Quarantining, for months on end, on the same premises as one’s extended family might sound like a recipe for interpersonal disaster. But not if you’re a member of the Coppola clan and can spread out over more than fifteen hundred acres in Napa. “It’s been wonderful to have this time with my mom and dad,” Roman Coppola, the fifty-five-year-old director, producer, and screenwriter, said the other day, over Zoom. “My kids were able to be around their aunts and uncles and cousins, so we’ve been having a lot of sleepovers—it’s been a little like summer camp.” Coppola’s parents, the director Francis and his wife, Eleanor, an artist and a writer, own a vineyard. Roman and his family moved up there from L.A. in March; his sister Sofia, the director, had been in residence with her family as well.
Coppola’s manner is gently formal; with his trim salt-and-pepper beard and dark-blue blazer (accessorized with a natty pocket square), he brings to mind an artistically inclined merchant banker. While in Napa, he has been teaching animation classes to his three children: Alessandro, who is five, Marcello, seven, and Pascal, nine. “I showed them a YouTube video where Terry Gilliam talks about the animations he made in his Monty Python days,” Coppola said. “They’ve been doing these cutouts, and then we have this little animation stand and a stop-motion app we use.” He panned his laptop to reveal the kids’ arrangements of pictures clipped from magazines—a knight in armor, big red lips, Mt. Rushmore.
“Marcello made up a joke the other day,” he said. “Do you want to tell it, silly?” Marcello’s sandy head popped into view.
“O.K.!” he began. “What did the charming Italian man say when he got a crazy-bad sunburn?” He waited a beat. “He said, ‘I’m a-peeling!’ ”
Coppola has directed two feature films, “CQ” and “A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III,” but most of his career has charted a more diffuse approach. “Anything that goes zig and then zag draws me in,” he said. “My heroes have always been polymaths like Buckminster Fuller.” In his thirties, he directed several music videos, including the Strokes’ “Someday” and “Last Nite,” which helped imprint the group’s scruffy, denim-and-sneakers look on the public’s imagination; later, he produced and co-wrote films with his friend Wes Anderson. (They collaborated on the script for Anderson’s upcoming movie, “The French Dispatch.”) He also established the Directors Bureau, which produces commercials and music videos, started a tote-bag company, and co-created the Amazon TV show “Mozart in the Jungle.”
Coppola’s quarantine schedule has been hectic. He co-directed “Mariah Carey’s Magical Christmas Special,” a glitter-strewn extravaganza, for Apple TV, and reunited with the Strokes to direct a video for their new song “The Adults Are Talking,” in which the band plays baseball against robots. He also directed a video for Paul McCartney’s “Find My Way,” from his latest album, “McCartney III,” on which the former Beatle plays all the instruments himself. It was shot remotely, with Coppola in Napa and McCartney at his home studio, in Sussex: “I was thinking, What if we get a crazy amount of security cameras that can be controlled through one brain—we ended up having fifty-three, I think—and then have him just do his thing?” McCartney ran through the song once at the piano. “I was, like, ‘Mr. McCartney, that was great.’ Then on to the harpsichord. We did vocals, backing vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, drums, and we hardly needed to adjust the cameras.” He went on, “We took a couple of breaks, he had a cup of tea—”
A shriek was heard from off camera. “Hey, guys? Guys! Just keep doing your animation, O.K.?” Coppola called. The screeching stopped, then resumed. Coppola laughed. “It was really just a document of an artist at work,” he continued, referring to the McCartney video. “The only thing I was sad about was that I didn’t get to meet him in person.” The footage from the fifty-three cameras was edited into a tapestry of tightly framed squares that appear to slide and shift, tile-puzzle style, to evoke the layered nature of McCartney’s work with his instruments.
Lately, Coppola has been thinking about making a third feature. “I’d like my kids to have the experiences I had as a kid, being on my dad’s movie sets,” he said. “Like, ‘Oh, they’re doing the napalm drop today, so I’m going to skip school,’ which in retrospect was kind of remarkable.” Meanwhile, he’s creating a communication platform called CASBU, which aims to be a more efficient alternative to e-mail and texting.
It was time to look at what the kids had made. Coppola tapped the animation app on his phone. A screech rose up, scoring a scene of Mt. Rushmore hastening to escape from a farting baby chick; in another scene, huge lips danced above a knight’s body. “When they were screaming, I thought they were just messing around, but they were making their animation!” Coppola said. “Hey, Alessandro, I saw your movie! It’s amazing! Yours, too, Marcello!” ♦
