Director Francis Ford Coppola, regarded as one of the greatest movie directors of the past century, has been hospitalized in Italy.
Local reports suggest that Coppola, who is 86, was hospitalised in Rome on Tuesday morning. He had been presenting a screening of his controversial film Megalopolis in Calabria.
There was no immediate comment from his team tonight. Unconfirmed local reports suggest that Coppola may be undergoing heart surgery.
Coppola spent part of the summer in Italy, partly because he was scouting locations for his new film, which he planned to shoot this autumn.
The auteur, who has won five Oscars in his career, directed film greats including Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, Peggy Sue Got Married and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
His wife, Eleanor, died last spring.
In mid-July, he was greeted by a crowd of young people in Soverato, as a special guest at the preview of the Magna Graecia Film Festival.
‘Young people tell me the world is a mess,’ he said at the time, ‘but I tell them there’s no problem that humanity can’t solve.
‘We must build a great new future, and do it together for the sake of our children. And tonight, we’re taking a leap into the future.’
After winning an Oscar and becoming a Hollywood icon, Coppola decided to tackle a self-financed, $120 million blockbuster, Megalopolis, an ambitious film, which premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Critics and audiences were disappointed.
The project is the subject of a documentary: Megadoc, directed by Mike Figgis, will debut at the 2025 Venice Film Festival at the end of August.
Coppola has very close ties with Italy, and with Basilicata in particular.
Francis’s grandfather, Agostino, emigrated from Bernalda in the early 1900s, and on May 1, 1989, Coppola became an honorary citizen of the Lucanian town, where he often spends his holidays, also enjoying the beaches of nearby Metaponto on the Ionian Sea.
The filmmaker has a plan to revitalize the Metaponto area; in fact, he has purchased an old building in Bernalda to transform it into a hotel.
A titan who reshaped movie culture, Coppola is one of the most influential figures in cinema culture.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, to a father who was a flautist in the local orchestra, he is a second generation Italian immigrant. He spent most of his childhood in Queens, New York.
His first success was with the 1968 film Finian’s Rainbow, starring Petula Clark and Fred Astaire.
But his breakthrough was in The Godfather in 1974, starring Marlon Brando, Robert de Niro and Al Pacino.
Coppola was initially unenthusiastic about the source material, a best-selling book by Mario Puzo, which he called ‘cheap.’ He wasn’t even the studio’s first choice of director and once said: ‘I was always on the verge of getting fired.’
But the film, which recast a crime saga as a vivid, intelligent story about a family and its bonds, was an enormous critical and commercial success and arguably the most influential movie of the century. It often tops polls of the greatest films ever made.
