Back To the Future
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Given the parallels that Francis Ford Coppola draws freely and eagerly between his own career and that of the fictional character at the center of his new film “Youth Without Youth,” it’s difficult to not also notice the aptness of the title. Oh, to be young again — but it’s only a movie.
Before he had even turned 35, an eager and broke Mr. Coppola suddenly found himself catapulted into the pantheon of American film, winner of Academy Awards both for his 1970 “Patton” script (shared with Edmund H. North) and for his runaway 1972 phenomenon “The Godfather,” for which he had been personally wooed by Paramount Pictures and subsequently earned the label of visionary. Embraced by audiences and the establishment alike, he went on to helm perhaps the most ambitious back-to-back-to-back series of films in cinema history, from the century-spanning “The Godfather Part II” to the claustrophobic “The Conversation” and finally to the reality bending “Apocalypse Now.” The first two competed against each other for best picture of 1974.
“Like so many colleagues, I was 18 or 19 and found myself blown away by all the films coming from Europe, from the likes of Bergman and Fellini and Antonioni,” Mr. Coppola said earlier this week. “Kubrick was this young guy, and they were all making the films they wanted to make, and then all of a sudden my life took this unexpected turn and I became this ‘important’ Hollywood director that I never intended or expected. It was very intoxicating but I quickly reached a point where I was like, ‘Gee, what happened to the filmmaker I wanted to be, writing my own screenplays and doing my own personal projects?'”
But life is funny sometimes. If he never intended to become one of Hollywood’s greats, he certainly didn’t expect to become a man in need of a “comeback,” as some are calling “Youth Without Youth.” Of course, some might also call this his third comeback, or his fourth, or his fifth. For it was only three years after the triumph of “Apocalypse Now” that Mr. Coppola bankrupted his production company, American Zoetrope, with his disastrously indulgent 1983 film “One From the Heart,” a dreadfully miscast love story which he infamously directed on TV monitors from the confines of his souped-up trailer. It wasn’t long before the ex-wunderkind was paying off debts by helming second-rate, director-for-hire fare such as 1986’s “Peggy Sue Got Married,” 1992’s “Dracula,” and 1996’s “Jack.”
These days, Mr. Coppola said, if he can complete his projects on a budget of $17 million or less, he needs no approval from American Zoetrope. Most Hollywood directors would shout this level of freedom to the rafters, but for Francis Ford Coppola, it seems more a melancholy acceptance of a certain reacquired freedom. Audiences accustomed to the sweeping, star-studded epics that made the filmmaker famous may find themselves surprised by the less flashy, more intellectual thrills of his latest small-budget drama. Of course, they may also wonder what the director might have done with an extra $20 million — money he would have been handed with a smile in 1980. But Mr. Coppola maintains that he has recalibrated his sense of scale, and that unlike the subject of his new film, he is not looking to return to the younger version of himself.
“I’m not trying to do the same thing again,” the 68-year-old director said. “This film is not trying to be super-commercial. I’ve been fortunate enough to have this opportunity to go back, to do things that are smaller and more personal and more challenging, and what I want now is for people to expect something different from me each time.”
In that regard, Mr. Coppola got it just right. “Youth Without Youth,” which opens nationwide next Friday as the award season’s biggest question mark, is an intimate, if puzzling, success — a film that has polarized early audiences as a metaphysical, romantic, science-fiction espionage thriller. Mr. Coppola said he was handed Mircea Eliade’s original text by a friend and found himself immediately drawn to the central character of Dominic Matei (played in the film by Tim Roth), an elderly linguistics professor who considers suicide as he comes to realize that he will die before he can finish his life’s work. (It should also be noted that Eliade, a distinguished scholar and writer, had ties to the fascist Iron Guard in his home country of Romania as a youth, and was alleged to have written anti-Semitic tracts.)
But a freak lightning strike changes Dominic’s fortune. Overnight, the badly burned professor begins to age backward, gradually returning to the health and vigor of a 30-year-old. Similarly, he develops a heightened sense of intellect, which takes the form of an omniscient and shrewd inner guardian angel — his heightened subconscious coming to life — also played by Mr. Roth, who communicates to Dominic through windows, mirrors, and inner monologues. Inspired by his luck and his newfound energy, and emboldened by his seemingly limitless intellect, the professor continues on his mission to chronicle the very first language ever spoken by a human being, working backward from modern dialects to more primitive tongues, hoping to one day discover the first words ever spoken by man.
Mr. Coppola makes no apologies for the denseness of the material; indeed, the challenge drew him to the project in the first place.
“It was fascinating to me: How do you express human consciousness? What is human consciousness, to begin with?” asked the director, who employs various strategies in staging and choreographing Dominic’s discussions with his subconscious self. “Something about that is exciting, particularly when you pair it with the notion of language — when that first language between humans gave birth to this extraordinary consciousness of life — and the idea of film language, and trying to develop a new way of showing this inner turmoil.”
Unlike the 40-year-old Mr. Coppola, whose productions were legendary both in terms of scale and ambition, the 68-year-old version keeps the ideas big while keeping the budget, and the logistics, small. He traveled with a bare-bones crew (small enough to fit into a single retrofitted truck) and filmed primarily on location during the span of some 80 days in Eastern Europe at the end of 2005.
It is the director himself who calls attention to perhaps the greatest irony of all: that in going independent, adhering to small budgets, and accepting more targeted, platform releases, he is rejecting precisely the kind of epic, big-star, studio-system production that he and such colleagues as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg helped establish in the 1970s. But again, one can’t help but sense that, like a declining Orson Welles, who was looking for that one big comeback project just as Mr. Coppola was ascending to greatness, the latter would get back in the blockbuster saddle — if only someone would let him.
“Today,” Mr. Coppola said, “studios are owned through a layer of companies, and the decisions lie more with executives on Wall Street, whose idea of risk is to buy a new telecom or satellite company. They want to do to movies what Coca-Cola does to drinks — to make them all the same. But you can’t have art without some creative risks, and that’s what I’m excited to do now — to jump back in and to take some major risks.”