Profile: Francis Ford Coppola (Part 3)
Our friend Trevor Hogg is back at FlickeringMyth with the third installment in a 5-part profile of Francis Ford Coppola. An excerpt:
“I threw The Outsiders [1983] into production immediately after the failure in the United States of One from the Heart,” remarked Francis Ford Coppola who cinematically adapted the novel by S.E. Hinton. “Rather than go through six months of being whipped for having committed this sin of making a film that I wanted to make, I escaped with a lot of young people to Tulsa.” When Johnny Cade (Ralph Macchio) kills an attacker, he ignites a war between two rival gangs. “For me the primary thing about her books is that the characters come across as very real. Her dialogue is memorable, and her prose is striking. Often a paragraph of her descriptive prose sums up something essential and stays with you.” To foster tension between the actors portraying the rival groups, the director boarded the “socs” in luxury accommodations and the “greasers” on the ground floor of a hotel. “All of the greasers were orphans, all outsiders, but together they formed a family,” stated Coppola. “The Outsiders was the type of film that I personally liked, a melodrama with a romantic tone.”
“I tried to make The Outsiders as I imagined fifteen year olds and sixteen year olds would like it to be,” stated the moviemaker who made symbolic use of sunsets throughout the story. “When you watch the sun set, you realize that it is already dying. The same thing applies to youth. When youth reaches the highest level of perfection, you can already sense the forces that will destroy it.” Starring in the drama are Matt Dillon (There’s Something About Mary), C. Thomas Howell (Red Dawn), Patrick Swayze (Ghost), Rob Lowe (Contact), Emilio Estevez (The Breakfast Club), Diane Lane (Secretariat) and Tom Cruise (Top Gun). “With The Godfather and The Outsiders all the people we went with became stars afterwards, but they were just kids interested in being actors. It’s a mixed problem when we can’t afford a real name actor so we have to find someone new and exciting.” Made on a budget of $10 million, the picture earned $26 million domestically. At the Young Artist Awards, the movie won Best Young Actor in a Motion Picture (C. Thomas Howell) and received nominations for Best Family Feature Motion Picture and Best Young Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture (Diane Lane). The Moscow International Film Festival nominated the movie for the Golden Prize. “I feel that The Outsiders suffered from a little bit of chaos of everybody turning yellow when they saw the rough cut of it, and that influenced its being cut shorter and shorter,” said Coppola, who rectified the situation in 2005 for the DVD version renamed The Outsiders: The Complete Novel, which included twenty-two minutes of extra footage and new music.