By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: late director Eleanor Coppola, who helmed Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, Paris Can Wait, Love Is Love Is Love and more.
In the Unsung Auteurs column, we have talked often of impressive creatives who have been under-celebrated largely due to their very close and frequent proximity to another, far more high-profile creative. There are a number of fascinating, talented creatives who have toiled quietly at a rate of high quality while in the shadow of, say, Clint Eastwood (Jo Heims, James Fargo) and Stanley Kubrick (James B. Harris, Anthony Harvey), never truly praised for their work outside being mentioned as a “frequent collaborator” of a cinematic great.
Slotting easily into this category is the late Eleanor Coppola, the longtime wife of the great Francis Ford Coppola, the legendary director of classics like The Godfather, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Outsiders, Rumble Fish and many more. The pair met on the set of Coppola’s 1963 Roger Corman-produced horror flick Dementia 13, where the then Eleanor Jessie Neil was working as an art director. Eleanor fell pregnant, and the couple were married in Las Vegas later that year. Their first child, Gian-Carlo Coppola, was later joined by Roman and Sofia, with all eventually involved in the filmmaking business.
With her family’s intimate connection to the art and craft of filmmaking, Eleanor Coppola became its equally intimate documenter. Allowed the kind of access no other filmmaker would be granted, Coppola was there on most of the sets of her director husband and filmmaker children. Much of this work ended up in various behind-the-scenes productions, with Coppola’s involvement reaching its pinnacle in the 1991 making-of masterpiece Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. Co-directed with George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr, this doco uses Eleanor Coppola’s stunningly rendered behind-the-scenes footage to craft an unforgettable portrait of a filmmaker on the edge and an epic movie hanging desperately in the balance.
Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse is an essential documentary on the very nature and inherent danger of filmmaking, and Coppola captured this to far less dramatic but no less interesting effect in her making-of docos on her husband’s The Rainmaker and her daughter Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette. Currently streaming on MUBI and in some cinemas is Making Marie Antoinette, in which Sofia revisits her mother’s on-set footage to craft another compelling and on-the-money picture of what it takes to get a movie made.
While best known for her role as family documenter, Eleanor Coppola also made two engaging feature films. “The man is often very devoted to his career, whatever that may be, but there are points in the woman’s life when she has to step away and decide what she has to do in regard to her own career,” Coppola told FilmInk in 2016.
For Eleanor Coppola, that meant making her feature film writing and directorial debut at the age of eighty with 2016’s Paris Can Wait, which follows Anne Lockwood (Diane Lane) – long married to successful film producer Michael Lockwood (Alec Baldwin) – who takes a car trip from Cannes to Paris with her husband’s French business associate Jacques Clement (Arnaud Viard), discovering a great deal about herself along the way. A knowing, warm-hearted and generous look at both the film industry and the life of a woman-of-a-certain age, Paris Can Wait marked an impressive debut indeed for Eleanor Coppola, who showed a flair for warm visuals, working with actors, and allowing characters ample breathing room.
“There is a routine in married life,” Coppola told FilmInk in 2016. “It’s not good, it’s not bad. I didn’t want Anne’s husband to be a monstrous guy, so we’d think, ‘Of course, she’s going to run off with the French man.’ She loves her husband, and he loves her, but they’re caught in that routine where they are just too busy to pay attention to each other. She doesn’t know exactly what her next step in life is, and she’s kind of turning to her husband. Hopefully, he’ll step in and encourage her and help her move forward, but he’s not doing that, because he’s too distracted. So, she sets off with this Frenchman who takes her out of the expected and takes her on this journey where she finally has time to literally smell the roses she loves so much. He sees her and makes her feel that someone is paying attention to her.”
Quickly proving herself something of a late-game master at capturing the vagaries of human relationships, Coppola followed Paris Can Wait in 2020 with Love Is Love Is Love, which stars Joanne Whalley, Chris Messina, Kathy Baker, Marshall Bell, Maya Kazan, Rosanna Arquette, Cybill Shepherd and Rita Wilson. A literal “labour of love”, the film is made up of three short films all musing on the quirks and worries that are somehow part of every relationship, whether it is marriage, or family, or friendship. Cosy in atmosphere, the film has an emotional depth that arrives without expectation, like a much-adored special friend on a surprise visit.
“It took six years to make Paris Can Wait,” Coppola told FilmInk in 2020, “and it came out on my 80th birthday.” Coppola did not want to wait that long to make another. Produced on a shoestring, Love Is Love Is Love was shot with different crews over a long period. “I took what came in [money-wise] from Paris Can Wait and approached this as a project in three parts, because I was not willing to wait six years to find the funding to make the next film I wanted to make. One of the major costs on Paris Can Wait was travelling in France with a crew. This time I literally made a film in my own backyard.”
Eleanor Coppola sadly passed away in 2024 at the age of 87 from complications due to thymoma. Though her body of work is relatively small, Eleanor Coppola’s importance to the world of American cinema is undeniable. And late in life, she also displayed an admirably auteurist bent, crafting two films that beautifully explore the complexity, humour and messiness of human relationships.
For more on Making Marie Antoinette, click here.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Peter Medak, Kieth Merrill, Tim Hill, Martin Bell, Joan Freeman, Rod Amateau, Sam Wanamaker, Paul Aaron, Savage Steve Holland, Rudy Wurlitzer, Keith Gordon, Alan Metter, Lynne Littman, Chuck Russell, John Derek, Don Chaffey, Harley Cokeliss, Jeannot Szwarc, Craig Gillespie, David Greene, Ernest Pintoff, Paul Williams, Jo Heims, Lee H. Katzin, Christoper Cain, Ken Wiederhorn, Barbara Loden, David Mackenzie, Alan Rudolph, James Lee Barrett, Edwin “Bud” Shrake, Joan Tewkesbury, Jamaa Fanaka, Jack Starrett, Joseph Sargent, Jeffrey Schwarz, George Sidney, Philip Dunne, Zak Hilditch, Luke Sparke, Cyrus Nowrasteh, Morgan Matthews, Tom Laughlin, Diane Keaton, Ed Hunt, Nancy Savoca, Robert Vincent O’Neil, Marvin J. Chomsky, Sam Firstenberg, Jack Sholder, Richard Gray, Giuseppe Andrews, Gus Trikonis, Greydon Clark, Frances Doel, Gordon Douglas, Billy Fine, Craig R. Baxley, Harvey Bernhard, Bert I. Gordon, James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
