When Sofia Coppola took a bullet: how an all-time bad performance killed The Godfather Part III?
Francis Ford Coppola gave his neophyte daughter 12 hours to prepare for the role of a lifetime. They would both pay the price for years
Julia Roberts was unavailable, Winona Ryder was bedridden, and Madonna was anxiously sitting next to her phone with her suitcase packed, hoping beyond all measure that Francis Ford Coppola would call for her help.
But, days into production on The Godfather Part III, the famed director had already made up his mind. For the film’s pivotal role, the lynchpin of the belated third chapter in the Godfather saga, he would cast his striking, untrained and incredibly inexperienced 18-year-old daughter, Sofia. It would go down as one of the worst creative decisions in film history.
Thirty years after The Godfather Part III’s release, Sofia Coppola is a beloved Hollywood figure. While her father would splinter in the wake of the film, directing ungainly work that would range from the ignored (Tetro, Twixt) to the inane (Jack), she has flourished as one of our most celebrated modern filmmakers.
Her 1999 directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides, is a dreamy masterpiece, and she would trail it with classic after classic: the unlikely melancholy of Lost in Translation, the punk-rock grandeur of Marie Antoinette and the withering satire of The Bling Ring, to name just a few.
On the Rocks, her new father/daughter comedy (starring Bill Murray and Rashida Jones), arrives this week like a sugary tonic to 2020’s numerous woes. With all of that in mind, her charmed filmmaking career is a remarkable pivot for a woman whose first appearance left her widely reviled.
In The Godfather Part III, Coppola plays Mary, the youngest daughter of Al Pacino’s Mafia kingpin Michael Corleone. She is the emotional heart of the movie, immersed in charity work and deliberately kept at a distance from the criminality that provided her family its fortune. Tension builds when Michael warns her off a fledgling relationship with her criminally aspirational cousin Vincent (Andy Garcia), terrified that any further intimacy will leave her life in danger.
The film’s tragic ending revolves around Mary, the character embodying just the latest innocent caught in the crossfire of generations of illegal activity. Quite literally, too, with Mary shot dead in an assassination attempt gone awry.
The problem with that final scene, however, is that it’s also hilarious. Coppola flatly reacts to the gunshot wound in her chest, tumbles to her knees and lets out one last, weak gasp of “Dad”. The clip is regularly featured in “Worst Acting Ever” compilations on YouTube, The Godfather Part III incongruous in a consistent roll-call of films like Troll 2 and The Room.
Even worse, Coppola’s eerie vacancy in the role of Mary is present in scenes where she’s both alive and a corpse on the ground. She gives one of the all-time bad performances – stiff and sleepy, and even more distracting because she’s surrounded by such heavyweights. In a different context, her detached naturalness may have been beguiling, but here it pulls the focus horridly.
