Francis Ford Coppola’s late era trilogy reveals an artist reclaiming his passion

Youth Without Youth, Tetro, Twixt—years could pass without us hearing the titles of these Francis Ford Coppola movies. These digitally-shot, classically-infused “late era” films excited, baffled, and irritated 21st century audiences in equal measure, but are too readily dismissed as a bad couple of harvests in the filmmaker’s vineyard.

On the eve of the mega-budgeted Megalopolis—$120 million is a lot of your own money to stake on any project, least of all one that has yet to secure distribution—these small-scale “personal projects” may unlock Coppola’s drive more than his canonized classics. They’re films about laying bare the mechanism of legacy, the magic of memory, and the thorn of ambition, treated with all the sincere, heavy-handed energy that those descriptions suggest. These were the films that Coppola made when he didn’t have to make movies, when he could be doing anything else (probably something wine-related) but ventured back to an artform that fueled and crushed him in equal measure. The way they bridge old themes with new styles for unique, uneven, and often stunning results should be cited first when understanding his long-gestating Megalopolis.

For those who don’t know why five-time Oscar-winner Coppola wasn’t getting War of the Worlds or The Departed-sized budgets in the mid-2000s, there’s perhaps no graduate of the New Hollywood wave who understands the constraints that commerce places on art than Coppola. He entered the 1980s utterly burned out from one-upping himself with towering works and was left in the dust with an open-hearted and financially ruinous musical flop—not a good place to begin the most hyper-capitalist decade in the history of movies.

Coppola spent years working to pay back the losses that his production company American Zoetrope incurred from One From The Heart. Whether his motivations were purely imaginative or cynical, his post-‘70s work often excelled in baroque, expressionist visions of youth, passion, and ambition, but petered out in 1997 with the no frills, no fuss John Grisham adaptation The Rainmaker. All the while, the cumbersome, unrealized dreams of Megalopolis lingered.

It’s no surprise that Youth Without Youth, an adaptation of a Romanian novella lent to Coppola deep in his Megalopolis misery, feels like an antidote to what plagued him while working commercially. His fascination with the story—an eventful fantasy about elderly, suicidal academic Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) getting struck by lightning and de-aging 30 years—did not have to be pitched to Hollywood suits. With European co-producers assisting the reduced-scale, self-funded production, Coppola compromised little of his passion for the strangeness of author Mircea Eliade’s text. “Given my age and where I was at the time,” Coppola told Bookforum, “I found myself with the opportunity to just go off and make it and not even tell anyone that I was making it.”

The idea of a private excursion into storytelling isn’t just appealing to someone burdened with studio struggles, it resonates with the intimate mood found in the film. The texture of Youth Without Youth’s digital image is admittedly plainer than the visual heights of Coppola’s career (it’s still shot with an expert’s eye for blocking and rhythm), but as Dominic reckons with the opportunities of youth and his status as a medical marvel in 1930s Europe (read: he becomes a Nazi target), the absence of eye-catching compositions or colors gives us the palpable sense that we share the same space as Dominic while he is quietly shattered and reconstructed regarding his position in the universe.

The story sacrifices little of its inherent literary nature—Dominic is plagued by a psychically-projected double and falls in love with Veronica (Alexandra Maria Lara), a doppelganger of his lost love who is also hit by lightning and thrown back in time—and by stripping the film of a polished visual sheen (but not necessarily technical craft), Youth Without Youth feels like a film stood between two worlds. It’s between prose and cinema, between past regrets and future promises, between classic and modern cinema. The tension between these poles is where Dominic spends most of the film—did Coppola think of himself in the same position?

As Dominic gains supernatural powers, invents his own language, and decodes why Veronica begins speaking in older and older tongues (Dominic’s unwritten opus is about the origin of all language), Coppola approaches the themes plaguing Dominic with a blunt urgency that indicates how strongly the director feels about them himself. Why can’t we articulate our own nature using our own language? What does it mean to be granted the extra time we long for, how does it change our desires? Will our art and loved ones both suffer because of our inability to choose between them? Youth Without Youth feels more like an idiosyncratic proof of concept for Coppola than a slept-on banger, a thesis statement of his flexibility and conviction as a filmmaker and an announcement of newly embraced horizons.

Tetro, released two years later, isn’t devoid of streaks of fantasy, but burrows more forcefully into what can be gripped with our own bare hands—the tensions of a fractured family burdened with more than two estranged brothers can bear, confronting a truth they don’t know how to articulate in their ancestral home of Buenos Aires. Bright-eyed cruise ship worker Bennie (a baby Alden Ehrenreich) tracks down the erratic older Angelo (Vincent Gallo), who now goes by “Tetro” and now lives with Miranda (Maribel Verdú), who used to be Tetro’s nurse at an Argentine asylum.

Angelo walked out on the family years prior, and now Bennie has found a tetchy, dismissive man with a different name in his brother’s place, who is reluctant to invite him into his new life and who has compartmentalized a difficult childhood into reams of scrawled paper hidden in the back of his apartment. Bennie discovers Tetro’s great unfinished play about their philandering, domineering conductor father (Klaus Maria Brandauer) and his guilt over the car accident that killed his mother. When Bennie gets into an accident himself, he decides to stage a completed version of Tetro’s play at a regional festival, forcing the elder brother to confront and accept the divisions he’s been fighting to uphold.

Shot in crisp black and white—a digital updating of brooding, post-war Italian family melodramas—Tetro showcases its endearing emotional swings with pride, reminiscent of Coppola’s piercing and artful 1983 flop Rumble Fish. Coppola has been upfront about the blurred lines of creating such a willingly personal film. His father and uncle were conductors, and he grew up envying and emulating his older brother August; can we be forgiven for projecting autobiographical readings onto his film? But like a lot of great personal art, Tetro is the result of abstraction, not a direct recreation—the result of an artist giving air to the insecurities and speculations that non-artists instinctively keep private. What if things had been different, Tetro reflects, what if resolutions never happened and diverting paths were chosen?

“It’s harder to make a personal film because you’re dealing with themes that you’ve probably chosen because you don’t entirely understand them,” Coppola told The Seattle Met. “You’re asking a question about your guts—and the only way to know the answer is to get in there and really stir around, which is not only painful but is almost like an autopsy. In a sense, you’re doing that while you’re still alive.”

If Youth Without Youth is about expansion, spreading our intellectual reach across the infinite, Tetro turns inward, locked inside the emotional boundaries created by the regime of family. There’s introspection, yes, but also the pull of fate, and above all, a keen sense of mortality—the clock is running out for us all to ask and answer.

Mortality haunts Coppola’s most recent and most unrealized “Late Era” project, the gothic ghost story Twixt. Sprung from a dream and shot on the director’s estate, Twixt focuses on Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), a hack writer touring his latest witch thriller across towns too small to have book stores, sequestering him to fold out tables at the back of hardware stores. His one local fan, Sheriff Bobby LaGrange (Bruce Dern), lights up his imagination by showing him a recent murder victim, and soon Hall stumbles upon a forest dreamworld of specters and memory. Here, a murdered girl Virginia (Ella Fanning) and Edgar Allan Poe (Ben Chaplin) update him on the historic slaughter of schoolgirls by a preacher convinced that vampires were dwelling across the lake.

It’s clear Twixt was a very relaxed production, and the ambling, unambitious supernatural story feels as much motivated by what Coppola finds bewitching and amusing as his subconscious musings. In its best moments, the film captures a mix of austere small-town eeriness and charming pastiche, where the conflicting vibes are emboldened by the unsophisticated digital visual palette—an effect more masterfully captured in Twin Peaks: The Return. The actors are game, led by a stellar Kilmer hiding a distinctly pathetic heart behind performed detective gravitas, and Fanning, Chaplin, and Alden Ehrenreich (as a French-speaking drifter) never overplay the pulpy side of their ghostly presence.

But the gulf between what Twixt wants to evoke and what the finished film actually achieves is evident. Coppola’s experiment with simple CG elements and backgrounds are jarring, the result of a director choosing the right project to meddle with new tech but rarely having a firm grasp on it. At points, we’re reminded of the technically fluid heights of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Anti-War trilogy; once or twice we recall the flattened landscapes of recent Neil Breen movies.

Even though Twixt makes a cathartic narrative choice to incorporate Coppola’s grief and guilt over the boating accident that killed his son Gian-Carlo in 1986, the film resonates most as a unifier for the themes coursing through his two other digitally-shot films. All three are about writers on the verge of producing terrific work, but who are encumbered by their own hang-ups and inadequacies. Hall may be a commercial hack compared to the meticulous and academic Dominic, but they’re equally aware of how they’ve internalized failure, and are liberated by fantastical encounters that unpick their psyches before they inspire great work.

Tetro’s unfinished work is taken out of his hands by a brother whose life will be turned upside-down if it’s completed truthfully; Dominic realizes that the closer Veronica gets to relaying the original language of his studies, the more his presence harms her. Ambition is a double-edged tool that chips away at those we love, but pursuing creativity can better the lives of people who need to grow closer.

And then there’s Twixt’s knowing, playful ending, where the spooky events of the story are revealed to be plot beats in Hall’s comeback manuscript. It’s a film about unresolved pain, but Coppola’s wink at the commercial lure of telling stories feels like a mature reflection of how we got to these self-funded projects in the first place. Stories aren’t just good for confronting pain, but for sparking the imagination and inspiring feeling—for creating entertainment and hoodwinking an audience. Why else would we tell stories to begin with?

In this unloved trilogy, Coppola tells an abstracted, interjoining story about breaking free of paralysis, creating something bold and exciting from darkness, and the self-knowledge, intimacy, and joy gained from doing that through stories—it’s likely Megalopolis could never have been made without him making films exactly like this. These films aren’t just deeply personal, they confront how telling stories transforms our interior worlds, and how stirring it can be to turn something painful into something inviting and entertaining. They, all at once, embody that old Hollywood chestnut: One for me, one for you.