Godfather proves a mixed blessing for director Coppola

Rarely has a director seen such a turning point in his career as Francis Ford Coppola did with The Godfather. After its release, "my life went another way", the American filmmaker said when we met in 2007 - and it's still true.

Before The Godfather emerged in 1972, Coppola was just another struggling director with dreams of changing the art-house landscape. Born in Detroit, Michigan, he'd majored in theatre at Hofstra University, graduated from UCLA film school and then began working for indie producer Roger Corman.

Making his directorial debut with the 1963 horror-thriller Dementia 13, he followed it with sex comedy You're a Big Boy Now, Broadway musical adaptation Finian's Rainbow and, in 1969, the low-key marital drama The Rain People. "I wanted to be this European-style filmmaker that was coming to the United States in the 1950s. We were seeing films by [Ingmar] Bergman and [Akira] Kurosawa, and we thought this was wonderful. The thing about seeing a good film is that it makes you want to make a film."

The Rain People was the first film produced by American Zoetrope, the company that he and George Lucas set up to bankroll their own movies and foster other fledgling talents, away from the restrictions of the studio system. The second was 1971's THX 1138, a bleak sci-fi work that marked Lucas' directorial feature debut. A box-office failure, its costs left Coppola personally in debt for US$400,000.

Never mind that Coppola had just won his first Oscar for the screenplay for 1970's Patton when he was just 31. Nor that his wife Eleanor (whom he's still with, after 51 years) was pregnant with their third child. The mounting money crisis threatened to sink him and American Zoetrope before he'd truly got started. He needed a job just to pay back the money - and along came The Godfather, a money-gig adaptation of Mario Puzo's mafia potboiler for Paramount.

It was not, to borrow from one of the film's most famous lines, an offer he couldn't refuse. Coppola feared it would glorify the mafia and reflect poorly on his own Sicilian heritage. It was not as if he was the first choice: Sergio Leone had declined; so did Peter Bogdanovich. Even when Coppola did go on board, he disagreed wildly with Paramount, which was set against him casting Marlon Brando as patriarch Don Vito Corleone.