She was just a kid who had a crush on her cousin, which was all it was. Paramount was pushing very hard to put in a name actress, but they were all 32 or 33 years old, and it was very important to me that it be a teenager you should see the baby fat on the girl. When we were ready to shoot the daughter’s scenes, we had been stalling because of Winona Ryder not showing up, and then Winona Ryder showed up and we were able to keep shooting, but she then dropped out. When I suggested that to Paramount, just as they had pushed back on Part II, they said, “No, it has to be called The Godfather Part III.” And I realized that was also probably because that meant there could be a four and five and … But I didn’t have the clout that I had had years earlier when Godfather was such a success. So, I became intrigued with what Mario said - that we should call it The Death of Michael Corleone. Frankly, I had a family to support, and I was trying to protect this Napa property, which was in danger. For Part III, at that point, I had been through a bankruptcy. That’s what happened with the script for Part II.
And I realized that I could apply it to the Godfather story. But I always had an idea in my head to write a story about a father and a son at the same age - with the story of the father, when the son is a little baby running around the house, and then the story of the son at that age (say, age 30) with the father as a doddering old guy. I wasn’t that nuts about making when they first entertained the idea. You weren’t too keen on making the second film, either, back in the day. They said, “Oh, if you call it The Godfather Part II, people will think it’s the second half of the film they already saw.” They always had a title like that - or Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Sequels in America were always called The Return of Frankenstein or The Son of Monte Cristo or The Invisible Man’s Revenge. Interestingly, when I decided to call the second film The Godfather Part II, it was considered very far out by the studio, and they pushed back on that very hard. And as we talked about a third film, he came up with the idea that we should call the film The Death of Michael Corleone. But I had a very happy collaboration with Mario Puzo. What prompted you to go back to it?Ī third Godfather was not something that I had thought necessary. So, let’s talk about …well, I still can’t help but call it Godfather Part III, even though the title is now Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. Basically it’s the pecans and the chestnuts that make it so good. has bread crumbs, a lot of spices, chestnuts, pecans, mushrooms, some garlic. The recipes are enormously different, so it depends who made the stuffing when they were young and what goes in it. Everyone has their favorite that they make. I chopped and carved the turkey and made one of the dishes. It was very safe, because the theme is, Let’s do it in a very safe way, so that we can have a real Thanksgiving in 2021. It was sort of like an outdoor restaurant. We arranged the family, the participants, at their own tables.
In our broad-ranging conversation, Coppola discussed the new cut, the continuing relevance of the Godfather saga, his own family’s legacy, and the many dramatic arcs of his career - which has been marked by absolute triumph and unfathomable loss.
Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (see, even the title has changed considerably) is shorter, leaner, and certainly clearer, with a new ending that ironically lets Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone live and continue suffering indefinitely for his sins. And now comes one of the most extensive and personal recuts of them all: a new edition of 1990’s The Godfather Part III, which critics have long considered the Fredo of the Godfather saga. Last year saw reedited iterations of 1979’s Apocalypse Now (which had previously been revised several times, despite its status as a modern classic) and 1984’s The Cotton Club (whose longer cut was, frankly, a revelation).
(He’ll reprise this theme at the end of our conversation.) Coppola, 81, might be grayer now, and he hasn’t technically made a new film in nearly a decade, but he has been releasing a steady stream of material. “This guy looks like I did 30 years ago,” he says when my bearded face appears for the first of our Zoom calls. Francis Ford Coppola is trolling me about our resemblance.
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