Francis Ford Coppola pays the bills with his day-job: making wine. Photo via Grazia Magazine
In a recent interview, auteur film director Francis Ford Coppola alludes to a future where the intersection of art and commerce resembles our past more than it does the present.
Interviewer Ariston Anderson asked, “How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce?”
We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.
This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?
- Francis Ford Coppola
