A Coppola Things

THE GODFATHER PART III

(1990) Trying to keep a new incarnation of Zoetrope floating, Coppola agreed to a lucrative third Godfather installment and won his fourth Best Director Oscar nomination. ''I absolutely had no idea how to do a Godfather III. It was basically put to me as a movie that could save my desperate situation [with Zoetrope]. They kept pushing for it to be about drug overlords and kind of a violent repeat of [the first] Godfather. But I became very interested in Michael Corleone looking for redemption for what he had done, and in the notion of this guy looking toward charity and good works, wanting to be embraced by the church, but ultimately finding that what was behind the Vatican was more corrupt than the Mafia.

''The movie didn't and couldn't give the audience what it loved about The Godfather, which was this cold, calculating Michael Corleone. I thought that ultimately he had to be punished for what he had done. So I felt the movie was pretty interesting, but it was not the type of ride people had come to expect from the Godfather movies.''

BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA

(1992) Coppola assembled an all-star cast (Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, and Keanu Reeves) for this technically lavish take on the vampire classic. ''Unfortunately, after Godfather III, the great amount of money I had earned got taken from me in a lawsuit related to One From the Heart. I was broke again, and I decided I would try to make two or three more studio movies. The context for Dracula was to do a classic but in a way that was never done before. In all my movies I try to have one experiment. In Dracula, it was to make a movie using no technology or optical effects that didn't exist when [F. W. Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu] was made. We used the magician's palette — we did all multiple-camera exposures, there were no sophisticated optical effects. We wanted to come up with all the turn-of-the-century imagery as if it were all an absinthe dream without using anything but what Murnau had.''

JACK

(1996) Despite making money for Disney, Coppola took a critical beating for this dramatic comedy about a kid in a man's body. ''I love Robin Williams, and Disney said here's a story we want to do, and we'll give you a chance to work with Robin. Not that I would've necessarily come up with that story, but I gave Jackeverything I had and tried to make it as personal as I knew how.''

THE RAINMAKER

(1997) ''If you're a professional director, especially at a time when film companies prefer to hire a new director because they can basically push them around, there aren't a lot of things a studio can offer you that aren't formula pictures about Mafia hits and serial killers. So I thought, Gee, it would be good to get an assignment like this because it's a little different, and it's got a big following. Plus, I liked having the chance to make the best John Grisham movie.

''When I first read it, I thought of Sean Penn, but he was unavailable. So we started looking at people who were less known and settled on Matt Damon — he seemed so believable. At the end, it's really about when Matt asks Jon Voight: 'Do you even remember when you sold out?' In other words, do you really want to be a lawyer if you're not going to help people? Do you really want to be a filmmaker if you're not going to make the films that are in your heart?''