Coppola: “Apocalypse” couldn’t be made today

With some reviewers suggesting that Francis Ford Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now Redux may be the best movie of the summer — despite the fact that it is a reedited version of his 1979 film — Coppola is suggesting that in today’s Hollywood it would be unlikely that he or anyone else could make such a film. In an interview with New York Daily News columnist Mitchell Fink, Coppola blamed the “middle management in the Hollywood system.” He told Fink: “They make so much money. A studio head gets $30 million at the end of the year. That kind of money makes them afraid to take chances, because they are driven by corporate bosses who want only to get the stock prices up, and keep them up. It’s more difficult to take chances today, but I’m sure ready to do it.” In a separate interview with Daily Variety, Coppola said that he is prepared to finance his next film, Megalopolis, himself. It is budgeted at about $65 million, but Coppola remarked, “It will look like $120 million.”