Mirala a la Sofia Gala, che... Moria se debe estar muriendo de envidia.FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA turned 70 a couple of months ago, but he shows no sign of slowing down. After a frustrating decade with nary a directing credit to his name, now comes “Tetro,” which is his second movie in two years and is based on the first original screenplay he has written, directed and produced since “The Conversation” in 1974.
“I view this as the second film of my second career,” Mr. Coppola said late last month, shortly after returning from Cannes, where “Tetro” was described by European critics as somewhat uneven but intriguing, emotional and elegiac. “From now on I’m always going to be writing the scripts, and every film will be personal. I’m going to be the kind of filmmaker I wanted to be when I was beginning.”
“Tetro” (which opens on Friday), with Vincent Gallo in the title role, covers some of the same territory, albeit from a different direction, that has fascinated Mr. Coppola since the time of the “Godfather” trilogy, which first made his reputation and his fortune. Once again he has filmed a drama about an Italian immigrant family in conflict, here called the Tetrocinis.
This time, however, the patriarch in question, played by Klaus Maria Brandauer, is a tyrannical orchestra conductor, and his sons are writers, not gangsters. And to the extent there is violence, it is emotional rather than physical, the product of a plot that revolves around a younger brother’s attempt to find and reconcile with an estranged sibling (Mr. Gallo’s character) who has broken with the family and fled.
Because Mr. Coppola’s father, Carmine, was a musician, a flutist who played for Toscanini in the NBC Orchestra before trying his luck as a composer and conductor, there is an obvious temptation to regard “Tetro,” which in Italian means “gloomy” or “glum,” as autobiographical. Suggestions to that effect have already surfaced, but Mr. Coppola said that was not really the case.
“Granted that classical music was part of my life, but my father was a wonderful and talented man who didn’t get his break in life until much later and was nothing like the monster portrayed here,” he said. “Clearly I ran away from military school when I was 15 and idolized my brother. But everything ends at that. My family was far from what you see here. We didn’t have the kinds of rifts, the terrible things that ‘Tetro’ has.”
“My story is more in the league of Tennessee Williams writing Blanche DuBois as an expression of his own vulnerability,” he added. “I think I am all the characters, but the kid is who I was. That’s my story.”
“Tetro” was made in Argentina, mostly in Buenos Aires in the bohemian neighborhood of La Boca, with other scenes shot in Patagonia. Both locales, the one brightly colorful and the other spectacularly imposing, are unfamiliar to most Americans, but Mr. Coppola chose to film in black and white, in part because he wanted to evoke the mood of movies he admires, Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers” and Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront” in particular.
That choice, especially coming after the mixed reception that greeted the release of his abstract and unconventional “Youth Without Youth” in 2007, also underlines Mr. Coppola’s determination to make the films he wants the way he wants and to avoid any situation in which he has to cede control to others. His long and uneasy relationship with Hollywood is over, he said, acknowledging that it would be difficult these days for him to get a green light from a studio for any project that interests him.
“My attitude is, ‘Who cares about them?’ ” he said. “It’s an industry that just makes the same movie over and over again and rules out a climate of experimentation.”
Audiences are part of the problem too, he argues, because they have lost their sense of adventure and curiosity. “After two generations of television they are even more anxious to see things that are familiar to them, like kids who want to hear the same stories over and over again.”
On the set of “Tetro,” cast members said, the atmosphere was more like that of a low-budget indie film than of a Hollywood production. There were no trailers, even for the stars, and Mr. Coppola was constantly experimenting with ideas that had just occurred to him, often singing songs to keep the mood relaxed and playful.
The Spanish actress Carmen Maura appears in “Tetro” in the brief but crucial role of Tetro’s former mentor, an imperious critic with the power to make or destroy an artist’s career. She has worked with distinguished directors like Pedro Almodóvar, Carlos Saura, Amos Gitai and Fernando Trueba but said that Mr. Coppola had a style she had not encountered before.
“It was an amusing and entertaining experience,” she said. “He’s a completely different kind of director. I liked his craziness. He was very friendly, simpatico and respectful, but you never know what he is going to ask, and he was full of surprises.”
Mr. Coppola has a history of finding and nurturing the talent of young actors. “The Outsiders,” his 1983 ensemble piece, is perhaps the best example: it provided breakout roles for Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Ralph Macchio, C. Thomas Howell and Diane Lane.
“Tetro” offered a similar opportunity to Alden Ehrenreich, who was 17 when he was cast and has just completed his freshman year at New York University. He had never appeared in a feature-length film before but after five months of auditions won the role of Bennie Tetrocini, who journeys to Buenos Aires in an effort to reconnect with his brother.
“The atmosphere Francis creates around him is extremely warm, inviting and collaborative,” Mr. Ehrenreich said when asked to explain Mr. Coppola’s success with young actors. “It’s like he provides the map, but you find what countries you want to visit. He doesn’t give you a specific laundry list, he invites you into the environment, and you decide how to interact.”
For the Spanish actress Maribel Verdú, who plays Miranda, Tetro’s girlfriend and Bennie’s confidante, “Tetro” presented a different kind of challenge. Though she is already known to American audiences for her performances in “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Y Tu Mamá También,” this was her first role in an English-language film, and going in she was understandably “nervous, worried that I couldn’t do this, wasn’t up to it,” she said. But Mr. Coppola managed to put her at ease immediately.
“I’ve been at this for 25 years, and never before had a director gone to the airport to await me and take me to his home,” she said. “It was a gesture that made me feel comfortable and protected from the start.”
Mr. Coppola said he perceived a kinship between “Tetro” and “Rumble Fish,” his only other black and white film, which he shot in tandem with “The Outsiders.” “I see ‘Tetro’ as more of a personal drama” than many of his previous works, he said, “a sibling to ‘Rumble Fish’ in that it is the story of a kid who idolizes his brother.”
Nevertheless Ms. Verdú’s role provides the glue that holds the movie together, he said. Or as she explained it, “From the start he was clear in telling me that I had to provide the heart, to bring a bit of light between these two brothers and their tormented relationship.”
Mr. Gallo did not respond to requests for an interview. But Ms. Verdú, who was in Cannes with Mr. Coppola, said the director appeared grateful for and was energized by the warm personal reception he received. And Mr. Coppola said that, because he was too busy and too worried to enjoy the acclaim that accompanied “The Godfather” films, he intends now to savor every opportunity that comes his way.
“I don’t have a lot of time left, but I’m so in love with the cinema that I want to learn all I can about making movies,” he said. “I just want to write another screenplay and make another movie.”
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