After the release of Youth without Youth Francis Coppola could relish the accomplishment of producing and directing an independent film on his own dime and for his own satisfaction. He felt impelled to do it again and add the component of an original screenplay, his first since The Conversation. This would become Tetro. As Coppola stated, “I always hoped, even when I was younger, to do films that were original screenplays and more personal. My career changed a lot when I made The Godfather because it was so successful. Now, at this age, I'm doing what I wanted to do when I was 22.”1 He began writing Tetro while Youth was being edited.
Coppola talked about creating personal films that grew out of his dreams. There are other directors who have used their dreams or unconscious as the genesis of a film idea. The film Three Women, directed by Robert Altman, was based on one of his dreams. Eyes Wide Shut, the final film directed by Stanley Kubrick, was based on an Arthur Schnitzler novel, Dream Novella, with the entire film predicated on not knowing what is real and what is not real. Kubrick felt that the film audience was perpetually in a dream state. The films of Ingmar Bergman are often interpreted as dreams, especially Persona. Tetro certainly has many elements that appear personal and autobiographical, but as in dreams and nightmares the familiarity that seems autobiographical is not likely. If you are looking for accuracy and verisimilitude you are not going to be satisfied. There are multiple references that resemble aspects of Coppola's life and genealogy, but they are mixed up and jumbled just as they would be in a fantasy or dream.
To plot Tetro as if it were a linear, realistic story is to misidentify its genre. This is a story of seeming reality in parts and of psychological and referential improbability in equal mixture. The fundamental story of Tetro is the love between two brothers. The younger brother, Bennie, idolizes his older brother, Angelo, known as Tetro, short for Tetrocini, the family surname. Tetro rejected his family when Bennie was a little boy and left him a letter saying he would come back for him, but he did not. Tetro is living in Argentina in a bohemian section known as La Boca. Bennie, at 17, is desperate to seek out his brother. He gets employment on a cruise ship that will dock in Argentina and appears at Tetro's home unannounced. There he meets Miranda, Tetro's live-in girlfriend, a warm, beautiful, and generous woman who is thrilled to welcome Bennie. When Tetro discovers Bennie in his Buenos Aries home, there is an immediate sense of tension. On the one hand he loves his brother; on the other he has chosen to abandon his family, and Bennie's presence sharpens all the agony he has left behind. The subtext for that complete rejection is not yet known. Miranda acts as a liaison between the two, encouraging Tetro to embrace his brother. She tries to explain to Bennie his brother's volatile personality. The brothers begin to explore each other and the environment where Tetro lives. Bennie is introduced to Tetro's artistic life and the companionship he has with performing troupes. Tetro has told Bennie he can stay until his ship sails in a week, but the audience intuits Bennie will not sail. It will take much longer to unravel the mysteries of Tetro's past, which is the key to understanding his family. Once having found Tetro, he will not leave.
What unfolds is the cruelty of their father Carlo, a renowned composer and conductor, who will not accept any success but his own. He tells Tetro there can be only one genius in the family, and that is Carlo. He stifles his own brother, who is also a composer. The father's intense rivalry and malice have forced Tetro to abandon his family and seek an alternate life where he can try to function. The storyline has many twists and turns. Tetro has written a play that will be performed in competition. Tetro will win the competition that takes place in the Patagonian Mountains but will reject the award to remain outside the superficial, strings-attached system. There is a hidden book of Tetro's written in mirror language and a suggestion of madness in that artistic act. Unbeknownst to Tetro, Bennie is determined to unravel the book's content and allow Tetro's genius to emerge. In flashback, we observe an even more sinister underbelly between Tetro and his father. We learn that Tetro has witnessed his mother's death in a car accident and that his father has seduced his girlfriend. There are dreamlike sequences that may or may not reveal truths.
Tetro is photographed in a contrast, widescreen black and white with flashback and dream sequences photographed in color to distinguish them. Coppola wanted black-and-white referencing the European directing masters of the 1960s—in particular, Luchino Visconti's film Rocco and His Brothers. Coppola has also referred to On the Waterfront, directed by Elia Kazan. This film was shot in black and white with a theme about love and conflict between two brothers, starring Marlon Brando in an iconic role.
Whether or not Tetro's conclusion is reality or just a dream is not especially relevant. What rises to the surface are the issues that matter for the brothers. Their love for each other becomes unconditional, and Tetro surfaces as an unencumbered artist who only needs to answer to himself.
Tetro has many visual pleasures and metaphoric images. Coppola is known for the long list of newcomers who owe their breakout opportunity to his artistic instincts. In Tetro Coppola chose as cinematographer Romanian-born Mihai Malaimare Jr., whom Coppola discovered in his home country while preparing for Youth without Youth. Born in 1975, Malaimare was one of many cinematographers to shoot casting tests for Coppola. When he needed to hire a director of photography, he chose Malaimare because his skill and talent were apparent to Coppola. He said about hiring him for Youth,“The movie was about becoming young again. I liked the fact that Mihai was so young, had a gentle personality, and was tremendously talented.”2 This was the first time Coppola was responsible for discovering a cinematographer. Coppola considers Malaimare a perfect collaborator who can shoot in a minimalist style. For Coppola to realize Tetro he needed to return to the kind of philosophy he used on The Rain People. It gave Coppola great pleasure to make a film as he did in his 20s before he was enveloped in the Hollywood studio system as director of The Godfather. He considers this his second career, the one he expected to have as a young man.
In casting the two brothers Coppola found another newcomer for the role of Bennie. This was Alden Ehrenreich, whom Coppola first saw when he was still attending Crossroads High School in Los Angeles, a school for students in the arts. Coppola asked Ehrenreich to read for him at his Napa office. This became a series of auditions and screen tests over several months. At their first meeting Francis asked Ehrenreich to read passages from J.’D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Ehrenreich's performance in Tetro is poignant and compelling. Still at the beginning of his career, he is attending the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and has been cast in several roles since Tetro.
For the title role Coppola had originally thought of Matt Dillon, but ultimately the part went to Vincent Gallo, an enigmatic, thoroughly independent filmmaker responsible for the well-respected indie film Buffalo 66 and the controversial Brown Bunny. Gallo is an excellent counterpoint to Ehrenreich's innocence. In the role of Miranda, Spanish actress Maribel Verdú adds great passion. She notes that, “From the start he [Coppola] was clear in telling me that I had to provide the heart, to bring a bit of light between these two brothers and their tormented relationship.”3 The world-renowned Austrian actor Klaus Maria Brandauer (Mephisto, Out of Africa, Hanussen) does double duty as the malignant father Carlos and also plays his brother. Spanish actress Carmen Maura, who has had a continuing collaboration with director Pedro Almovador, offers a welcome cameo as an Oprah-like mistress of ceremonies at the Patagonia art festival.
There are references of all kinds in Tetro. The most obvious relate to Coppola's family tree. There are some professional similarities, but the resemblance stops there. We can assume that Bennie is an unformed Coppola, at least in terms of his adoration of his older brother and the gentleness of his demeanor, which Coppola's mother Italia described. Coppola was in awe of his older brother August. His father Carmine was a composer and conductor. His uncle Anton conducted opera (including conducting Cavalleria Rusticana in The Godfather Part III) and is still conducting music at an advanced age. As often is the case with artists, they absorb their own backstory and use the skeleton as invention and fantasy for creative ideas.
The other main reference in Tetro is to The Tales of Hoffmann. The Tales of Hoffmann was an opera by Jacques Offenbach. In 1951 it was adapted into a highly successful film by the British directorial team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. This film is cherished in Coppola's memory. He saw it as a young boy with his brother August on one of their many excursions to the movies. In addition, Powell is a director revered by many film directors, and Coppola asked him to be in residence at Zoetrope Studios when he was developing and directing One from the Heart.
Some critics and Coppola himself have made reference to Coppola's other black-and-white film, Rumble Fish, also filled with visual symbols (clocks) and about the devotion of brothers. Perhaps this is why Dillon was first considered for the part of Tetro; he would be like Motorcycle Boy. Coppola observes in an interview with The Independent in 2010, “Well, maybe Tetro is kind of the sibling to Rumble Fish. I made Rumble Fish because it reminded me of my own brother. In fact, the film is dedicated to him.”4
Throughout the film there is a visual metaphor of circular lights and flickering light and fluttering of moths’ wings. We see this in flashback when Tetro is in the car accident that kills his mother. At first the flickers and flares affect only Tetro (who runs the lights at the theater as Coppola did in his theater days) and then Bennie also experiences the flickers and flares. Ultimately, after their father's funeral, Bennie runs into traffic and the headlights surrounding him and his brother saves him. The film ends with discs of light serenely moving across the screen (this final image was second unit, shot by Roman Coppola.)
Coppola asked his trusted colleague Walter Murch to edit the film. Murch had the particular challenge of transitioning from black-and-white sequences to color. The color images are reduced to two-thirds the size of the black and white to maintain the full clarity of the black-and-white images.
Tetro was reasonably well received critically when it opened in the spring of 2009, but it was perceived as an art film and did not attract a wide audience. Nevertheless Coppola had met his objective. He made the film by his own standard to be appreciated by any audience that found it.
At age 70, Coppola is quoted in the New York Times as saying, “I don't have a lot of time left, but I'm so in love with the cinema that I want to learn all I can about making movies. I just want to write another screenplay and make another movie.”5
As fate would have it, on October 27, 2009, just a few short months after the release of Tetro, August Floyd Coppola, beloved older brother of Francis Ford Coppola, died of a heart attack at age 75 at his home near Los Angeles.
Francis has stated many times that August was his role model in all things, and, indeed, August's life was remarkable. He had extensive academic credentials, attending UCLA where he received a bachelor's degree in philosophy; he went back east to Hofstra for a graduate degree in English and then earned a doctorate in comparative literature at Occidental College. For many years he taught comparative literature at California State–Long Beach and then relocated to San Francisco where he served as dean of creative arts at San Francisco State University. August Coppola was an out-of-the-box thinker responsible for many educational innovations. He also wrote a novel, The Intimacy (1978), and had a second novel in progress, The Nymbus. He worked with his brother Francis at American Zoetrope on special projects, among them Abel Gance's Napoleon. August Coppola founded the San Francisco Film and Video Arts Commission and chaired Education First! which sought support from Hollywood studios for education. He developed a weekend college program for working adults to pursue advanced education. In 1981 Governor Jerry Brown appointed August Coppola to the Board of Trustees of California State University. Of his passing, Brown said, “Augy was a brilliant man. He was a man of letters and ideas. I learned from him.”6
Of his father, Nicolas Cage said, “He was one of the most remarkable characters anybody's ever going to meet. When I was a kid, the other kids were going to see Disney, and he was showing us movies like Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits.”7
Fascinated with the sense of touch, August Coppola helped create the Tactile Dome at the San Francisco Exploratorium, where attendees move through darkness using touch as their guide. Touch was also the main theme of his book The Intimacy. In the mid 1990s he moved to Savannah, Georgia, for four years so he could work on a second novel in a quiet atmosphere.
Professor Gregory Frazier invented a process where readers describe movie action so the blind can better understand it. When Professor Coppola learned of it, the two opened the AudioVision Workshop and brought the idea to the Cannes Film Festival.
At Cal State–Long Beach the Comparative World Literature and Classics Conference Room has been named in his honor.