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EXCLUSIVE: After spending months talking about his long-nurtured dream project, Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola embraced the chance to depart from promo tour talking points.
Calling Megaloplis “a great adventure,” Coppola affirmed with a smile in accepting his DGA Honor on Thursday night, “I decided tonight I wouldn’t say anything I’ve been saying.”
After being given the award by his granddaughter, Gia, Coppola said he was delighted to spin yarns about ” how the Director’s Guild was founded.” While he didn’t do so in linear fashion, the 85-year-old filmmaker had the audience in the palm of his hand as he recounted giants of cinema and his personal touchstones, paying tribute to masters like Billy Wilder, King Vidor and Samuel Goldwyn.
When he met Jean Renoir, Coppola recalled, the French filmmaker gave him a “beautiful smile” and shook his hand “like he was welcoming me to this profession that he loved so much.” Frank Capra, by contrast, was “a lot grouchier. I remember how much he didn’t like Apocalypse Now because he thought it was anti-American.” Studio bosses like Darryl Zanuck and Jack Warner, he said, were “not exactly, by today’s standards, good-behaving people,” but their passion for the movie business was undeniable.
Coppola and the other honorees were announced in August. Deadline was given a chance to attend the ceremony at the DGA Theater along with a cross-section of figures from New York’s film, media and cultural communities.
Due to the pandemic and other factors, the DGA Honors ceremony had not been held since 2018, but the annual event returned this year to mark its 25th anniversary. As high-energy host Natasha Lyonne advised the crowd, the honors “are not to be conflated with the DGA Awards,” which will be handed out in a few months.
Along with Coppola, 2024 recipients included Sesame Street, Criterion, former CBS News chief Susan Zirinsky, and Broadway Stages founder Tony Argento and his sister, Gina Argento, who run the Brooklyn production complex. Presenters included producer-director Ron Howard; 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl; directors Mira Nair, Barbara Kopple and Darius Marder; and actors Jeremy Sisto and Christopher Meloni.
Gia Coppola, who has joined the family business of filmmaking, directing The Last Showgirl, praised her grandfather’s contributions to the world of film. But she also added personal sentiments, movingly reflecting about how how her grandfather “stepped up” to help parent her. “I never met my father, Gian-Carlo,” she explained, alluding to Francis Coppola’s oldest son, who died in a boating accident when Gia Coppola was about to be born. She and her grandfather “have gone on incredible journeys together,” she added, “and I greatly treasure those memories.”
Bonding with her grandfather helped her make the leap into filmmaking after college, Gia Coppola recalled, with a crew job on Coppola’s 2011 film, B’Twixt Now and Sunrise.
Coppola, who said he was “triple-jet-lagged” from consecutive trips to London, California and New York, sat in the audience for the entire two-and-a-half-hour ceremony. The event covered everything from TV news to preschool programming to physical production to Coppola’s native realm of cinema. “Tonight,” he observed, “was a different experience than I thought. Tonight, I met so many people I wish I had known before, and so many wonderful people and so many talented people.”
