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You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you'll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost.

Francis Ford Coppola

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Francis Ford Coppola
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: April 7
Actor
Composer
Executive Producer
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Winegrower
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Might
Instincts
Really
Courageous
Memorable
Things
Instinct
Otherwise
Courage
Lost
Knuckle
Ideas
Knuckles

More quotes by Francis Ford Coppola

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I just admire people like Woody Allen, who every year writes an original screenplay. It's astonishing. I always wished that I could do that.
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You don't have to specialize - do everything that you love and then, at some time, the future will come together for you in some form.
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I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.
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When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.
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Most filmmakers can't afford to try something out that doesn't work.
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When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.
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A director is the ringmaster of a circus that's inventing itself.
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I think it's better to be overly ambitious and fail than to be underambitious and succeed in a mundane way. I have been very fortunate. I failed upward in my life!
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The things you get fired for when you’re young are the same things that you get lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.
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I live near San Francisco in the most beautiful spot on earth and enjoy myself in many ways. Yes, I love to work, which for now is to think and read and write, so it's all a dream come true.
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Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos.
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I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying he wanted me to make up dialogue.
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It's ironic that at age 32, at probably the greatest moment of my career, with The Godfather having such an enormous success, I wasn't even aware of it, because I was somewhere else under the deadline again.
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I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.
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They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family.
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I wanted to be a film student again, as a man in my 60s. To go someplace alone and see what you can cook up, with non-existent budgets. I didn't want to be surrounded by comforts and colleagues, which you have when when you're a big time director. I wanted to write personal works.
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Today's winemakers still worry about quality.
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When a movie is about to come out on its initial debut, there are a lot of people involved - the financiers, the studio and the producers and also, many times, the foreign distributors. So it is a time of tremendous pressure and uncertainty.
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I've been blessed with enough wealth that I can make a film myself up to a certain budget. So one way I thought I would reinvent myself was just to make these very small, personal films that I've financed myself.
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I was never sloppy with other people's money. Only my own. Because I figure, well, you can be.
Francis Ford Coppola