40 years later: “From the Bottom of the Heart”, Coppola’s almost apocalypse, is a masterpiece and is back on the big screen

QWhen, in the summer of 1979, “Apocalypse Now†went on to great international success, Francis Ford Coppola was triumphant and sovereign, as Napoleon must have felt after the battle of Austerlitz. In the great epic that the filmmaker said was not about Vietnam, but Vietnam itself, Coppola had put everything at risk: his reputation, his financial assets, his mental health, even his family. After an inordinate amount of filming – more than a year in filming -, post-production dragging on for months and months, premieres successively postponed, a screening in Cannes even while work in progress (it would still be worth the Palme d’Or) and the final victory at the box office, the project he had dreamed of for Zoetrope, the company created in the 60s, seemed possible: transforming it into an old-fashioned studio, with screenwriters, actors, technicians hired continuously, equipped with the most modern technologies (which Sony never tired of lavishing on him and he was testing) and, above all, intended to house the world’s greatest creators who didn’t have a door open in traditional companies. It’s the time when figures like Wim Wenders, Jean-Luc Godard or Hans-Jürgen Syberberg spent seasons at Coppola’s mansion in Napa, on the outskirts of San Francisco; in which old movie glories like Gene Kelly or Michael Powell are hired as wise advisors; the time in which he resorts to quixotic gestures, such as pressuring 20th-Century Fox to buy the American rights to Kurosawa’s “Kagemushaâ€, thus making possible the Japanese master’s return to the forefront of international cinema. But it is also the time when he risked showing more than seven hours of “Hitler – A Film from Germany†, by Syberberg, at Lincoln Center, in New York, in an auditorium with 2,700 seats. It seemed crazy, but the session sold out within 24 hours – and had to be repeated a few times. Similar initiatives followed in several other cities, always with success. Riding the crest of the wave, the year he turned 40, he was the ‘mogul’ of the moment. Furthermore, in April, his birthday party, in Napa, was a blast: a thousand guests, several days long, the cake, mounted horizontally and transported on a stretcher, was almost two meters long. long,†he told Peter Cowie, his biographer.