Producer Roman Coppola’s great ambition? Opening a theme park

Not long before I’m scheduled to talk to the filmmaker Roman Coppola, an email comes through from his publicist: is it OK to postpone the interview while he takes his mother to the dentist?

Somehow, this doesn’t come as a surprise. After all, it’s hard to think about Coppola without also thinking of his family – especially of his dad Francis Ford Coppola, the legendary director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now.

Not that the Coppola brand these days is about Francis alone. There’s Roman’s sister Sofia, director of The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation; their mother Eleanor has made films too, both documentary and fiction. Then there are the acting members of the extended clan, including their aunt Talia Shire and their cousins Jason Schwartzman and Nicolas Cage.

This is the kind of legacy some might view as a burden – Cage, for instance, changed his professional name from “Nicolas Coppola” to establish his own separate identity.

By contrast, being a Coppola seems like a central part of what Roman Coppola is all about. When I finally reach him on Zoom, he’s relaxing in the sunshine in the family vineyard in California’s Napa Valley, an affable full-faced guy with a greying beard not unlike his father’s, plaid shirt unbuttoned, looking totally at home.

But what else is Coppola about, as an individual? It’s not easy to sum up his career, which has taken many turns since he started as a second-unit director on his father’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Since then he’s continued to do second-unit work on and off, including on his father’s long-anticipated science fiction epic Megalopolis, which recently finished shooting. He’s also the current president of American Zoetrope, the independent production company which Coppola senior founded with George Lucas in 1969.

Besides this, he’s directed two features of his own, CQ and A Glimpse Inside The Mind of Charles Swan III, as well as music videos for the likes of The Strokes, Daft Punk and Fatboy Slim (his most recent Strokes video, for their 2020 single The Adults Are Talking, shows the band playing baseball against a team of robots). As a writer, he’s contributed to the scripts for a number of films by his friend Wes Anderson, from 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited to the upcoming Asteroid City.

One way Coppola sees himself is as a technical problem-solver, with a special interest in miniatures and visual effects generally; he’s also fond of the French term flaneur, which he defines as “someone who strolls around and explores”. On Anderson’s films, he serves as a trusted advisor (or a consigliere, to borrow a Godfather term).

This can-do approach is one which can be applied to many fields. In a couple of weeks, Coppola will be in Melbourne as the keynote speaker at Never Permanent, a day-long talks program on the theme of “creativity and technology now” . His talk promises to reflect both his collaborative ethic and his interest in technical innovation, focusing on his work with Decentralized Pictures (or DCP), a non-profit described as a “blockchain-based film community”.

The goal of DCP, Coppola explains, is to support fresh talent and to “open up opportunities to people who may not have that access”. Anyone can submit film proposals, with successful projects becoming eligible for financing opportunities and mentoring advice – success being determined not by a panel of judges, but by a “user-generated algorithm” that gives everyone a say.

The difference from a company like YouTube or Netflix, Coppola says, is that the DCP algorithm favours “genuine reactions” rather than simple majority opinion. “Ten people hate it, 10 people love it, that’s a lot more interesting than 20 people kind of liking it.”

While it’s early days for the venture, his hopes are high. “Just mathematically, if we have hundreds, and then thousands, and then tens of thousands of [pieces of] material, that’s when we really excel. Because you could have a contest of a hundred screenplays, and you could figure out a way to evaluate them with a dozen people in a committee,” he says.

“But if you had a million screenplays and you had to evaluate them, there’s no way to do it unless you do it in a manner not unlike what we do, where it’s collective participation. So I’m excited to get to that critical mass place where we can sort of prove our thesis.”

Speaking of the future of cinema, I’m curious what Coppola might be able to reveal about Megalopolis, an ultra-ambitious passion project in the works for decades, reportedly self-financed to the tune of roughly $120 million.

Understandably, Coppola says he can’t go into specifics, beyond hinting at the themes that make it more than just a science-fiction story. “Where’s our culture going? What is the future we should make for ourselves?”

He is, though, upfront about what the project means to him emotionally. “I’m very proud, not only that I’ve been involved, but that my dad … you know, he’s this 84-year-old guy who’s won all the accolades, and been successful in his business life, but that he’s feeling that drive to go for it and make something ambitious and artistic and personal.”

For his father, he says, filmmaking is often a matter of trying out ideas in the moment rather than deciding everything in advance. “He’s like that when it comes to cooking. He’s like, what do we got? What’s in the fridge?”

Since Coppola has also directed second unit on several Wes Anderson films, I wonder how the experience compares. “Wes is very particular, where he has something in his mind,” Coppola says. “It’s all kind of in his head, and we’re trying to put it down.”

With Anderson the adventure tends to be more at the writing stage – as with The Darjeeling Limited, which follows three bickering brothers on a fraught spiritual journey. Starting from this premise, Anderson, Coppola and their co-writer Jason Schwartzman set out to parallel life and art: “We travelled together to India and we would go to temples, and goof off, and try to be in the spirit of these brothers, and some of those experiences came to bear on the story.”

By his own admission, when Coppola himself is calling the shots his approach is more at the controlling end of the spectrum. But his ultimate creative dream, it turns out, isn’t a film at all.

While in Melbourne, he plans to take some time to visit the city’s Luna Park, with its clattering Scenic Railway overlooking the bay, among the oldest functioning rollercoasters in the world. “I’m a huge fan of amusement parks, but from the 1920s and ’30s,” he says – an enthusiasm he traces back to his childhood visits to San Francisco’s Playland, which closed in the early 1970s.

“My great ambition is to recreate a classic amusement park – not period correct, not to be fetishy about the past, but to make something in that template with the wooden rollercoaster, and bumper cars, and a fun house in that classic way. That would bring me a lot of pleasure,” he says. “I like things that evoke a sense of delight. That’s something I come back to.”

Never Permanent, part of Now or Never festival is at the Royal Exhibition Building, August 24. Asteroid City is now showing.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.