Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast: Even Coppola was shocked to discover “The Cotton Club” was one of his better films.
In the early 1980s, Francis Ford Coppola was one of the biggest names in filmmaking. After box office and awards success with two “Godfather” films, he had also gone to hell and back making “Apocalypse Now,” betting his vineyard and personal fortune on the biggest arthouse war movie ever made, and somehow ended up winning big. He would never make another film, “Cotton Club” included, without having final cut.
And yet the story of making the original “Cotton Club” was one of the director under tremendous pressure and losing sight of his movie by making edits that compromised his original vision.
“It was a long production of a lot of warfare going on on the set, you’ve gone through a cut, a director is pretty exhausted by the time the movie is coming out,” said Coppola when he was guest on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “And very well…
