Francis Ford Coppola is the man responsible for delivering some of the most significant works of cinema ever made. Quite simply, if it weren’t for the Detroit-born filmmaker, the cinematic medium would be missing some of its greatest entries, such is his impact on the world of film.

For instance, as far as the war movie genre goes, Coppola delivered one of its finest pieces in the shape of Apocalypse Now, starring Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando and Dennis Hopper. And, of course, one cannot think of Coppola and not immediately recall his legendary crime movie The Godfather and its equally brilliant sequel.

Starring Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and James Caan, among several other notable stars, The Godfather, based on Mario Puzo’s novel of the same name, charts the story of the Corleone Italian-American crime family and is considered one of the greatest movies ever made. However, the film is an interesting one from the perspective of Coppola’s career.

During an interview with the DGA, Coppola admitted that The Godfather “sort of interrupted” his career. The filmmaker explained, “I’d always wanted to make a series of films from original screenplays, more in the spirit of the European pictures of the ’50s, but also of the great writers, like Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill.”

Coppola added: “I wanted to be someone who, when a new movie of mine came out, it would be something no one had ever seen before because it would have just been written and created”. Of course, The Godfather ended up being an “enormous success”, both from a critical and a commercial perspective, so naturally, Paramount Pictures wanted Coppola to make a sequel, even though the director himself felt the first movie was a “complete drama” and a “terrible experience”.

Eventually, The Godfather Part II arrived in 1974, but between the first two movies in the series, Coppola set about making a movie that he always felt he wanted to make, free from the “interruption” that The Godfather had become. The film was the neo-noir mystery thriller The Conversation, starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Harrison Ford and Robert Duvall.

The Conversation saw Hackman play a surveillance expert who is caught up in an ethical problem when his recording finds evidence of a potential murder. In the DGA interview, Coppola spoke of how the pressure from Paramount to make the second Godfather movie spurred him on to make The Conversation even more.

“Even with most of our best directors, we know they need to be sponsored and financed and that this pretty much means making a movie that the studio wants you to make because they think it will be a hit,” he said. “I wanted not to be that way”. Coppola went on to say that after The Conversation and The Godfather Part II, he wanted to return to his personal vision of filmmaking again, but it took many years for him to have a personal sense of creative freedom.

“I wanted to do one film after another like The Conversation, and, in a sense, you could say that Youth Without Youth is the film I made after The Conversation,” Coppola explained. 2007’s Youth Without Youth was the first film Coppola made since 1997’s The Rainmaker and showed what the director was capable of free from the shackles and “interruptions” of studio executives, as he had found on The Godfather, even if the results were nothing short of masterpiece status.