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Standing across the street from the Castro Theater, a long line of people were standing in the rain, waiting to see a screening of a new print of The Rain People, the film Francis Ford Coppola made right before The Godfather. I wanted to make a pun, but it would have been to myself. So I suppressed the urge, knowing none would appreciate it more than I, anyway.

Despite nature’s welcome, the movie was not that evening’s main event. The famous arthouse theater located in the heart of San Francisco’s Castro district was packed to the brim with people last night for another reason. The San Francisco Film Society was to honor Coppola for his contribution to world cinema through the works he’s done over the past four decades. The Founder’s Directing Award—previously known as the Akira Kurosawa Award until 2003—is given each year during the San Francisco International Film Festival to congratulate a master director on behalf of the festival’s late founder Irving M. Levin.

Coppola’s long and celebrated career doesn’t exactly resemble the typical trajectory of American filmmakers. At a young age, he found himself arriving at a powerful position he never intended to be in, when The Godfather became what it is. Coppola mused that he often wondered what his career would be like had he followed his original desire to do small, intimate and personal films—ones not unlike the film being screened that night, his women’s lib road trip drama The Rain People—instead of getting “sidetracked” by The Godfather. Having just turned seventy last month, Coppola plans to explore that curiosity in his remaining years. We saw this in 2007’s Youth without Youth, an ambiguously artsy film without the commercial release or the type of fanfare one would expect from a great American director making a return after a ten year absence. His latest film, Tetro, looks easier to swallow, though just as esoteric: intimate family drama, set in Argentina, in black-and-white… It was only appropriate that the night kicked off with a trailer for it (which has since debuted online), acting as a marker for both his past and his future as a filmmaker.

Also shown was a 10-minute behind-the-scenes footage of Francis Ford Coppola directing his crew throughout the years, from the confident young man on the set of Finian’s Rainbow to the father figure on the set of Tetro. Ending the reel was Tetro’s star Vincent Gallo gushing about how much The Rain People influenced his own work, bringing the night full circle.

Tetro is only the third original screenplay Coppola has ever written and the first since 1974’s The Conversation. Stripped down and produced independently much like his last, it is a personal story for Coppola, who calls it his return to his eighteen-year-old self’s original passion. It tells the  story of the schism within an artistic family born out of creative differences. Though a work of fiction, Coppola admits to inserting plenty of personal moments into the script. “I set it in Argentina so people wouldn’t know,” he joked when asked about the film’s setting. It’s difficult to hear the line “he’s a genius without many accomplishments” in that trailer and not wonder if that’s how Coppola saw himself, a view his fans would surely contest.

Appearing onstage accompanied only by host David D’Arcy at first, Coppola was quick to note that “what gets you fired when you were young gets you honored when you’re older.” He related a story of how he wrote the script for Patton very early in his career and was fired for its opening scene, which the studio hated. Several years and dozens of other drafts by other writers later, when the movie finally went into production, they dusted off Coppola’s draft and shot it. Now we remember that opening monologue as one of the most iconic scenes in American cinema.

Coppola then brought out his best friends for decades, the people who took a big risk 40 years ago by starting American Zeotrope with him. They are Walter Murch, Carrol Ballard, Matthew Robbins and, of course, George Lucas. Not content with just six people onstage, Coppola insisted that all their longtime wives join them, as well, and they did (with the exception of Lucas).

Oddly enough, the night moved slightly away from an honoring of Coppola’s career and became an extended love letter to the city of San Francisco. D'Arcy opened the discussion by asking about 827 Folsom St., the address of a warehouse found by Coppola and Lucas some forty years ago. It became their home from The Rain People to The Godfather Part II, after which they moved to the North Beach building where Zoetrope still stands today above an Italian cafe of the same name.

Coppola reminisced that back then they’ve always dreamed of building a studio with a countryside setting, overlooking the redwoods. Then he turned to Lucas and said, “You did it. You have that now.”

Over the course of the night, Coppola and friends spoke candidly. “They love telling stories most of all,” said one of the wives. “Whether it’s at the dinner table or up on the screen.” And tell stories they did, from how Coppola conned money out of Warner Bros and divided it equally among the five of them for each to make their projects, to how they convinced the seemingly impossible task of casting Marlon Brando as Don Corleone (shoe polish, a table full of food and a trip to Paramount’s parent company were involved).

A great deal was made about their deep affinity for the Bay Area, and how different American Zeotrope would be if they had stayed in Los Angeles. All five men related their disdain for the bureaucracy involved in making films the union way, where a film shoot is treated as an industrial workplace rather than a creative gathering of artists—a big reason why five young hotshots decided to move north and start their own way of doing things. “We wanted to be filmmakers,” Coppola asserted.

George Lucas was the first. He then quickly roped his former film school classmates into joining him. “[The creative atmosphere in] San Francisco was like being back in film school,” recalled Walter Murch.

The enthusiasm met when these anti-Hollywood sentiments were made perhaps says more about the Northern California-Southern California rivalry than the Zeotrope guys’ careers, but it’s just as easy to see how inspiring their stories are to the spirit of independent filmmaking. Coppola himself had to note a couple of times that he likes LA (his kids live there), though he never doubted that setting up shop in San Francisco was the right decision. This despite the mounting pressure of having to make a living and not knowing where to start. For this, Coppola thanked George Lucas for pushing him to accept the Godfather job when he was still reluctant to do such a big film, but Lucas insisted that Coppola was always their leader.

There was a moment when their deep friendship truly showed through, as only friends could be so eager to jab at one another without exhibiting any malice. While discussing the belief that a director should also be able to write, Lucas admitted to having always been the “visual guy,” believing in the power of images as the primary driving force of film.

“I always thought that if it was beautiful enough, you didn’t need all that other stuff,” said Lucas.
“Script?” Coppola quickly jumped in, raising his eyebrows playfully at his friend. The audience broke into laughter as Lucas chuckled along.

Earlier in the night, D’Arcy asked Coppola—as the man who made Tucker, the biopic of maverick car designer Preston Tucker—what he thinks of the current fiasco befalling the auto industry. Coppola was optimistic, believing that the economic hardship would force creative minds like Tucker to come up with something new, exciting and efficient. He suggested that the same will happen to the film industry.

“Tough times bring people together personally,” Coppola said. He believed that it would translate to more personal movies, as well, and that the future of cinema rests in the indie guys offering their unique visions.

“Because every one of you sitting there,” he said, pointing a finger towards the audience like a Godfather addressing his successor. “There’s no one else like you.”