Polio survivor Francis Coppola urges caution Vaccine skeptics Trump

EXCLUSIVE: The 85-year-old five-time Oscar-winning director Francis Ford Coppola spends the days before Christmas not wrapping presents, but the international rollout of Megalopolis. This week he’s doing interviews as the film opens in the South American market, but he took time to weigh in on a movement gaining traction to restrict vaccines as Donald Trump prepares to enter the White House again.

The US is gross Megalopolis was low for the $100 million + of his own money he spent making the film, but Coppola said the experience was largely satisfying—except for a wave of negative stories he believes were attempts to sabotage him. Finding out who was behind them in the discovery phase is largely why he sued Variety. This mechanism certainly proved fruitful for actress Blake Lively when she found evidence of a smear campaign set up in emails in her dispute with her This ends with us director Justin Baldoni. The actress/filmmaker was just dropped by WME after it became clear the agency would lose her and husband Ryan Reynolds if he stayed. Coppola said he dug in, determined to find out who planted negative stories ahead of every move he made on the film. Beyond that, Coppola said he was pleased with the film’s outcome. It cost him part of a windfall that came with the sale of some of his wine holdings, which he did mostly to ensure that his businesses would continue to run efficiently after he died without being a burden on his children and grandchildren, most of whom are busy making films themselves.

“It pleases me because it remains extremely (polarizing); people say it’s the worst movie ever made, and it’s the best movie ever made,” Coppola said. “I love it. People don’t notice that it is a film made for controversy. I always knew that. Of course, I know the difference between a picture of the budget that is made without any risk, compared to a picture of the budget that is never made. This is the first film ever made as an indie with the kind of budget that just went into it all. I’m happy with the response, I think it was money well spent because it did what I wanted it to do.”

That is, to create discussion in reheated servings long after he is gone, in the same way as his Hearts of Darkness takes place in Vietnam, epic did. Foretold disaster when he made it, Apocalypse now grew in appreciation. Coppola, who reshot the film a few times before finding a version that reflected what he was really trying to say, said he made more money from it than any other film because he owned it. The only reason he owned it was because no one else would support him.

“I feel that Megalopolis will go the way of Apocalypse now in that regard,” he said. “I am working on connecting it with New Year’s, so that every New Year’s Day we show the picture and ask the question in the society we live in, the only thing available to us, and have a good healthy discussion. I know if people talk about it every year they will come up with some good suggestions on how to improve things. I have an allegiance to our human family; we are all a unique and wonderful family around the world. And as my picture expresses at the end, let’s use our profound genius to make the world a better place for our children. That’s all I’m saying.”

His film’s claim that a utopia is all about making sensible decisions is relevant here as Donald Trump prepares to become president again. He has chosen a wave of controversial government candidates. It gave me a shudder when I read a Washington Post report last week about the vaccine skepticism expressed by the incoming Dept. appointee. of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and how his top adviser Aaron Siri asked the government in 2022 to reconsider the approval of a widely used polio vaccine. I remembered Coppola’s experience with the disease. I asked Coppola to harken back to the scariest time in his life, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell did in a recent interview to counter any chance that public confidence in the polio vaccine could be undermined. Trump has so far indicated that it will take a lot to get him to change policy on polio, but it’s still alarming when eradicated viruses even have a glimmer of a comeback.

“People don’t understand that polio is a fever that just hits you for one night,” Coppola told me. “You’re only sick for one night. The terrible effects of polio, like not being able to breathe so you have to be in an iron lung, or not being able to walk or being totally paralyzed, are the result of that one night’s damage with the infection I remember that night I had a fever and they took me to a hospital ward that was so full of children that there were stretchers piled up three and four high in the corridors. were beds at the hospital.

“I remember the kids in the iron lungs, you could see their faces on mirrors and they were all crying for their parents,” he said. “They didn’t understand why they were suddenly in these steel cabinets. And I remember being more afraid of those kids, and not myself, because I wasn’t in one of those things.”

It quickly became clear that he wasn’t going to just walk away from the nightmare.

“I looked around and when I tried to get out of bed I fell on the floor and I realized I couldn’t walk,” he said. “I couldn’t get up. And I stayed in that ward for about 10 days before my parents could finally take me home.”

There was no clear course of treatment.

“It only became clear when they took me to a doctor, a French doctor. I remember who said I should be a soldier and that I would be able to live a long life and be very active and do anything I wanted. But then he added, but always in a wheelchair. And that’s when I realized what I was up against. And we all went to eat Chinese food that afternoon and I cried even though this was my favorite food because he had told me I would always be in a wheelchair.”

Coppola was saved by his father’s unwillingness to accept the diagnosis. Carmine Coppola was an Oscar-winning composer who scored several of his son’s films, but perhaps his greatest achievement in his son’s work was going against the grain to ensure that Francis Coppola would get a proper shot at life.

“My father didn’t trust the statement,” he said. “It was a strong opinion that the cure, or the therapy, was to keep you in your bed and make you immovable. That didn’t sound logical to him. So my father resorted to what was called in those days, “March of Dimes”. It was the charity that helped children with polio. And they told him there was another way to deal with it, which came from the Australian nurse, Sister Kenny.”

Elizabeth Kenny, to be played by Rosalind Russell in a film about her exploits, was a self-taught nurse in the Australian bush who spread the gospel that the best treatment for children with polio was to rebuild the muscles. Other treatments put limbs in casts to ensure immobility, and these patients ended up in wheelchairs or worse, as their muscles atrophied beyond repair.

“Her method was kind of mild training,” Coppola said. “And my father thought, thank God, that it made more sense to take a lamb than to make them immobile. The idea was that if you were immobile, you wouldn’t injure the muscles further. They sent me this wonderful lady, I remember her name, Ms. Wilson. She was an older lady with white hair. And she would come to me four days a week and do these very gentle exercises where she would lift the limbs and what have you. And that lady, over four or five months, gradually brought back my ability to move my left arm. And I am completely grateful and know that I can walk myself today is because of Sister Kenny’s system, which was a revolutionary thought at the time. Everyone believed in the immobile theory. So that’s the big story, but the horror is what I saw a hospital just full of screaming children and it was finally over because of the wonderful Salk vaccine that happened just two or three years later.

“Both of the doctors who developed the Salk vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, they donated the patents on their vaccines to the public as opposed to what happens today where the companies own them,” Coppola said. “To see (polio) go away, there are so many stories about the vaccine, how many lives it saved in an epidemic that was only becoming a bigger epidemic… It makes it so absurd, the idea that they would consider reversing course on vaccines now.”

Coppola said he will next make a musical, and this time he hopes its modest budget and European locations will lead to financing opportunities overseas.

“I’m looking forward to it because hopefully it’s a movie I can have fun with,” he said. “But I always say that.”