Francis Coppola

Gary Oldman was covered in pus. It was the middle of the night, he was wearing a rubber costume and fangs. Welcome to Hollywood. The search was on for an insomniac dermatologist, a man to cure those troublesome nocturnal pimples. This being America, one was located, and Oldman elaborates, “We went to this guys house and he was thrilled, because he hadn’t seen anything like this since Vietnam. He sat me in the chair and got other doctors to come and look at me. Very unpleasant.”

Then there was the eye problem. “There was that time my contact lens got stuck and I lost my teeth in that pond. It wouldn’t come out and I was doing my growling” he explains, “but you know, this was Dracula.” Dracula it was, and the actors troubles stemmed from laborious make-up and costume changes which transform him from Oldman to old man, as endured in the name of art, and as directed by the gentlemen sharing the table, Francis Ford Coppola.

The vampire legend been done to death, and it is hard to find new ways to tell an old story. A clue to the new approach lie in the title – this is Bram Stoker’s Dracula. “I did have reason to believe you could make a new Dracula”, says Coppola. “Number one was that the novel had never been adapted; the closest was Nosferatu, and that was done at a time when the rights were in dispute [1921-22] and the Stoker estate actually brought suit over the production. Then there was the question that he was a real historical figure, a Rumanian figure of importance. I felt there was a lot of new material about the history of Dracula, and then there was the book itself, so that was more than enough to get us going in a new direction.”

The direction he chose was to shoot a highly stylised and visually captivating picture which would explore the other side of the Vampire legend. When talking about how the film was made, Coppola emphasises that his film would be like no other, and says that “If you think about my films they are very different one from another. The Godfather is a very classical style, Apocalypse Now is in the style of a fuse burning out.” But Bram Stoker’s Dracula is like other films. Other Coppola films. The techniques of montage and juxtaposition are used, and religious metaphors abound. The Christ figure is a familiar stalwart for the director (just think of Kurtz and Don Corleone), and here resurrection, bodies and blood figure big. Very big.

“It was clear there was many thing about the real history of Dracula we did not know” says Coppola, in response to my question about the religious aspects of his film. “As we explored the idea it became clear that there was more to him than even Bram Stoker included, and I thought how interesting that, like the good knight Lucifer, he should fall in conflict with God. This suddenly elevated him into a real tragic hero. Throughout the movie the cross, all the symbols that represented the good angel/bad angel are used. It seemed to be a very rich metaphor and ultimately the film was about Dracula and God.”

And Sex. The erotic side of Stoker’s story is developed, and Oldman plays that angle brilliantly. There is a suggestion this is the first Dracula with credible sexual attraction. Oldman agrees: “He does love as a mortal and a tortured soul with that look in his eyes”, and here he smirks confidently, “Women go for that.”

The relationship between Dracula and his mortal love, Mina (Wynona Ryder) is complex and convincing, and James Hart’s screenplay has them as a destructive partnership. This was part of the attraction to Oldman, as he explains, “What I thought was interesting about the script is that it deals with earthbound emotions and fears that we all understand and can relate to. We understand the joys of love and the pain that comes with love and it works on all of those levels and that’s why it intrigues me. It was a delicious cocktail, not just a one-dimensional monster.”

To modern audiences, sex and blood have a different meaning, and it wasn’t long before the critics had interpreted another meaning into the movie. “Dracula has blood as a central metaphor,” says Coppola, “and in our case it was a metaphor for passion. It was unavoidable that people would see it as an AIDS allegory, and to some extent it was.

Certain people say Stoker himself died of syphilis and I may have wrote this as a metaphor for his own case, but rather than go so far I decided the best thing to do would be to touch those themes but not to pretend that this hundred year old book could enlighten us, give us solutions or deal with the question.”

Meanwhile, Oldman’ physical degradation continues. He speaks of dehydrated corneas, a side-effect of the coloured lens placed in his eye, and it all sounds grimacingly painful. In the past, he has had none of this, playing roles such as the Joe Orton (Prick Up Your Ears), Sid Vicious (Sid & Nancy) and Lee Harvey Oswald (JFK). In comparison to these parts, was he not worried that an actor could be swamped under the make-up ?
“There was a danger of disappearing behind all that, and it was cumbersome. You just have to be master of that, you play it, you must not let it play you. We were fortunate enough to have rehearsals, so I kind of knew what I’d let myself in for. You have to have an idea in your head that really your in jeans and a T-shirt.”

Likewise, there must have been a temptation to send Dracula up, to make a camp vamp. Is this true ?
“I think it’s very dangerous to send up or patronize the people I play, and I tend to avoid that,” says the actor. “This was somewhat more difficult because it does lean toward camp, and I suppose you walk a very fine line with it. I don’t know what that line is, and I just have a subjective view of what I’m doing. You hope that Francis will be your geigercounter and tell you if your tipping the scales too far…I hope and would like to think that we successfully walked that tightrope, that it does not slip into a parody or send-up. The films preceding this one have made that mistake, and it’s a tough one.”

Inevitably, the subject turns to money, and to Coppola. His financial past is a well-documented affair, lapsing from phenomenal success (The first two parts of The Godfather are estimated to have made $800 million worldwide) to abject failure. When asked about it, Coppola remains candid, “The truth of that is that I made twenty movies, of which I went over budget on two, both of which I financed myself.” Those two were Apocalypse Now and One From The Heart, a lavish musical which kinder reviewers said was ‘a promo film which all too clearly reveals the schizoid dream of Zoetrope Studios…Coppola has lost himself’. It left box-offices untroubled, and forced its director to file bankruptcy charges amid Maxwellian debts.

It is obvious that Dracula must have cost a mint (an arm and a leg seems the wrong choice of phrase for this movie), and so did he manage to run to budget ?

“I do think that I’m not a person who’s money crazy, I like money only for what it allows us to do. On [the two films] I just did what I wanted but it was my money, but on other peoples films I’m very anxious to not waste their money. I have to tell you that the difference between working on a big budget film and a low budget film is that you really are thinking about budget and schedule from morning to night and it’s no fun.”

Yet he maintains that the experience on this film was a good one, budgetary limits be damned. It has been known, he says, for pressure to work in his favour, evidence that “Making a film is a dynamic situation, and very often limitations are good for that. In the creative process anything that happens kind of fuels it.” And at that point, with talk of dynamism and creativity hanging in the air, my tape-recorder switches off, with calculated embarrassment.

“I hope” says Coppola, grasping the machine, “that was not a judgement.”

Peter Hill