine old stories.

Francis Ford Coppola: Well, for me to do that, I would have to bring in another giant into the picture, who is the German Goethe. And what Goethe said—and he was, of course, a big influence to our wonderful American Emerson—this game is a tag game. And Goethe's position was whatever he read and whatever he learned, it was only that which he could use in something that was important. And I believe that because, you know, I have a pretty good memory, and I wasn't a big reader as a youngster. But as I became older, I started to read much more. And I had this habit of whatever I was working on, I would try to find something that was nothing like it so I could rest my brain.

But what happened is when I would read something that was nothing like what I was working on, instead of it resting my brain, it made me want to change what I was working on to be more like what I was reading. And that kept happening because I would be choosing—you know, I deliberately choose things that had nothing to do with what I was working on.

For example, at one point, I chose a Chinese—a great Chinese book that is well studied and loved in China called The Story of the Stone or The Dream of the Red Mansion, written in the 16th century. And I found myself trying to change Megalopolis into being more like that, which I did, because that was one of the few books I ever read where the dream life of the characters was as important as the waking. You know, we all dream, and then we get back to what our life is, but who knows whether our life is the dream life and not that.

And in this Chinese novel, which is a beautiful book, The Dream of the Red Mansion, the dreams are part of the characters' story. And so, I made Megalopolis more like that. So, I found that whatever it was that I was supposedly trying to get my mind off the movie, it was—in fact—I was bending my mind to make the movie more like that. And that happened a lot and is one of the reasons why the film is so unusual.

But that was Goethe. Do you know anything about that whole period with Emerson in America? It was before the Civil War—they were called the Transcendentalists.

Ryan Holiday: Of course.

Francis Ford Coppola: Well, they were interesting because they were men and women working together, which really was the first time intellectually as partners—as intellectual partners. And they were, of course, the light of learning in those days was the Germans—it was Goethe and, you know, all of those guys. And so, they were all reading and translating Goethe into English. And Goethe's whole position was that what you read was only important if you could make use of it, if you could put it in your work.

And that's what I believe. Like, I believe that whatever I think is great in the cinema—which there's a lot that's great—you know, people ask you, "What are your ten favorite films?" I say, "They ask me what my thousand favorite films are," or "Who are the greatest filmmakers? What's your list of the top ten great filmmakers?" I say, "I'll give you five hundred," you know, that it's too abundant and very exciting.

Our literature—what if you look at literature as what you're able to take from and be inspired by and copy even, you know? I don't know who it was that said, "Poor artists borrow; great artists steal." I don't know who that was—someone. But that was what Goethe did.

Ryan Holiday: Sure.

Francis Ford Coppola: He wrote a book called—what the hell was that called—Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. And that was him stealing from Shakespeare, you know? That was Goethe saying, "I want to be as much like Shakespeare as I can be."

Ryan Holiday: When Shakespeare was stealing from Plutarch and from Montaigne and from these sort of Danish legends and other plays—they were all stealing from each other, Marlowe and...

Francis Ford Coppola: And, in fact, I think Stephen [Greenblatt] is writing a book on—what's his name—Kyd, another playwright, very famous playwright that no one knows anything about. It wasn't Marlowe; it's someone else.

Ryan Holiday: So you see your movies and your thinking as products of all that you have read and consumed and all the great stories and myths of history.

Francis Ford Coppola: I certainly don't think it's something of mine. It was what it did to me. And, you know, I once read an obscure book by Balzac—I don't know where the hell I found it—in which someone's talking to Balzac and says to him, "You know, a lot of the young writers are just stealing your stuff." And Balzac said, "That's why I wrote it. Because if they take my stuff and make use of it, then I will live; I will be immortal in their work."

Balzac understood that this is a process—that the young are inspired by the old, and then they become old and they inspire. And it's sort of like having a great-grandson or a great-great-great-grandson in that you live through them. And artistically, what Balzac was saying and what Goethe says is that by taking and being inspired by these great artists of the past—who were probably inspired by great artists—it all goes back to, you know, Sappho and those kind of people, you know, and Homer, whoever the hell he was or she was—you know, they live through us.

That's why when you tell me that they may have discovered more of Epicurus—I mean, imagine if someday we get lucky and discover more of Aeschylus or more of Sophocles or more—someone we never heard of. You know, we have like seven plays of Aeschylus, and he wrote 300. Imagine if somehow, somewhere, with our technology, like with you mention in—in... imagine we find more Aeschylus or more Sophocles or more someone we never heard of. It's thrilling; it's so thrilling.

Listening to this part of the conversation reminded me of the saying “creativity is combinatorial.” I don’t remember where I read it or who said it, but it’s stuck with me ever since. I did a cursory search to figure out who said it and I found some amazing things:

The amazing Maria Popova:

There is a curious cultural disconnect between our mythology of spontaneous ideation—the Eureka! moment, the stroke of genius, the proverbial light bulb—and how “new” ideas actually take shape, amalgamated into existence by the combinatorial nature of creativity. To create is to combine existing bits of insight, knowledge, ideas, and memories into new material and new interpretations of the world, to connect the seemingly dissociated, to see patterns where others see chaos. Celebrated creators—artists, writers, scientists, inventors—have always known the power of the synthesizing mind and have advocated for embracing the building blocks of combinatorial creativity. — Combinatorial Creativity and the Myth of Originality by Maria Popova

For as long as I can remember—and certainly long before I had the term for it—I’ve believed that creativity is combinatorial: Alive and awake to the world, we amass a collection of cross-disciplinary building blocks—knowledge, memories, bits of information, sparks of inspiration, and other existing ideas—that we then combine and recombine, mostly unconsciously, into something “new.” From this vast and cross-disciplinary mental pool of resources beckons the infrastructure of what we call our “own” “original” ideas. — How Einstein Thought: Why “Combinatory Play” Is the Secret of Genius

Matt Ridley in his talk titled “When Ideas Have Sex”:

So we've created something called the collective brain. We're just the nodes in the network—we're the neurons in this brain. It's the interchange of ideas, the meeting and mating of ideas between them, that is causing technological progress incrementally, bit by bit.

However, bad things happen. In the future, as we go forward, we will, of course, experience terrible things. There will be wars; there will be depressions; there will be natural disasters. Awful things will happen in this century, I'm absolutely sure.

But I'm also sure that because of the connections people are making, and the ability of ideas to meet and to mate as never before, technology will advance, and therefore living standards will advance.

Of course, Mark Twain has something to say:

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old.

Whoever said it, it’s something I’ve long believed in. In the context of writing, I’ve often noticed that some people feel a certain sense of inadequacy that they don’t have anything original to say, but I don’t understand why that’s a bad thing. The moment we remove this stupid constraint that everything we have to say has to be original, there’s a whole new world of things waiting to be repackaged, connected, contextualized, and presented.

There are countless stories waiting to be told based on the unique connections you draw and told in your unique voice, all the while colored by your unique life circumstances and lived experiences. The world needs more of these stories, not less.

What the world doesn’t need is another anodyne, performative bullshit piece of writing. What it needs are stories that you discovered while you wade through the muck of life exploring this messy and maddening world.

All my writing has been just me shamelessly copying and connecting things others have said or written. For example, here’s a recent post I published at work that’s a perfect example of this shamelessness. I used to feel the same inadequacy I mentioned earlier about my lack of originality when I initially wanted to write. To be honest, it was a little crippling. But once I made peace with the fact that this was an unnatural and useless expectation, I started enjoying every act of writing.

As an aside, most people write blogs with the objective of being popular, and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s a part of me that wants what I write to go viral—not that it ever will—but I realized this was the wrong expectation to have. Or at least it was in my context. It took me a while to realize that the reason why I was writing is because one of my default impulses when my brain is idle is to explore. As I explored, I had this urge to share the fascinating things I discovered in my explorations with other people.

Once that happened, discovering new things and being a little less fucking stupid in life became the goal, and not popularity or performativeness. Of course it feels nice when people discover whatever you write—I’m only human. But it is no longer a big motivator for me.

Going back to the notion that creativity is combinatorial, what Francis Coppola is saying is the same but in a much more profound way.

In Between Pages

Hands down, my favorite part of the conversation was how Ryan Holiday and Francis Coppola kept saying some version of “Ooh, have you read the book…” It was just stunning how widely both Coppola and Holiday read. One moment they are talking about the classics like The Epic of Gilgamesh and Meditations, and the next, contemporary works like Ask the Dust by John Fante and The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt.

I was jealous about how they were casually throwing around book titles like that. I kept thinking, “When the hell will I be even 10% as well-read as these two?”

I gave ChatGPT the transcript of the conversation and asked it to count the number of books mentioned in the conversation. The number was 29. Both Holiday and Coppola kept giving each other recommendations, and as someone who’s trying to read widely, it was a joy to listen. I did feel a little inadequate because I haven’t read a single damn book of the 29 that were mentioned because the bulk of them were classics.

For a long time, I had lost my reading habit, and I only recovered it in the last few years. I started pacing myself with books that are easy to read, and it was only this year that I started reading books that most normal people would consider a little challenging. I’ve also been stocking my bookshelf with classics like Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Jane Austen, and Franz Kafka but haven’t started reading them yet.

As I heard the podcast, I remembered this inspiring post by

Ted Gioia

on his lifetime reading plan, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot this year. I don’t yet have a clear articulation of my lifetime reading plan, but I am walking in that direction. Listening to this podcast made me both happy about the books that are waiting for me to read them and a little sad that I may never be able to read them all.

For the moment, I take solace from Nassim Taleb:

Taleb uses legendary Italian writer Umberto Eco’s uncommon relationship with books and reading as a parable of the most fruitful relationship with knowledge: The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore Professore Dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others—a very small minority—who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary. — Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones

Update - October 12th.

A reader of the blog asked for a list of books mentioned. It’s dumb that I din’t include them to start with but here’s the list that ChatGPT extracted from the transcript of the episode:

Classics:

1. "The Cataline Conspiracy" by Sallust
   An ancient Roman historical work written in the 1st century BC.

2. Account of the Cataline Conspiracy by Suetonius
   Suetonius was a Roman historian from the early 2nd century AD.

3. "The Gallic Wars" by Julius Caesar
   Commentaries by Julius Caesar on his military campaigns during the Gallic Wars (58–50 BC).

4. "On the Nature of Things" by Lucretius
   A philosophical epic poem from the 1st century BC exploring Epicurean philosophy.

5. "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius
   Personal writings by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, reflecting Stoic philosophy (2nd century AD).

6. "Oration on the Dignity of Man" by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
   A seminal Renaissance text from 1486 discussing human potential and free will.

7. "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
   An influential German novel published in 1795–96, foundational to the Bildungsroman genre.

8. "The Story of the Stone" or "Dream of the Red Chamber" by Cao Xueqin
   One of China's Four Great Classical Novels, written in the 18th century.

9. "The Epic of Gilgamesh"
   An ancient Mesopotamian epic poem dating back to around 2100 BC.

10. "Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings" by Ferdowsi
    An epic poem completed around 1010 AD, telling the mythological and historical past of Persia.

11. "The Odyssey" by Homer
    An ancient Greek epic poem from the 8th century BC.

12. "Finnegans Wake" by James Joyce
    A groundbreaking modernist novel published in 1939.

13. "Tender Is the Night" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
    A classic American novel published in 1934.

14. "What Makes Sammy Run?" by Budd Schulberg
    A novel from 1941 exploring the dark side of Hollywood.

15. "The Disenchanted" by Budd Schulberg
    Published in 1950, a novel reflecting on the disillusionment of post-war America.

16. "Ask the Dust" by John Fante
    A 1939 novel considered a classic of American literature.

17. "Caesar and Cleopatra" by George Bernard Shaw
    A play written in 1898, offering a comedic take on historical events.

18. Works by Honoré de Balzac (unnamed)
    Balzac was a prolific French novelist of the early 19th century, known for "La Comédie Humaine."

19. Loeb Classical Library (collection of classical works)
    A series of books containing original texts and English translations of classical literature.

Contemporary Works:

1. "The Storm Before the Storm" by Mike Duncan
   Published in 2017, a historical account of the Roman Republic before Julius Caesar.

2. "Burr" by Gore Vidal
   A 1973 historical novel about American founding father Aaron Burr.

3. "Julian" by Gore Vidal
   Published in 1964, a novel about the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate.

4. "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern" by Stephen Greenblatt
   A 2011 non-fiction work exploring the rediscovery of Lucretius's poem and its impact.

5. "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare" by Stephen Greenblatt
   Published in 2004, a biography of William Shakespeare.

6. "Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics" by Stephen Greenblatt
   A 2018 book analyzing political themes in Shakespeare's plays.

7. "Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World" by Irene Vallejo
   Originally published in 2019 (Spanish), English translation in 2022, exploring the history of books.

8. Works by Wendy Doniger on Sanskrit and Ancient Indian Mythology
   Contemporary scholarly works on Hindu texts and mythology.

9. "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman
   A 2020 novel by the screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman.

10. "Ask the Dust" by John Fante
    Although published in 1939, it remains influential and is sometimes considered a modern classic.

11. "The Harder They Fall" by Budd Schulberg
    A 1947 novel about corruption in professional boxing.

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That’s it for this week.