Godfather (57 page)

In November 1990 Hart was invited to meet with Coppola at his home in the Napa Valley, the original Inglenook estate near the original Inglenook winery, which Coppola now operated as the Niebaum-Coppola winery. On the estate grounds is a bungalow where Coppola holds conferences during the preproduction phase of a film—the same cottage where he met with Dean Tavoularis and Vittorio Storaro when they were planning
Tucker
. Although Hart had composed the original draft of his script, which had been entitled
Dracula: The Untold Story
, as early as 1977, he found discussing the revised screenplay with Coppola a revelation.

Coppola smiled at him over his glasses like a mischievous professor, Hart remembers. Then he opened the screenplay, “a conductor about to commence a symphony. For the next two-and-a-half hours I sat at the Master's feet as he went through my screenplay page by page, mesmerizing me, telling me with images ‘the erotic fever dream of a movie' he would turn those words into.”
⁷

Coppola was intent on giving
Bram Stoker's Dracula
the look of a sumptuous horror film along the lines of Stanley Kubrick's
The Shining
(1980) and still stay within the stipulated budget of $40 million—which was modest for a top-level costume picture. He hit upon the idea of cutting back on expensive sets so that he could afford to devote more money for lavish-looking costumes. If the costumes were eye-filling, he reasoned, filmgoers would not notice that he had skimped on the sets. He accordingly brought in Eiko Ishioka, the Japanese designer who had collaborated with him on his telefilm “Rip Van Winkle.” In hiring Eiko, Coppola explains, he was confident that at least one element of the film's design, the costumes, would be totally unique and original.

Eiko's dazzling costumes were exotic, stunning creations, all exquisite silks and brocades, worthy of a museum. Since red often symbolizes blood in films, she dressed Dracula primarily in red (the red cloak Dracula wears when Jonathan Harker, a young attorney, comes to visit him at his castle demonstrates this technique). The enormous train, which trails behind Dracula as he walks, “is conspicuous when Dracula rushes about his castle like a bat. It was designed to undulate like a sea of blood.”
⁸

Coppola selected German cinematographer Michael Ballhaus as director of photography. Ballhaus, a favorite of German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder before coming to Hollywood, had recently shot
GoodFellows
for Martin Scorsese. Since Coppola was not in the market for the kind of elaborate sets favored by Dean Tavoularis for previous Coppola films, Coppola turned to a young production designer, Thomas Sanders.

Because many of the scenes take place at night, Coppola had Ballhaus photograph these scenes in deep, jarring shadows. Therefore, Coppola was often able to get by with simple settings, because they were shrouded in shadows. In this fashion he was spared the cost of having Sanders build lavish sets and was therefore able to stay within the budget.

Coppola states that he opted to shoot
Dracula
entirely in the studio, rather than on location as he had done
Tucker
and some other films. In the studio “we could control the settings in an artistic and unusual way.” That simply was not possible on real locations, where weather conditions could spoil a scene.
⁹
As another money-saving device, Coppola commandeered some sets built for Steven Spielberg's
Hook
, which were still standing at the studio.

Eleanor Coppola was amazed when she visited the studio during shooting to see what marvels Sanders could produce with paint and plaster. One of Sanders's principal sets was “a grand Victorian mansion,” with a front room that “opened onto a terrace overlooking a garden with a fountain
and a pond.”
¹⁰
The sumptuous-looking garden was actually cobbled together from an old wooden set, colored lights, and potted palms.

Coppola commissioned Peter Ramsey and his team of artists to produce nearly one thousand storyboard drawings for individual shots. He instructed Ramsey and his artists to draw not only on their research but on their own nightmares in designing the storyboards. When complete, the storyboards were correlated with the script, page by page, to produce a detailed shooting guide, which accordingly became the bible for the whole film.

Coppola wanted an impressive musical score, on a par with those Sergei Prokofieff composed for Sergei Eisenstein's Russian epics like
Alexander Nevsky
(1938). He imported Wojciech Kilar from Poland to give the underscore an Eastern European flavor. Kilar obliged him with one of the scariest film scores ever. This ghastly, frightening music, states musicologist Larry Timm, “has a certain satanic aura that leaves the listener with an uneasy, eerie feeling” since it comprises several themes scored in a variety of minor keys.
¹¹

When it came to casting the title role, Coppola selected the young British actor Gary Oldman. The actor rightly saw Stoker's Dracula as a fallen angel, a tortured soul. “Vampires are selfish, destructive creatures who half despise what they're doing, yet can't avoid doing it,” says Oldman. “So I don't play Dracula as out-and-out evil.”
¹²

Winona Ryder, of course, was to play Vlad's first wife, Elisabeta, as well as Mina Murray, the later reincarnation of Elisabeta. Mina at that point is the fiancée of Jonathan Harker, played by Keanu Reeves. Anthony Hopkins, who had recently won an Academy Award for
The Silence of the Lambs
, was tagged to play Professor Abraham Van Helsing, a physician and metaphysician who dabbles in the occult and who is also the namesake of Abraham Stoker. Hopkins also was to play a Romanian priest who clashes with Vlad in the film's prologue.

Coppola assembled the actors at Castle Coppola in Napa for the customary week of preproduction rehearsals. The cast spent two days taking turns reading selections from Stoker's novel. This dramatic reading of passages from the book recalls a similar dramatic reading of excerpts from the novel that Stoker himself staged at the Lyceum Theater in London, for one performance only, shortly after it was published.

Coppola transferred the storyboards to videotape and had the script read as a voice-over to accompany the drawings on the tape. So Coppola already had a tape that told the whole story, which he could refer to during rehearsals. The movie's cast also did walk-throughs of all the scenes in the
script. Hopkins, who normally frowns on extended rehearsals, found them helpful this time around. Coppola creates a great atmosphere to work in, he said afterward. The director sets up a scene and then improvises within that framework, “and talks you through the scene.” He concludes, “The only way to work with somebody like him is just learn your lines, show up, and don't ask questions, because he seems to know what he wants to do.”
¹³
Coppola then arranged for some run-throughs of the script before live audiences, a technique he had originated way back when he was making his first mainstream studio film,
You're a Big Boy Now
. These “dress rehearsals” were videotaped, and they served, Coppola notes, as his version of trying out a Broadway play in Boston.

Principal photography commenced on October 14, 1991, on the former MGM sound stages, which Columbia had taken over. Oldman chose to stay in character between takes, so he came across as morose and disagreeable when dealing with the cast and the director. Admittedly, Oldman had an abundance of helpful hints on how each scene should be played, but both Coppola and the other actors found him too bossy in seeking to impose his ideas on them. Coppola thought that Oldman was the most temperamental actor he had had to cope with since Marlon Brando on
Apocalypse Now
. When Coppola attempted to reason with him, Oldman replied that he was under a great deal of pressure, endeavoring to play such a demanding role: “I'm four hundred years old and dead; how the fuck do I get into character?”
¹⁴
One way he found was to shrewdly modify his voice so that he purred with “the perverse timbre of Bela Lugosi's inhuman intonations.”
¹⁵

Coppola became concerned about Oldman's drinking habits, and he finally confronted him about it when the actor was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol one weekend. Nevertheless, Oldman, a gifted actor, gave an unforgettable performance as the smoldering creature of darkness.

Each take was videotaped at the same time it was photographed on motion picture film. This enabled the trio of film editors, Nicholas Smith, Glenn Scantelbury, and Anne Goursaud, to assemble a preliminary edit of each scene on videotape right after it was shot. Consequently, by the end of principal photography, Coppola had a “draft” of the final film—a process he had employed on other films, including
The Outsiders
, which Goursaud also edited.

The rather stringent budget allocated only a minimal sum of money for special effects. Coppola compensated by having his twenty-seven-year-old son Roman, who was in charge of special effects, achieve most of the visual tricks in the camera itself—without the benefit of expensive
computer-generated images (CGI). Roman Coppola employed such quaint cinematic techniques as double exposures, slow fades, and dissolves to achieve spectral effects. For example, making a vampire disappear by means of a slow dissolve suggests their ability to evaporate into thin air. A close-up of Dracula's face grinning maniacally is superimposed on a shot of the sky, implying his unearthly evil presence brooding over the dark, gloomy Transylvanian landscape. Chiaroscuro lighting infuses certain interiors with vast, menacing shadows, which loom on walls and ceilings, giving a sinister, Gothic quality to a vampire's face. These artfully composed visual effects were not only economical, but they also paid homage to the magic of the earlier Dracula films of Murnau and Browning, which utilized similar effects in the days before CGI. Therefore, the present film has the look of a 1930s, studio-enclosed production.

Coppola also borrowed gimmicks that were used to produce magical effects in a stage play. For example, for the scene in which Dracula's three concubines materialize in Jonathan Harker's bedroom while he is staying in Dracula's castle, a trapdoor was constructed underneath his bed so that they would emerge from beneath it. They provocatively rise from under the sheets between his legs to rape him.

By the same token, Coppola created the illusion of a lengthy journey on horseback on a single indoor set, without the use of exterior locations. It is the sequence in which Van Helsing and his vampire killers journey through the Transylvanian mountains to Dracula's castle. Sanders employed a soundstage that was the size of a football field. He constructed an oval track around the perimeter of the stage. The actors rode their horses hell-bent-for-leather around the track in the face of a blizzard churned out by wind machines blowing artificial snow in the air. Between takes the greens crew kept moving the fake trees and plants around in different formations in order to create a variety of backgrounds. As a result, the horsemen appear to be covering hundreds of miles on different roads at breakneck speed, when in fact they are merely galloping around the circumference of the soundstage.

The shooting period finished on February 1, 1992—on budget and slightly ahead of schedule. Coppola then plunged into postproduction with his team of editors at the American Zoetrope facility in San Francisco. By April, Coppola had put together a rough cut. He then arranged for a sneak preview in San Diego, where he had previewed
Godfather II
. History repeated itself, and audience reaction to
Dracula
was no better than it had been for
Godfather II
earlier. Coppola reflected that the negative tone of several preview cards submitted by filmgoers meant that the present picture just did not meet their expectations.

The fundamental problem was that the audience found the plot, which spans four centuries, hard to follow. So the narrative clearly needed editing and tightening. In reworking the rough cut, Coppola kept in mind that he was committed by contract to deliver an R-rated picture to Columbia. As a result, he deleted some footage that he judged too gory and lurid to sustain an R. For example, in one scene Dracula's vampire brides carried an infant down a dark corridor as they prepared to suck its lifeblood away. Coppola trimmed the incident to a single shot of Dracula's concubines gathering around the baby and left the rest to the viewer's imagination.

Coppola was not unduly depressed by audience reaction to the rough cut: “On the brighter side, I also know that sometimes very good films have a low score at first,” as
Godfather II
did. Consequently, “I hope I can get the audience to like it better than they did in San Diego,” Coppola recorded in his journal on April 17.
¹⁶

Another sneak was held in late summer, this time in Denver. According to the preview cards, narrative continuity was still a problem. Filmgoers thought that “as a whole, the storytelling skipped around, that transitions were bad,” and “things were not explained enough,” as Coppola wrote in his journal on September 2.
¹⁷
For example, why did Jonathan Harker, an inexperienced solicitor, have the temerity to visit Count Dracula at his castle in Transylvania? Viewers also wanted more character development, especially in terms of Mina's attitude toward Dracula: Did she really fall in love with him when he sought to seduce her?

Coppola's work was cut out for him. He must “eliminate the audience's feeling that … they don't know what is going on.” He was convinced that ironing out the difficulties in the plot would involve new material that would require retakes. For example, he obviously needed to add a brief scene to establish that Jonathan, a junior attorney in a law firm, is sent to Transylvania to arrange for the count to purchase property in London, because Renfield, another lawyer, failed to complete the transaction. Coppola also decided to have Anthony Hopkins, as Van Helsing, record additional voice-over narration to knit the plot together more coherently—a technique he had utilized to clarify the plotline of
Apocalypse Now
. The front office at Columbia balked at the added expenditure for bringing back cast members to do more work, but Coppola insisted.