Francis Ford Coppola

Operatic ambition, family and empire. Coppola stages criminal and colonial power as inheritance, with baptisms and banquets crosscut against killing, and a career-long willingness to risk everything on one production.

Signature

• Ceremony intercut with violence.
• Dark, amber interiors; faces held in shadow.
• Family obligation as the mechanism of corruption.
• Production scale pushed to the point of hazard.