Documentary filmmaker Eleanor Coppola dies at 87 : NPR

Director Eleanor Coppola attends a special screening of Paris can wait in New York in 2014.

Brent N. Clarke/Invision/AP

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Director Eleanor Coppola attends a special screening of Paris can wait in New York in 2014.

Brent N. Clarke/Invision/AP

Eleanor Coppola died Friday at her home in Napa Valley, Northern California, according to a statement from her family shared with NPR through her publicist. She was 87 years old. The cause of his death has not yet been made public.

The documentarian was best known for chronicling the filmmaking process of family members Francis Ford Coppola, to whom she was married for more than 60 years, and her daughter Sofia Coppola.

Eleanor Coppola was a mother of three when Francis Ford Coppola asked her to come to the Philippines to record the making of his 1979 magnum opus about the Vietnam War, Apocalypse nowwith Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen.

“They were very casual about their guns,” Eleanor Coppola said in a 1992 interview with WHYY’s. Fresh air bodyguards the Philippine government hired to protect the Coppola family during their stay there, fearing that insurgents would try to kidnap the famous Hollywood director. “Our main bodyguard would put his gun in the waistband of his blue jeans, take it out and show the kids how it worked.”

The process of making the film, which Eleanor Coppola filmed in detail on camera, was notoriously fraught with difficulties. Heavy rain delayed filming and a typhoon destroyed the sets. Sheen had a heart attack. Brando was overweight and could not play the role as Francis Ford Coppola had originally conceived it; the whole part had to be rewritten. The production ran over schedule and way over budget, threatening to bankrupt its director.

“Everyone says, yeah, well, Francis works best in a crisis,” Francis Ford Coppola told his wife during one of their many heart-to-heart conversations by her at the time. “I’m saying this is a crisis I’m not going to get out of. I’m making a bad movie, so why should I continue?”

Released three years later, Apocalypse now has been declared a masterpiece – as, in its own way, was Eleanor Coppola’s 1991 documentary about the tortured making of that film, Hearts of Darkness.

“It strips Coppola of all defense while revealing him as a great and courageous filmmaker,” film critic Roger Ebert wrote of the documentary in 1992. “It also reveals the ordeal he put his actors through and his team there in the Philippines – and what he endured at their hands.”

Eleanor Coppola grew up in Southern California and attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where she majored in applied design. She started out as a visual artist. In 1962, she met her future husband while working in the art department on Francis Ford Coppola’s first low-budget feature film, Dementia 13. They married the following year.

Apocalypse now almost broke up the Coppolas’ marriage. In the Fresh air interview, Eleanor Coppola spoke about sending her husband a telex – which she also shared with other members of the production team – telling him that he was becoming like Kurtz (the crazily intense character at the heart of the film) and that he was creating his own Vietnam, through his excessive behavior. . The couple has had many ups and downs over the years, including extramarital affairs, mainly on the part of Francis Ford Coppola.

But they stayed together. “The constant in this ever-evolving carnival of cinematic art and cinematic madness was Eleanor,” said Kim Aubry, former vice president of technology and post-production at Francis Ford Coppola’s production company, American Zoetrope. “She always provided us with shelter during the storm.”

Eleanor Coppola later made documentaries about The rainmakerdirected by her husband and daughter Sofia Coppola Virgin suicides And Marie Antoinette. Later in life, she also wrote and directed her own feature films. Paris can wait And Love is love is love.

Sofia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola and Eleanor Coppola are pictured in 2013.

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Sofia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola and Eleanor Coppola are pictured in 2013.

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Eleanor Coppola was also an accomplished visual artist. His drawings, photos and conceptual art have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. She has designed costumes for contemporary dance productions and created experimental art installations.

“Eleanor was an extraordinary and gifted person who encouraged everyone she came in contact with,” filmmaker and visual artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, Coppola’s close friend and artistic collaborator, said in an email to NPR. “Her generosity and her spirit deeply touched and enriched those who were fortunate to know her. The gift of her art, in many disciplines, remains her great legacy.”

She was also closely involved in the family’s extensive wine business in Northern California. Winemaking was a family business of Francis Ford Coppola. In the mid-1970s, following his success with the Godfather films, the director purchased an estate in Napa Valley and began producing wine.

Eleanor Coppola was also a writer. She was 87 when she wrote her third memoir. According to his family’s statement, in the manuscript the author wrote: “I appreciate how my unexpected life has stretched and pulled me in so many extraordinary ways and taken me in a multitude of directions au- beyond my wildest imaginations. »