Francis Ford Coppola

WHY SHOULD WE CARE?
Because it was Coppola who, in the late 1960s, opened the doors for the flood of film-school-educated director-auteurs that hit Hollywood in the 1970s - Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg et al. Because his aspirations of owning his own studio shine with an old-fashioned zeal for artist-led independence. Because of "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse" and "I love the smell of napalm in the morning".

WHAT SORT OF FILMS IS HE FAMOUS FOR?
Big, modern American classics: the ultimate gangster movie (The Godfather) and the ultimate Vietnam movie (Apocalypse Now). But he isn't given the credit he deserves for the diversity of his career: the musical (Finian's Rainbow), the paranoid conspiracy thriller (The Conversation), the teen angst drama (Rumblefish, The Outsiders), the big budget horror movie (Bram Stoker's Dracula), the mainstream John Grisham potboiler (The Rainmaker), the hippie era snapshot (The Rain People), the jazz era spectacle (The Cotton Club).

WHEN WAS HE WORKING?
During the 1960s, Coppola learnt his trade at the low budget, quick turnaround end of the market under the eye of Roger Corman, making his proper directorial debut with horror flick Dementia 13 in 1963. He broke into Hollywood with Fred Astaire musical Finian's Rainbow (1968) and secured his credentials with an Oscar win for the screenplay of Patton in 1970. When The Godfather became a phenomenon two years later, he pretty much had it his own way for the next decade, until the double whammy of the production nightmare that was Apocalypse Now and the crippling financial loss that was One From The Heart brought his excesses to an abrupt end. On the directing front, the 80s and 90s were a shaky period, with many writing him off for having blown his chances because of his uncontrollable ego and disregard for budgets and deadlines. However, a flurry of executive producer credits in recent years (ranging from Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow to Hal Hartley's No Such Thing and, importantly, his own next generation in the shape of Sofia's The Virgin Suicides and Roman's CQ) built on similar in-the-background credits from the past (producer on American Graffiti, executive producer of The Black Stallion, Kagemusha, Koyaanisqatsi and Wim Wenders' Hammett). The future could see him continue to shape the career of others - coach rather than player - while nursing his vines in the Napa Valley and waiting for the next like-minded visionary to drop a bag of money in his lap for another grandiloquent project of his own.