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Francis Ford Coppola apologized for making one of the greatest films of all time.
The Oscar-winning director, 85, told the Washington Post in an interview published Monday that he’s to blame for the never-ending amount of sequels in Hollywood, because he helmed 1974’s “The Godfather Part II.”
“So I’m the jerk that started numbers on movies,” Coppola said. “I’m embarrassed, and I apologize to everyone.”
Coppola recalled that after the success of 1972’s “The Godfather,” Paramount Pictures was insistent on him making another movie. But Coppola didn’t want to, so he made specific demands to the studio that he thought would stop the sequel from happening.
The filmmaker asked Paramount to pay him a salary of $1 million (exorbitant at the time) and suggested they call it “The Godfather Part II,” inspired by Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet film series “Ivan the Terrible,” released as “Part I” and “Part II — The Boyars’ Plot.”
Coppola said that while the studio thought his ideas were “nuts,” they agreed to make “The Godfather Part II” even after he threatened to quit the project.
“They said, basically, ‘Francis, you’ve made Coca-Cola. You’re gonna stop making colas?’” Coppola recalled.
“The Godfather Part II” won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Coppola and Best Adapted Screenplay for Coppola and Mario Puzo, the author of the original “Godfather” novel.
Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, Talia Shire and Morgana King starred in the film, hailed as an all-time great movie.
Coppola also made “The Godfather Part III,” which came out 16 years later, in 1990.
Coppola previously reflected on making the “Godfather” franchise in 2022, when did an interview with Variety before his Hollywood Walk of Fame star ceremony.
“I thought it was going to be a special failure,” Coppola admitted. “When you make a film going against the grain of what’s going on at the time, those kind of films are tough. You’re not doing what everyone expects or wants you to do.”
The father of three explained that he initially wasn’t interested in adapting Puzo’s 1969 book for the big screen.
“Mario loved his family and he wanted to take care of them, so he wrote a book he thought would be a best seller, but it was a bit of a potboiler,” Coppola shared, adding that he looked past the “sensational” elements of the book and focused on the family theme.
“I dissected that book very carefully and left out many of the pages, but Mario was all for it,” he said.
Coppola’s latest project, “Megalopolis,” flopped at the box office and was panned by critics upon its release in September. The film cost Coppola $120 million to make and was in the works for 40 years.