# Francis Ford Coppola‘s Surprisingly Erotic Beginnings
The 1970s are known to be one of the greatest decades in cinema history, with such filmmakers as Steven Spielberg, John Cassavetes, Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott making some of the era’s best movies.arguably, no director was quite as influential in the decade as Francis Ford Coppola, the mind behind *The Godfather*, *Apocalypse Now* and *The Conversation*, who won five Academy Awards at the time and whose career had surprisingly erotic beginnings.
In an interview, Coppola once said, “Film is an illusion. The audience just sees a lot of shadows on the screen. The emotion is in the audience. The trick is giving them something that unleashes that and suddenly they endow the images with their emotion. My theory is, when people say a movie is stunning, I don’t think it can be unless there is beauty in the audience.”
He added,”I want to make a film about the future. You know the Alfred, Lord Tennyson quote? ‘For I dipt into the future, far as human eye coudl see, saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be…’ That’s the movie I want to make. It would be called *Megalopolis*. I’m 81 so I hope I have enough years to make it. I want to give the children of the world a vision of the future that is beautiful. that is positive. That is a heaven on Earth, because I really think we can have that.”
but to do all that, you need to start your career, and to do that, you frequently enough have to compromise yourself. For Coppola, it meant moving into erotic movies.
