Unit 12

Further education and career prospects.

COMMUNICATION

Exercise 1. There are several ways to continue your film education:

1. Learn filmmaking on your own by shooting films.

2. Get filmmaking tips from top experts and prominent film directors. Follow books and online filmmaking courses.

3. Enter a University and join graduate or postgraduate Film, TV and Digital Media Programs to get a degree.

4. Conduct your own research on different aspects of Film Art.

Discuss pros and cons of each approach. Give as many arguments as you can to prove your ideas.

READING

Exercise 2. Scan the article to find the following information.

1. What are Coppola’s 3 professional rules?

2. What are contemporary producers afraid of?

3. What is Coppola’s side job?

4. What is the theme of “Apocalypse”?

5. How can a filmmaker boost confidence?

6. What outstanding actress and singer has panic attacks?

Filmmaking Tips.

Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration.

by Ariston Anderson

Over the course of 45 years in the film business, Francis Ford Coppola has refined a singular code of ethics that govern his filmmaking. There are three rules:

1. Write and direct original screenplays.

2. Make them with the most modern technology available.

3. Self-finance them.

But Coppola didn’t develop this formula overnight. Though he found Hollywood success at the young age of 30, he admits that the early “Godfather” fame pulled him off course from his dream of writing and directing personal stories. Like Bergman, Coppola wanted to wake up and make movies based on his dreams and nightmares.

I met Mr. Coppola during the Marrakech International Film Festival, where he shared insights on the filmmaking craft with local students. Rejecting the popular “master class” format, Coppola preferred a simple “conversation,” where he spoke with students and shared his advice generously.

Why did you choose not to teach a master class?

For me in cinema there are few masters. I have met some masters – Kurosawa, Polanski – but I am a student.

I just finished a film a few days ago, and I came home and said, “I learned so much today”. So if I can come home from working on a little film after doing it for 45 years and say, “I learned so much today,” that shows something about the cinema. Because the cinema is very young. It’s only 100 years old.

Even in the early days of the movies, they didn’t know how to make movies. They had an image and it moved and the audience loved it. The cinema language happened by experimentation – by people not knowing what to do. But unfortunately, after 15 – 20 years, it became a commercial industry. People made money in the cinema, and then they began to say to the pioneers, “Don’t experiment. We want to make money. We don’t want to take chances.”

An essential element of any art is risk. If you don’t take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn’t been seen before? You try to go to a producer today and say you want to make a film that hasn’t been made before; they will throw you out because they want the same film that works, that makes money. That tells me that although the cinema in the next 100 years is going to change a lot, it will slow down because they don’t want you to risk anymore. They don’t want you to take chances. So I feel like I’m part of the cinema as it was 100 years ago, when you didn’t know how to make it. You had to discover how to make it.

Do you feel like you’re more of a risk-taker now?

I was always a good adventurer. I was never afraid of risks. I always had a good philosophy about risks. The only risk is to waste your life, so that when you die, you say, “Oh, I wish I had done this.” I did everything I wanted to do, and I continue to.

What’s the most useful piece of advice you’d give a student?

The first thing you do when you take a piece of paper is always put the date on it, the month, the day, and where it is. Because every idea is useful to you. By putting the date on it as a habit, when you look for what you wrote down in your notes, you will be desperate to know that it happened in April in 1972 and it was in Paris and already it begins to be useful. One of the most important tools that a filmmaker has are his/her notes.