Francis Ford Coppola—director of The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and The Outsiders—is a big fan of Trapped In The Closet. That’s what Phoenix’s Thomas Mars says, anyway. Mars, who's married to Sofia Coppola and whose band recently released a remix with R. Kelly, told Pitchfork all about the time he showed his father-in-law Kelly’s magnum opus. Quoth Mars, “I remember him sitting there in silence for 10 minutes and then saying, ‘This is incredible.’” All this came after Mars described watching Trapped on French TV as the “best TV experience of [his] life,” saying he remembers “dreaming about the water drop,” and adding that “it stayed with [him] for a while.”
R. Kelly is, of course, flattered, telling Pitchfork he always wanted to be a director, and that Trapped was his way of showing the filmmaking establishment that people cared what he had to say, even though he couldn’t get a movie deal.