Eleanor Coppola, the matriarch of a Hollywood dynasty who won an Emmy for directing the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse and helmed her first narrative feature at age 80, died Friday. She was 87.
Coppola died at her home in Rutherford, California, her family said in a statement to the Associated Press.
Survivors include her husband of 61 years, five-time Oscar-winning filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, 85; their daughter, Sofia Coppola, the director, producer and Oscar-winning screenwriter; and their son, Roman Coppola, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter.
Her oldest child, actor Gian-Carlo Coppola, died in 1986 at age 22 in a speedboat accident.
Eleanor Coppola often went on location with Francis, and during the making of his Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now (1979), she was in the Philippines to shoot footage with a 16mm camera and conduct interviews, material that supposedly was to be used by the United Artists publicity department.
It would all be seen in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.
The shoot took more than a year to complete and was vexed with problems, among them: a typhoon destroyed sets; Harvey Keitel was fired, and his replacement, Martin Sheen, suffered a heart attack; a grossly overweight Marlon Brando threatened to quit; and the Marcos government reclaimed the helicopters it had lent the production. All the while, the original $13 million budget tripled, forcing Francis to mortgage the family home and putting him on the brink of bankruptcy.
“My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like,” Francis said at a news conference that is seen in the documentary. “There were too many of us. We had access to too much money. Too much equipment. And little by little we went insane.”
A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse debuted on Showtime in 1991, and Eleanor shared the Emmy for informational programming directing with George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr. The Washington Post at the time called it “the most revealing film about the making of a movie ever produced.”
“Even then when it came out, [Francis] was not happy because he felt like it made him look too out of control,” Eleanor said in a 2016 interview with THR‘s Tatiana Siegel. “But my reaction is it really shows the creative process and the depth of anguish that it can be. I think now he’s gotten over it.”
She also kept a journal during production, and that became the 1979 book Notes: On the Making of Apocalypse Now, paving the way for the documentary.
With Paris Can Wait (2016), from Sony Pictures Classics, Eleanor became the second-oldest person to direct a first narrative feature. She also wrote the romantic drama, which centered on a woman (Diane Lane) who is married to a Hollywood producer (Alec Baldwin) and turns a seven-hour drive with a Frenchman (Arnaud Viard) into a three-day road trip. (A similar incident happened to Eleanor in 2009).
“I’m this housewife who suddenly decided she’s going to write a film and actually direct it,” she told Siegel. “It was terrifying, but part of the challenge was cutting through all of your fears and just going for it.”
More recently, she co-wrote and directed Love Is Love Is Love (2020), featuring Rosanna Arquette, Chris Messina and Cybill Shepherd.
Eleanor Jessie Neil was born on May 4, 1936, in Los Angeles. Her mother raised her and two younger brothers in Huntington Beach after her father, a political cartoonist for the Los Angeles Examiner, died when she was 10.
(One of her younger brothers, Bill Neil, went on to work as a Hollywood visual effects artist who received an Oscar nom for his work on 1986’s Poltergeist II: The Other Side.)
Eleanor graduated from UCLA with a degree in applied design and did fabric-and-collage murals for architectural installations as a freelancer. In 1962, she met Francis in Ireland while working as an assistant art director on his low-budget horror film Dementia 13, and they wed in Las Vegas in February 1963.
“I never expected Francis to be a celebrity when we got married. He was making this black-and-white film, very low budget. I thought we were going to live in the [San Fernando] Valley,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2008. “I was just as startled and unprepared for how our lives evolved.”
In her 2008 memoir, Notes on a Life, she described in a 1992 entry how frustrated life could be for her: “I had an ongoing internal war, a conflict between wanting to be a good wife and mother and also to draw, paint, design, write and shoot videos. I focus on the family and imagine there will be time for my interests, but there rarely is.”
Still, she shot and helmed a 2007 documentary short about how Francis motivated his actors on The Rainmaker (1997) and chronicled his return to directing on Youth Without Youth (2007) after a decade away in Coda: Thirty Years Later, also released in ’07.
She also directed documentary shorts about the making of Sofia’s Virgin Suicides in 1998 and Marie Antoinette in 2007.
Also among her survivors who work in show business: granddaughter Gia Coppola (an actress, director, screenwriter and Gian-Carlo’s daughter); actress and sister-in-law Talia Shire (the Rocky and Godfather films); and actors and nephews Nicolas Cage and Jason Schwartzman.
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