Francis Ford Coppola Untangles “Tetro”

The legendary director needs no introduction, but his new film "Tetro" might.

In your online bio for “Tetro,” you talk about “expanding the language of cinema.” How do you see this film achieving that?

FFC: I would like to do it. I don’t know [about "Tetro."] I think when you make a personal film and you’re not under the thumb of a moneymaking machine that really wants to appeal to as many people as possible — even in independent films, Fox Searchlight or Focus, they’re very concerned about making money, they have to — so the more you have to deliver a big, mass audience, the less you can kind of experiment a little bit. The way the language of movies got created was at a period when no one knew how to make them, so the filmmakers tended to try out ideas that then stuck and then became our vocabulary. If you’re not allowed to experiment anymore for fear of being considered self-indulgent or pretentious or what have you, then everyone’s going to just stick to the rules — there’s not going to be any additional ideas.

When the Germans in the ’20s or Eisenstein or the early filmmakers in America invented these techniques that we still use, the producers said, “go out and make a half an hour… we don’t care what you do.” So they were able to try out ideas and they came to us, but if you can’t try out ideas anymore, then you’re not going to be able to expand what’s possible and what’s not. I don’t know what “Youth Without Youth” or “Tetro” has uncovered that might be useful to someone later, but maybe there’s something in there because I did make it in a very free and heartfelt way. I didn’t like stick to the rules particularly.

In “Youth Without Youth,” I wanted to find a way to express dreams, because dreams are not all wavy and oily like they are in the movies, and so I did all the dream scenes in “Youth Without Youth” upside down because I felt they’re very realistic, but when you think about them, there’s something different about them. And a lot of people wrote about “Youth Without Youth,” why is it upside down? So who knows? Maybe some day people will be comfortable to say that maybe dreams are upside down.

Alden Ehrenreich: I think also in the subset of filmmaking that is acting, it’s a young art form. [Acting] has been with us since the Greeks, but really American film acting is from the ’40s. If you look out on the street and observe human behavior, there’re a lot of dimensions you still don’t see in movies. There’s a sense of “We have realism in film acting, so we’re done. That’s the whole gamut.” But there’s a lot of absurdity and illogical behavior that isn’t allowed for or is hard to think of when writing because it defies what people conventionally think of as emotionalism.

FFC: Interestingly, the use of acting and the behavior that’s not accepted, but you’d probably see on the street, those early German [actors] — Emil Jannings of “Nosferatu” and Nicholson, today, is a practitioner of that, where acting is a little extended and very interesting. Nicolas Cage, too.

I’m getting the wrap-up sign, so I wanted to ask about one of your films that seems to get short-shrift, 1988′s “Tucker: A Man and His Dream.” The story of Preston Tucker, a man who built an innovative car only to be brought down by the major automakers, seems especially relevant as the Big Three have fallen in Detroit and even analogous to moments in your own career. How does that film resonate for you today?

FFC: I always liked “Tucker” because I loved cars and I loved the story, which was a true story and one which as a little kid, I saw on the sidelines because my father had ordered a Tucker. I said, “When is the Tucker coming? When is the Tucker coming?” And he said, “Oh, it’s never going to come because they didn’t want him to make the car.” “Why wouldn’t they want him to make the car?” “Well, you know, in this country sometimes, people don’t like competition.”

I was nine years old and always thought of Tucker as an interesting story. At the end of “Tucker,” he says, “If we don’t allow there to be unusual ideas, we may be buying the cars that the Germans and the Japanese make,” our former enemies. Which is what happened. But no one came to see “Tucker,” unfortunately.

It’s funny. I would’ve thought with all the people who loved cars and car collectors that it would’ve had a bit of potential, but movie attendance is a mystery to me — what they go to and what they don’t go to. Is it that studios choose what they think is middlebrow enough and then put a ton of money behind it so they go? I don’t know the answer. All my personal favorites of the movies I’ve made, if you took them all — “The Conversation,” “Rumble Fish” — and add them up, they wouldn’t buy lunch.

“Tetro” opens in limited release today.

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