Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola came into cinema through cheap work: in his early twenties he was shooting material for Roger Corman's low-budget productions and for erotic films. The Oscar he took for co-writing the screenplay of Patton opened Paramount's door to him, the studio offering him the chance to adapt Mario Puzo's mafia novel, and The Godfather came out of that. The Conversation, made between the two Godfather films, was its opposite, a cold and spare story of surveillance steeped in the hopelessness of the Watergate years. Apocalypse Now he built by joining Joseph Conrad's novel to real accounts of Vietnam; it went into Cannes in 1979 still unfinished and shared the Palme d'Or with The Tin Drum. One from the Heart sank commercially in 1982, and debts accumulating from his own independent productions pulled him back to a smaller scale. The Berlinale gave him its Berlinale Camera in 1991.