Francis Ford Coppola

🛕 Halva, 🎬 The Thief of Baghdad, 📖 Antkind, and more.

October 4, 2024

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Francis Ford Coppola is a legendary NYC-based film director and screenwriter, best known as the mind behind some of the most championed films of our time, such as The Godfather Trilogy, American Graffiti, and Apocalypse Now. With a career spanning over fifty years, and multiple academy awards under his belt, Coppola is undoubtedly one of the most important and influential figures in contemporary film. His newest film, Megalopolis, is a decades-in-the-making modern Roman epic starring greats like Adam Driver, Nathalie Immanuel, and Giancarlo Esposito. Megalopolis premiered at Cannes earlier this year and is now playing in theaters. Lucky for us, Francis is here to tell us what he’s been into.

🛕

Halva

One of the things I love most in the world, that I’ve loved since I was a little boy, is that every Christmas I always get some halva. It's a Middle Eastern confection made from ground up sesame seeds and egg albumen into this heavenly candy. To this day, every Christmas, one of my kids gives me a chunk of halva, but I don't keep it in my house because I would just eat it all. I keep it in Sofia's house, and every once in a while I go and I take a little piece.

🎬

The Thief of Baghdad

A very favorite movie that I always loved and saw my own life in because it related to certain stories of my own family is The Thief of Baghdad starring Sabu, Conrad Veidt, and John Justin. The Thief of Baghdad, played by Sabu, is a boy traveling around with this older caliph who is a handsome friend, and they go on an extensive journey together. Their dynamic always made me think of me and my older brother – it's a fantasy beyond fantasies, that movie. I love it so much.

📖

Charlie Kaufman’s book, Antkind

I never knew Charlie Kaufman had written a book until I found “Antkind” after searching for “solipsist making a movie of his own life” on Google. I figured, well, this book is going to explain my life to me, so I read the whole thing, and it was very funny. It's long, but people who read it really enjoy it. It has this man, this writer, who has a unique mind and after reading this book, my perception of my own life felt completely different than it used to. My life felt like a fantasy being written by Charlie Kaufman – so that was my experience with “Antkind.”

🛝

Playing with children

The most fun thing to do is to play with kids, be with a group of kids and just play with them and make up plays or stories. When I was younger I used to be a drama counselor: and I was in charge of about 9 boys, and I would always have so much fun with them, reading to them and doing treasure hunts.

🌺🧦

Hawaiian shirts & mismatched socks

20 years ago, I decided I wanted to have some of those Hawaiian shirts, but you couldn't buy them anymore. So I had a dozen Hawaiian shirts made by someone I knew who was a costume designer, and I used to wear them wherever I went. Over time, I would go to Brazil, for example, people would say, oh, he's wearing a Coppola shirt. People started calling them “Coppola shirts,” and they started to get popular again. As they got more popular, companies started to make them available to buy again. Then, I started wearing dissimilar socks to see if that would become a trend too – I think they do sell socks in mixed pairs now. It turns out that there's a boys' school in England where the tradition is to wear the wrong socks; there was also a famous physicist who wore mixed socks. So I'm not the only one.

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Francis Ford Coppola

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