Coppola's Focus Back On Family In New Film

Francis Ford Coppola is back with another film about the family dynamic, but unlike his classic "Godfather" trilogy, the legendary writer-director's drama "Tetro" is more personal than it is business.

In the personal sense, Coppola based the story -- while fictional -- on his observations of family growing up. And as it relates to business, the five-time Oscar winner financed the film himself to make the story he wanted to make. Following his independent, self-financed 2007 dramatic thriller "Youth Without Youth," "Tetro" is latest step in the 70-year-old filmmaker's creative rebirth.

"I think of it as a second career because I'm only focusing on original stories and screenplays," Coppola said in a recent @ The Movies interview. "The budgets are more modest now (than previously with studio films) -- but the less the budget is, the more interesting an idea can be."

Opening in limited release Friday, "Tetro" tells the story of two brothers and the revelations of family secrets that kept them apart for more than a decade. Alden Ehrenreich plays Bennie, a 17-year-old cruise ship attendant who uses a layover in Buenos Aries to locate his long-lost brother, Angie (Vincent Gallo), who has renamed himself Tetro.

A brilliant yet temperamental writer, Tetro holds deep resentment for his and Bennie's dominant father, Carlo (Klaus Maria Brandauer), a famed orchestra director. The clues to the anger lie in Tetro's pile of scribbled pages meant for no one's eyes but his own -- that is, until Bennie happens upon them and effectively opens up the wounds of a disturbing past.

Coppola said growing up in a large family provided a springboard for creativity in the writing of "Tetro," which marks his first original screenplay since the 1974 classic "The Conversation."

"As a kid, my happiest moments were when my family gathered together for things like Thanksgiving. It always included uncles, aunts and cousins, and as Italian-Americans, we always had wine at the dinners and an abundance of food," Coppola recalled. "But I also started noticing that all of a sudden this uncle wasn't invited, or my mother didn't want me to be nice to this aunt even though that aunt had always been nice to me and given me the best Christmas presents."

Effectively, Coppola said, he began to understand that there were many complicated changes, resentments and hurt feelings that affected the whole family.

"You never knew as a kid what was really going on, but you could see the various riffs happening," Coppola explained. "That was always sad for me because, suddenly, I wouldn't see those cousins anymore because they weren't invited to gatherings."

As it relates to "Tetro," the family strife arises from the rivalry between the promising writer Tetro and musically talented and dominant Carlo, and Carlo's insistence that there's only room for one genius in the family.

"When I set out to do the story, I was interested in not only the normal frictions in a family, but especially what happens when you have a family full of creative people with a lot of different careers," Coppola explained. "I wanted to examine that theme, so I wrote this story to express it in the best way I could."

As "Tetro" roles out into theaters, Coppola knows that its success will be measured by how audiences relate to the film on an emotional level. Thankfully, better than anybody, Coppola knows exactly where the core of that emotion is.

"When I think of emotional films I think of 'Rocco and His Brothers' or 'The Best Years of Our Lives.' Usually those types of films have some heart-breaking or heart-rending issues related to people's families," Coppola said. "We learn to love when we're little kids, from our mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters. From there our world widens and we begin to understand more what love is -- but we're taught it from our families."