Coppola. Interviews.

"I think it's good to be overly ambitious," Francis Ford Coppola tells James Mottram in the Independent. "I think it's better to be overly ambitious and fail than to be underambitious and succeed in a mundane way. I have been very fortunate. I failed upward in my life!" As for Youth Without Youth, Mottram writes, "there's no doubt that this is the strangest film of Coppola's career. A Faustian tale of Nazi scientists, dopplegängers and Sanskrit-speaking paramours, it's as intriguing as it is baffling."

Updated through 11/23.

"A remarkably challenging and absorbing film that Coppola paid for himself, Youth Without Youth is a return to the intensely personal work that characterized his early career." Introducing its interview with Coppola, Bookforum notes that it's "also a rather faithful adaptation of Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade's 1976 novella.... The result is not only Coppola's most personal film in decades but also one of his most complex and haunting."

Earlier: Bruce Handy talks about his interview for Vanity Fair.

Updates, 11/23: John Hiscock talks with Coppola for the Telegraph.

Robert Levin at cinemaattraction on Youth Without Youth: "The ideas he posits about aging and the futility of recapturing one's lost youth must play better on Eliade's page, in a less immediately visceral medium more apt for intricate philosophical digressions. Here, in failing to provoke thought and reflection he leaves us with little beyond an overwrought, bifurcated narrative that transitions from a jumpy first half to a stagnant conclusion, in which most of the action plays out in an over the top theatrical fashion within a constrained setting."

Posted by dwhudson at November 16, 2007 4:25 PM