Francis Ford Coppola is a very influential director and producer who also wrote the screenplay to several films. Many of his films reflect his own life and centre around the family. He studied film making and during this time he worked with Roger Corman who gave him his first film to direct, Dementia 13, made on an extremely small budget. Warner Brothers gave him a contract as writer and it was there that he made his first main feature film, You're a Big Boy Now. It is an offbeat coming of age film. He followed this with the musical fantasy Finian's Rainbow. The Rain People was one of his favourite films, of a pregnant housewife who goes on the road to leave her husband and in some ways was a feminist Easy Rider. It was his next film, The Godfather, that set him up as a major director. Paramount were expecting a small Mafia film, but he developed it into a much bigger film and it became a huge success and an influential film. The Conversation was Oscar nominated as Best Picture. Paramount wanted a sequel to The Godfather, but he went a slightly different route of both a prequel history and the present. The Godfather Part 2 won him the Best Director Oscar and the film won Best Picture. Apocalypse Now, his film of the Vietnam war that was a huge and expensive film, that showed the insanity of war. The production was difficult, chaotic, ran over time and budget, but one of the best war films made. The Outsiders was a teenage film about two gangs of teenagers. Rumble Fish is a different style of film, being shot in black and white in an art house / expressionist style. Peggy Sue Got Married was an entertaining romantic comedy. Tucker: The Man and His Dream was a biopic of a revolutionary car designer and in some ways reflects Coppola's life. Bram Stokers Dracula is a visually impressive, theatrical and darker version of the film.
