Watching Francis Ford Coppola break down his iconic movies is no less entertaining than the movies he talks about. It made me think about lessons ordinary folk living mundane lives working unexciting jobs could stand to learn from what Coppola had to say. The one line I found amusing and thought-provoking was about not needing be in a terrific series of crisis to deliver and be successful. Good work can be done without needing to execute heroics all the time. He says that in the context of making the first Godfather and Apocalypse Now. Different set of reasons for the unending crises but extraordinary outcomes.
This is relatable for the rest of us too. People do pull extraordinary stunts to get through difficult patches in their lives - personal and professional, often over-rotating on doing what feels like the right right. Once the adrenalin rush dies down and sanity returns, the world looks very different. The intensity of feeling fades and those "heroic" actions seem unneeded even harmful. Yet the person is completely spent and there is no room for recovery. They become a different and lesser version of themselves and move on. For Coppola the wins were so outsized that all events leading up to become brilliant vignettes to share with the world. Regular people don't have that privilege. And that was only one line - all thirty minutes are teachable in different ways. There was this great lesson on distilling the essence of things:
I always try to have a word that is the core of what the movie is really about — in one word. For “Godfather,” the key word is succession. That’s what the movie is about. Apocalypse Now,” morality. “The Conversation,” privacy.
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