Documentary filmmaker Eleanor Coppola dies at 87 : NPR

Director Eleanor Coppola attends a particular screening of Paris Can Wait in New York in 2014.

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Director Eleanor Coppola attends a particular screening of Paris Can Wait in New York in 2014.

Brent N. Clarke/Invision/AP

Eleanor Coppola died on Friday at her dwelling in Northern California’s Napa Valley, based on an announcement from her household shared with NPR through her press agent. She was 87 years previous. The reason for her dying has not but been shared publicly.

The documentarian was finest recognized for chronicling the moviemaking technique of members of the family Francis Ford Coppola, to whom she was married for greater than 60 years and her daughter Sofia Coppola.

Eleanor Coppola was the mom of three children when Francis Ford Coppola requested her to return to the Philippines to report the making of his 1979 magnum opus on the Vietnam Warfare, Apocalypse Now, starring Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen.

“They acquired very informal about their weapons,” mentioned Eleanor Coppola in a 1992 interview with WHYY’s Contemporary Air of the bodyguards the Philippine authorities employed to guard the Coppola household throughout their time there, fearing insurgents would try and kidnap the well-known Hollywood director. “Our predominant bodyguard would stick his pistol in his belt of his blue denims and he’d get it out and present the children the way it labored.”

The filmmaking course of, which Eleanor Coppola captured on digicam in candid element, was famously fraught. Heavy rains delayed taking pictures and a hurricane destroyed units. Sheen had a coronary heart assault. Brando was obese and could not play the position as Francis Ford Coppola had initially conceived it; all the half needed to be rewritten. The manufacturing ran over schedule and vastly exceeded its finances, threatening to bankrupt its director.

“Everybody says, sure, nicely, Francis works finest in a disaster,” Francis Ford Coppola informed his spouse throughout one among their many heart-to-hearts captured by her on digicam at the moment. “I am saying that is one disaster I am not gonna pull myself out of. I am making a foul film, so why ought to I am going forward?”

Launched three years later, Apocalypse Now was declared a masterpiece — as was, in its personal quieter approach, Eleanor Coppola’s 1991 documentary in regards to the tortured making of that movie, Hearts of Darkness.

“It strips Coppola naked of all defenses and but reveals him as an incredible and courageous filmmaker,” wrote movie critic Roger Ebert of the documentary in 1992. “It additionally reveals the ordeal he put his actors and crew by, on location within the Philippines – and what he endured at their arms.”

Eleanor Coppola grew up in Southern California and attended the College of California, Los Angeles, the place she majored in utilized design. She began out as a visible artist. In 1962, she met her future husband whereas working within the artwork division on Francis Ford Coppola’s low-budget function movie debut, Dementia 13. They have been married the next yr.

Apocalypse Now almost broke the Coppolas’ marriage. Within the Contemporary Air interview, Eleanor Coppola spoke about sending her husband a telex — which she additionally shared with different manufacturing employees — telling him he was turning into like Kurtz (the madly intense character on the coronary heart of the movie) and creating his personal Vietnam, by his extreme habits. The couple went by many ups and downs over time, together with extra-marital affairs, totally on Francis Ford Coppola’s facet.

However they stayed collectively. “The fixed in a always upheaving carnival of movie artwork and movie loopy was Eleanor,” mentioned Kim Aubry, the previous vice chairman for know-how and put up manufacturing at Francis Ford Coppola’s manufacturing firm, American Zoetrope. “She all the time offered a shelter within the storm for all of us.”

Eleanor Coppola went on to make documentaries about The Rainmaker, directed by her partner, and her daughter Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette. Late in life, she additionally wrote and directed her personal function movies — Paris Can Wait and Love is Love is Love.

Sofia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola and Eleanor Coppola are pictured in 2013.

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Sofia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola and Eleanor Coppola are pictured in 2013.

Todd Williamson/Invision/AP

Eleanor Coppola was additionally an completed visible artist. Her drawings, pictures and conceptual artwork items have been exhibited in galleries and museums world wide. She designed costumes for up to date dance productions and created experimental artwork installations.

“Eleanor was a rare and gifted one who inspired everybody with whom she got here in touch,” mentioned filmmaker and visible artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, an in depth pal and creative collaborator of Coppola, in an electronic mail to NPR. “Her generosity and spirit profoundly resonated and enhanced these lucky sufficient to know her. The present of her artwork, in lots of disciplines, stay as her nice legacy.”

She was additionally intently concerned with the household’s intensive wine enterprise in Northern California. Wine-making ran in Francis Ford Coppola’s household. Within the mid-Seventies, following his success with the Godfather motion pictures, the movie director bought a Napa Valley property and began making wine.

Eleanor Coppola was a author as nicely. She was 87 when she accomplished her third memoir. Based on her household’s assertion, within the manuscript, the writer wrote: “I recognize how my surprising life has stretched and pulled me in so many extraordinary methods and brought me in a large number of instructions past my wildest imaginings.”