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06/12/2009 07:20 PM

Coppola Starts Anew As A Filmmaker

By: George Whipple

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Five-time Academy Award-winning director Francis Ford Coppola recently premiered his new film "Tetro" at The Director's Guild of America in Midtown.

"I like to think of this as my second career. This is the second picture of my second career," says Coppola. "Usually by doing this under different auspices, I might learn how to make movies a little bit more each time. This is part of my career. I want to write the stories and write the screenplays about things I care about personally and can learn about personally."

He is the father of Academy award-winner Sofia Coppola and was the executive producer for her films "Lost in Translation" and "Marie Antoinette."

But now the elder Coppola is starting over as a movie director.

"I don't do it to have a career. I don't have a career. I don't do it to make money because I spend money to make them," says Coppola. "So, it's really something of a personal desire to learn about moviemaking and about the ideas that the films may be about."

"Tetro" is the second of the "new" Coppola films. In the first, "Youth Without Youth," the protagonist aged backwards, not unlike "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

Coppola wrote the script for "Tetro," a bittersweet story of two brothers, a family lost and a family found and the conflicts and the secrets with a highly creative Argentine-Italian family.

Vincent Gallo stars and Ximena Maria Locono is on the screen to shake things up.

"I play Naomi White, who is a dancer and past girlfriend of Tetro who kind of causes a bit of havoc in the film," says Locono.

Coppola may say that he is starting over as a director but everything he touches turns to gold. He is a winemaker, a restaurateur and has certainly made some of the greatest films of our time. If he is starting over as a director, good luck to you, Francis!