The performances tended toward the naturalistic, often integrating improvisation and utilizing the “Method” approach, which encouraged actors to seek total emotional identification with their characters. Their narratives were morally ambiguous, and avoided tidy endings. They were shot, for the most part, on location. Yet his movies employed many techniques in vogue in the auteur director-driven cinema of the period, which strove to create experiences more gritty, intimate, and raw than those of older Hollywood studio films.
Even his classic films are intensely stylized (take, for example, the baroque, chiaroscuro compositions of The Godfather).
Yet they represent radically different visions of their source material.Ĭoppola had never been a realist filmmaker. The two films were both shot on location in Tulsa, made back-to-back with much of the same cast and crew, and released in 1983. They share a basic setting - the emotionally-charged worlds of Oklahoma juvenile delinquents - and many of the same themes. Coppola’s Hinton films are engaged in such a dialogue. They borrow styles, trade symbols, tread similar ground, winking and calling back-and-forth, sometimes mirroring one another, other times bending away. Hinton adaptations from 1983, The Outsiders and (in particular) its avant-garde counterpart, Rumble Fish.įilms talk to each other. Inaugurated by the 1981 musical One from the Heart, this creative enterprise hits its stride with Coppola’s two S.E. In the films of this period, the director’s focus shifts away from the medium’s ability to evoke real life and toward its power to create artifice. For Coppola, the early ’80s were not a time of creative bankruptcy, but of creative realignment. Following an extraordinary run during the previous decade - The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now - he ascended into the stratosphere on a cloud of ego fumes, trading substance for style, eschewing serious-minded projects for what The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael would call “pastry chef’s movies.”īut, to me, this is a misunderstanding. In the 1980s, the narrative goes, the great Francis Coppola lost his touch.
William Patterson, Matt Dillon, and Mickey Rourke in Francis Coppola’s “art movie for teenagers.” (RUMBLE FISH, 1983)
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