It is 40 years this month since Apocalypse Now first hit cinemas, and to mark the anniversary Coppola returned once again to his editing suite. He is well aware that he’s doing this, of course, but, as he observes with a smile: “When you’re 80, you don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to talk about.” In conversation he tends towards the philosophical, and his elliptical answers stray from his films towards his admiration for the likes of Aristotle and William Morris. He has also dropped four and a half stone (64lb), the result of four months spent at a weight-loss clinic. Gone are the hirsute beard and thick-rimmed spectacles that were once his trademark they are replaced by neat white stubble and, slung loosely around his neck, a modern pair of magnetic glasses that unclip at the nose. When he welcomes me to Inglenook, Coppola, who turned 80 in April, is almost unrecognisable from his 70s heyday. It is also here, in the estate’s old carriage house, that Coppola has spent the past two years restoring and refining a new – and he says definitive – version of that film: Apocalypse Now: Final Cut. Bought in 1975 by Francis Ford Coppola, using his spoils from The Godfather, he promptly risked the property, staking it to raise money for what would become one of the most arduous and challenging productions in the history of film. Yet arguably the greatest war film of them all owes much to Inglenook.
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