Lyon (AFP)

His debut, his risk taking, his family ... The American film giant Francis Ford Coppola returned to his career at the Lumière Festival in Lyon, which ends Sunday after rewarding him for his entire career.

- the shock Eisenstein -

It was after watching Sergei Eisenstein's film "October" (1927) that Coppola decided to turn to cinema.

"I was interested in science" but after failing in this branch "I became a student in theater, because that was where the girls were," he said in a conversation with the public.

"One afternoon, I went to a screening at 4:00 pm, where there was no one, it was + October +, and I could not believe my eyes," he said. "I said, I'm going to do cinema like Eisenstein +, and I went to study in UCLA's film department."

- imagination and enthusiasm -

"Some filmmakers have a gift from God," such as "Roman Polanski, Steven Spielberg or William Wyler," Coppola told a press conference.

"Others are not so talented, but they manage to reach a creative level by working hard, rewriting all the time," he added. "That's the kind of talent I have."

"My gifts are good imagination, enthusiasm and maybe a little vision of the future, but that's all."

- risk taking -

"I do not want to redo a film that I have already done," said the filmmaker, highlighting "his desire to learn". For him, "the risk is what is so thrilling in art".

"My career started with a successful gangster movie (+ The Godfather +, ed.) I could have made gangster movies throughout my career."

"But then I made a film the farthest possible from a gangster film, a war movie about Vietnam of a totally different style," he continued, and later, "a film on Dracula ".

"Every film I did was an experiment to teach me about my style," he said, before joking: "Learning is one of the few human pleasures that does not make you fat, do not give you diabetes and do not get your wife mad at you. "

- overtaken by + Apocalypse Now + -

Coppola returned to his cult film on the acclaimed film "Apocalypse Now" (1979) and "the nightmare of his production" that "completely exceeded" him.

"Most of the time, when you're trying to convince someone to finance your movie, you're trying to seem to know how you're going to do it," he said.

"For Apocalypse Now, I said it was going to be a big production with helicopters and it was going to be a big war movie," he added. "But when I got there I realized I did not know how to do it."

Scheduled for a budget of $ 13 million, the film will cost 30 million. Coppola will invest his personal fortune by mortgaging his property.

- family cinema -

"When I left for more than two weeks (for filming), I took the children out of school and took them with me," Coppola said. "And it was a good idea, because the two weeks usually turned into six months!"

"We were like a family troupe (...) I always put my children in my movies", like Sofia baby in "The Godfather", then in "The Godfather 3".

"Result, they have been in the world of cinema," he added, his daughter Sofia as his son Roman, both directors.

His granddaughter Gia Coppola, director, "represents the fifth generation of the Coppola family in the cinema," he said proudly. The father of Coppola, composer and musician, has participated in the soundtracks of several of his films and his paternal grandfather was one of the inventors of the sound film process Vitaphone.

© 2019 AFP