Interview: Francis Ford Coppola (2012)
therumpus.net
therumpus.net
>In a series of Instagram posts in July 2023, Coppola stated that the film had been heavily influenced by the following books:
Bullshit Jobs, Debt: The First 5000 Years, and The Dawn of Everything, all works of the anthropologist David Graeber; The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse;[7] The Chalice and the Blade by sociologist Riane Eisler; The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama; The War Lovers by Evan Thomas; and The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt.[8]
There's a neat 10 minute fragment of an interview with him on youtube [1], about the notebook he made prior to filming The Godfather. He took the paperback copy of the novel, which he'd annotated, cut the pages out and pasted them onto larger pieces of paper so he'd have more margin to annotate in, and put the whole product in a huge three-ringed binder that he relied on more than the script itself when filming.
I got to go listen to Michael Chabon give a lecture once, and he also does all his writing in the morning. 4 hours of uninterrupted writing every day is all it takes to be an author, he said. But it's critical that it's uninterrupted and that it is every day, even if it sucks and you aren't in the mood and you only get one ok page or one good paragraph out of the whole 4 hours.