Francis Ford Coppola rarely met a deal he couldn’t refuse. From money to movies, he’s swung from the highs to the lowes. Isn’t it time fo a little middle?

Long before the arrival of Bill Gates, the 500-channel universe and the Internet, one of the great showmen of modern filmmaking imagined satellite communications as the basis of a grand new business and cultural exchange between North and South America. Francis Ford Coppola chose the republic of Belize, newly independent in 1981, as the seat of this grand enterprise. His mission, he said at the time, inspired by Plato’s “Republic,” was not so much “making just movies, but building a new city.”

* “It was one of my Jules Verne-type ventures,” Coppola says today, recalling that heady time just before his career went into a tailspin after the disastrous reception to his 1982 film, “One From the Heart.” The portly 57-year-old director is recounting the story as he lounges on the front porch of his 20-room Napa Valley home, tufts of curly gray chest hairs showing under his half-open Hawaiian silk shirt.

* Belizean government officials sat awe-struck as the director of “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now” wowed them with elaborate plans for a film studio that would utilize the latest in high technology. “I wanted to start a TV industry where they could be a port or a hub, with telecommunications as a new form of trade,” Coppola explains, lighting up the cheroot-style cigar he sells commercially, named after his father, the late composer Carmine Coppola. “It appealed to my Utopian fantasies.”

But his global vision went unappreciated. “The government didn’t take me seriously,” he says. “They said, ‘That’s interesting, but there’s just this one little thing--we don’t have any TV sets yet.’ ”

As he has done so often in his career, when a grand vision goes bust, Coppola downsizes. Instead of a city of the future, he built a resort hotel called Blancaneaux in the Maya Mountains near the Belizean town of San Ignacio. It boasts the only wood-burning pizza oven in the country, furniture carved from native woods and wine from Coppola’s Napa estate. Cabana lodging is available for $160 a night in high season.

Don’t they call Belize the Mosquito Coast? “Oh no!” Coppola says with alarm, suddenly the fast-talking salesman. “It’s a beautiful place up in the mountains. Don’t worry--no mosquitoes at all!”

He puffs furiously on his cigar. “The resort makes money, you know,” he says proudly. “So sometimes your dreams lead you to things that don’t quite happen the way you first planned.”

Coppola could be talking about his famously topsy-turvy career. Winner of five Academy Awards by the time he was 36, he was the most celebrated of a generation of Young Turks in early ‘70s Hollywood--George Lucas, Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and William Friedkin--all eager to topple the aging studio system. Fiercely ambitious, Coppola saw himself not as a mere filmmaker but a visionary Godfather of the arts--a combination Medici, Magellan, Marconi and P.T. Barnum.

“Francis had no concept of failure whatsoever--he was convinced we were going to take over the world,” recalls Lucas, a longtime friend who first met Coppola when Lucas was a USC film student watching Coppola direct “Finian’s Rainbow.” “Francis isn’t just a filmmaker. He’s an Italian opera. He’s the kind of person who would’ve built the Vatican or, before that, the pyramids. He thrives on chaos and tumult. He was constantly jumping off cliffs and I was the guy who kept running after him, saying, ‘You can’t do that!’ ”

But things didn’t turn out the way anyone planned, especially for Coppola. As a filmmaker, Coppola worked on a dizzyingly epic scale, always courting disaster, whether it was disappearing into the Philippine jungles for a hellish year while making “Apocalypse Now” or launching American Zoetrope, an artist-controlled studio that he lost to creditors in 1983. He financed “One From the Heart” largely out of his own pocket, but the $25-million fantasy of two lovers adrift in Las Vegas was overwhelmed by unwieldy video effects. It earned less than $8 million overall and it had a devastating effect on his career.

In bottom-line Hollywood, filmmakers never risk their own nest egg. The mantra is: Always spend someone else’s money. Coppola spent millions of his own. He’s clearly missing the chromosome that stops people from jumping off roofs to see whether they can fly. “If somebody gave me $2 billion,” he once announced, “I’d use it as leverage to borrow $30 billion and do something really big.”

In the 1960s, he sank his first big screenwriting paydays into a company that made a music-video jukebox called Scopitone. The firm went bust, wiping out Coppola’s entire investment. In the ‘70s, he used his profits from the first two “Godfather” films to become a one-man impresario, buying a magazine, a radio station, a restaurant, an office building and part of a movie art-house chain. The San Francisco building houses his American Zoetrope production company, but most of the other investments went belly-up or were sold to pay off debts. (Coppola kept the name American Zoetrope after the studio facilities were sold.)

James Caan remembers visiting Coppola in San Francisco when the maestro was riding high in the ‘70s. “He had the ugliest decorated place I’d ever seen and he was wearing these stupid corduroy suits and he had a screening room that was so ugly, it was like it was done in early zebra,” Caan gleefully recalls. “I remember him saying, ‘I bought this building and this piece of property.’ He was like a kid with all these new toys.”

Coppola has always had a sense of largess. When Caan was nearly broke and unemployable, Coppola hired him to star in “Gardens of Stone.” Numerous writers and directors got their start working as his assistants or attending Coppola-sponsored workshops. Coppola hired Fred Fuchs, who now runs American Zoetrope, to produce “Tucker” even though Fuchs had no producing experience. The director has given his longtime editor, Walter Murch, valuable “points” in films he worked on.

But money has consistently been Coppola’s undoing--it’s hard to point to another filmmaker in modern times who has teetered so many times on the brink of financial disaster. He has declared bankruptcy three times, most recently in 1992, when he listed debts of $98 million. For three consecutive years beginning in 1987, he failed to file state or federal income taxes. Even as he scrambled to earn money, he lost it. He made “The Godfather Part III” in 1990 largely to pay off debts, but when he was in Reno working on the script, he managed to lose $10,000 at the Peppermill Casino.

Coppola’s high-stakes gambles have radically altered the course of his career. After “One From the Heart,” Coppola was forced to curtail his ambitions--the daring young impresario became the reliable old pro. To work off his debts, he turned to for-hire projects, stepping in to direct Robert Evans’ troubled production of “The Cotton Club” and the Kathleen Turner vehicle “Peggy Sue Got Married.” His 1992 version of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” showed some of the Coppola flair: It was loaded with stylish visual effects but little coherent storytelling. One project that seemed undeniably personal was “Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” his 1988 film about a real-life 1940s car designer named Preston Tucker, whose love affair with new technology, like that of Coppola’s, resulted in his economic collapse. Having just completed “Jack,” an uncharacteristically conventional film for Disney, he begins work this fall on “The Rainmaker,” yet another film version of a John Grisham thriller.

Fred Roos, Coppola’s longtime co-producer and casting advisor, witnessed his efforts in the 1980s to pay off his massive debts. “Francis would get phone calls in the middle of shooting about gigantic financial crises involving his house and his properties. Bankers and attorneys came around all the time. There was always a crisis that needed an answer or something dire would happen,” he says.

Despite his excesses, there is something romantic about Coppola’s willingness to risk it all. Unlike today’s wealthy Hollywood lords, who run their entertainment empires with icy corporate efficiency, Coppola has always been an impetuous showman--it’s his idealism that gives his carny pitch an emotional heft. He’s an heir to restless entrepreneurs of the past who made and lost fortunes, tossing away millions on crackpot inventions one year, making it all back the next when a wildcat well strikes oil.

As Eleanor, his wife of 33 years, has said of their tumultuous marriage: “We travel together like a circus family, with Francis on the tightrope and the rest of us holding the ropes.”

Amazingly, Coppola has rebounded again from his financial setbacks. Overseeing the release of “Jack,” his new $40-million film starring Robin Williams, he says he is as solvent as he’s been in years. Four years after his last bankruptcy filing, through debt reorganization, he has managed to keep his San Francisco office building, his property in Belize, an apartment at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York and his 1,700-acre Niebaum-Coppola estate in Napa Valley, where his vineyard produces close to 6,000 cases of wine a year. He paid a total of $17.5 million to creditors, drawing mostly from his “Godfather Part III” earnings and his “Dracula” directing fee. Recently, he even expanded his holdings, buying the neighboring 94-acre Inglenook estate for $9.5 million.

Coppola says the winery pays for itself. He also owns nine of his films, including “Apocalypse Now” and “The Conversation,” which generate a steady stream of revenue. (Paramount Pictures owns the three “Godfather” movies, but Coppola received 15% of “Godfather III’s” gross receipts.)

Taking a break from a last-minute mixing session on “Jack,” he is cordial but subdued, especially when analyzing his past excesses. “I didn’t know how important business plans and accounting were,” he says, studying the dead ash on his cigar. “I tend to outrun the information, and I’ve been hurt by that.”

He credits his appointment to the MGM board of directors in 1993 with teaching him the value of organization and planning. “I’ve adapted [what I learned] to my business and it’s part of why the winery is doing so well,” he says. “I always thought that if you created a good product, it would be a success. But that’s only half the issue--marketing and business plans are part of the artistry too. So I’ve learned. I think I have a more three-dimensional attitude toward business now. I even come in on budget with my movies.”

But the longer Coppola talks, the more his old shoot-for-the-moon personality takes over, pushing aside the penitent artist. Soon clouds of smoke are spiraling up from his cigar--he’s thinking big again.

“If I get lucky and I make another movie that does well,” he says, now going full-throttle, “I’d use the money I made to self-finance a project, to do the fundamental financing to make a movie on the scale of ‘Apocalypse Now.’ That’s what I’m hoping will happen.” (One possibility is his long-promised epic film of Goethe’s “Elective Affinities.”)

So he would risk his own money again? Coppola doesn’t bat an eye. “Why not?”

*

Nothing fascinates Coppola more than technological wizardry. Born in the motor city of Detroit, his middle name is Ford, paying homage to perhaps the greatest mass-produced invention of the 20th century. In 1981, when video editing of motion pictures and computer-generated effects were still considered World’s Fair fantasies, Coppola was writing the “One From the Heart” script on a word processor, using “blue-screen” video mattes and sh oting rehearsals on experimental high-definition TV equipment obtained from his pal, Sony legend Akio Morita.

“Everyone thought Francis was a lunatic who was drunk on technology,” recalls Michael Lehmann, director of “Heathers” and “The Truth About Cats & Dogs,” who worked for American Zoetrope in the early 1980s. “But he helped change the process of filmmaking. Francis would say you could randomly access images that were transferred from film to video and then rearrange and edit them by computer. We thought it was all sci-fi stuff, but that’s how I cut my last movie--on an Avid [editing machine]. Most of what Francis was fantasizing about has been adapted by everyone today.”

The props and prototypes for his fantasies are still here at his Napa compound, gathering dust in his warehouse, which is full of movie icons and now-obsolete high-tech contraptions, ranging from ancient computer shells to clunky Betamax video recorders. The maestro is a sentimental man--he doesn’t throw anything away.

Against a wall is a pair of battered wooden water skis that Robert Duvall used in “Apocalypse Now.” Around the corner are family cars--one of Coppola’s two vintage Tuckers, an ancient Model A that appeared in a period scene from “The Godfather,” his father’s old Ford Mustang and his late son’s black Porsche 911.

“People have tried to get him to throw things out,” says Anahid Nazarian, his research director of 16 years. “But I learned a long time ago not to bother. Francis keeps saying the Smithsonian’s going to want it, but they haven’t called yet.”

Seeing all these musty artifacts, some intensely personal, others simply high-tech junk, you can’t help but be reminded of the closing scene from the most celebrated of all American films, the scene that shows a storeroom crammed with relics, symbolizing the tragic end to its owner’s lofty dreams.

“I know, I know,” Coppola says briskly. “It looks like the last scene from ‘Citizen Kane.’ ” He wags his finger at you, eager to make a distinction. “Except I’m still alive.”

*

When he was 9, Coppola contracted polio. kept away from his friends, he spent a year in bed, his left leg and arm paralyzed. He occupied himself with puppets and mechanical gadgets. His childhood heroes weren’t filmmakers--they were inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. “I was raised on fairy tales and stories of great explorers and inventors,” he says. “I was a dreamer, I was fascinated by men like David Sarnoff, who started radio at RCA. Those were the stories that filled me with wonder.”

As a boy, Coppola realized that even dreamers had bills to pay. His father, Carmine, who for years had been first flutist for Toscanini’s NBC Symphony Orchestra, quit his job, prompting a series of family relocations as he searched for work. When the big break didn’t come, Francis, already thinking like a showman, sent a fake telegram from the head of Paramount’s music department. It informed Carmine he’d been hired to compose a film score, concluding with a flourish: “Please come to Hollywood immediately!”

Coppola’s family had long been involved in the arts. His mother, Italia, had been an actress; her father a playwright and songwriter. To this day, friends say, if they name a song from a musical or an opera, Coppola can sing it on the spot. “He wasn’t like a New York wise guy--he’s a very Mediterranean Italian,” says James Caan, who went to college with Coppola at Hofstra University before starring in several of his films. “That’s his family--they’re very into theater, music and art.”

In the Coppola clan, it was Francis’ handsome older brother, Augie, who was considered the budding genius, a straight-A student who read Jean-Paul Sartre at age 9. But it was Francis, awkward and homely as a boy--more like the character of Fredo Corleone than Michael--who eventually became the Godfather of the family, putting them to work on his films: Carmine to compose scores; sister Talia Shire, nephew Nicolas Cage and daughter Sofia to act; sons Gian-Carlo and Roman as assistants. (The elder son, Gian-Carlo, died in a boating accident during the 1986 filming of “Gardens of Stone.” Grief-stricken, Coppola dutifully completed the movie, shooting the film’s funeral scenes in the same chapel where his son’s funeral was held.)

After graduating from Hofstra with a degree in theater, Coppola went to Hollywood in 1960, attending film school at UCLA. He apprenticed under Roger Corman, making B-movies but always thinking big. “When Roger gave him $10,000 to make ‘Dementia 13,’ ” Eleanor Coppola recalls, “Francis went off and got $10,000 from someone else, not because he was trying to steal the money, but because he figured if he had $20,000 he could make a better movie.”

Coppola made several studio films in the late ‘60s, including “You’re a Big Boy Now” and “The Rain People,” but he was still a relative unknown when hired to write and direct the film version of Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel, “The Godfather.” Initially envisioned as a low-budget mobster film, its epic grandeur comes from Coppola’s artistic bravado. Paramount was adamantly opposed to casting Marlon Brando, only acceding to Coppola’s wishes after a summit meeting during which the director concluded his pitch by hyperventilating and collapsing to the floor. Just before the film opened, studio accountants discovered Coppola had spent $1 million they’d never seen. No matter: Made for a mere $7 million, the film ended up earning $285 million and catapulting Coppola to stardom.

Coppola’s great strength has always been his emotional affinity with his work--he sees himself as a character in his movies. The storyline of “The Godfather Part II,” perhaps his most personal film, took the family saga far beyond its pulp origins. In Coppola’s examination of the quest for power and money, the film’s tragic hero, Michael Corleone, found himself isolated by the anxieties of that power--a burden Coppola keenly felt of his own celebrated gifts. But with “Apocalypse Now,” Coppola overreached, his identification with Col. Kurtz leading him to a near breakdown. “I was the guy at the end of the river,” he says now. “I was Kurtz. I directed the movie from Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’ not from the script. So I directed the film like someone who had outrun all authority. Like Kurtz, they couldn’t reach me. They’d have to send a guy to assassinate me.”

By the time “Apocalypse” debuted at the Cannes Film Festival to raves from movie critics, Coppola was playing another character--the crazed film director. Furious with the press coverage of his misadventures while making “Apocalypse” (“I thought I should get some credit for doing a serious, visionary film, but the stories when I was in the Philippines all made fun of the movie”), he dismissed American journalism as “the most decadent, totally lying kind of profession.” It was all great theater, but Coppola was a changed man after “Apocalypse.” He’d lost his artistic equilibrium, the fearless self-confidence great directors draw on to craft a masterwork, even though the film was a box- office success, and is still considered a key film of its time.

“I stripped a few gears,” he acknowledges. “I was smoking cigarettes, which I’d never done before. I was smoking pot, which I’d never done before. I was alienated from my wife and jeopardizing her security, and our marriage was falling apart. I was hanging by a thread. My feelings were stupidly hurt by the bad press I was getting.”

Coppola sighs, puffing on his cigar. “That’s why I love having Oliver Stone around--he draws all the fire away from me now.”

Coppola’s low point was preserved on film in “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” a 1991 documentary directed by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper. It was compiled from diary accounts and footage Eleanor Coppola shot during filming, showing the maestro in full-blown crisis during the “Apocalypse” shoot--manic, depressive, often incoherent. Was it a fair portrait? “It faithfully captures my wife’s half of the experience,” Coppola says diplomatically. “I was hurt [at the time] because all I wanted was her support. I’d come home and say what a disaster it was and how unhinged I was because everything was going wrong. But instead of her telling me, ‘It’s not so bad, you’re doing a good job,’ all she said was, ‘Could you say that a little louder?’ ”

For an artist whose career has been marked by so much turmoil, you have to wonder: Have Coppola’s financial travails kept him from making more personal films or has he used all the tumult to stimulate his creative juices?

According to Coppola’s friends, his most personal films often began as commercial ventures. “ ‘The Godfather’ was a job and yet it’s as personal as can be,” says Fred Roos. “He took what Paramount had envisioned as a potboiler Mafia movie and by the sheer force of his charisma and salesmanship brought the film up to a whole other level. Francis fought for everything, even Marlon Brando. Paramount wanted Carlo Ponti or Ernest Borgnine in that role.”

Coppola might not have made “The Godfather” if it hadn’t been for a debt he owed Warner Bros. Films. “He’d convinced them to give him $300,000 to help put together the original American Zoetrope,” recalls Murch, a film-school-era buddy who worked on five Coppola films, including the three “Godfather” pictures. When the films Zoetrope produced, which included George Lucas’ “THX 1138,” made little or no money, Warner Bros. demanded its money back, claiming that its financing had been a personal loan.

“I don’t know if Francis would’ve done ‘The Godfather’ if he hadn’t needed to pay off his debts,” Murch says. “When Francis is in debt, he talks about making enough money to get out of debt. But as soon as he gets out of debt, he starts talking about buying a jet. It’s a very complex thing, because he’s done some of his best work when he was in debt and had to work to pay it back.”

The worst of Coppola’s financial woes dates back to “One From the Heart.” In desperate need of money to complete the film, Coppola was introduced to Jack Singer, a high-rolling Canadian real estate mogul who admired Coppola. “He was in awe of him,” says Singer’s son and business partner, Alan. “He thought of him as one of the great directors of the 20th century.”

Singer gave Coppola a $3-million personal loan, taking a fifth mortgage on Coppola’s American Zoetrope studio as collateral. When the movie bombed, the Singers forced Coppola into bankruptcy, eventually buying the studio property for $12.3 million at a foreclosure sale.

When Coppola didn’t repay the loan, the Singers sued him for $8 million--their initial loan plus interest. Coppola countersued, claiming, as he still does today, that their $3 million was an investment wiped out by the film’s losses. In early 1990, weeks after a Superior Court judge ordered Coppola to repay the initial loan, he declared bankruptcy again, listing staggering debts, including a $50-million-plus debt to Fred Roos, his longtime friend and co-producer.

“We attacked that as a sham,” says Alan Singer, who contends that Coppola used his huge debt to Roos to shield the director’s valuable Napa Valley and San Francisco properties. The two parties finally settled in July, 1990, with Coppola paying off the debt with some of his $6-million director’s fee from “Godfather III.”

Coppola has also settled his massive debt to Roos. Roos won’t go into specifics, but it seems likely that the original $50-million figure is inflated. “I couldn’t walk you through it if my life depended on it, but it’s all worked out,” he says. “Francis didn’t make payments to me--it was resolved in another fashion.” He adds with a smile: “Maybe Francis has a secret business sense that is more sophisticated than the rest of us.”

For the average person, it seems amazing that Coppola has survived so many fiscal crises without losing everything. (His 1992 bankruptcy filing and subsequent reorganization were prompted by lingering debts from “One From the Heart.”) He shrugs off his bankruptcies as “par for the course,” saying fears of his losing his home were exaggerated. His wife agrees: “I wasn’t afraid--it was part of the adventure. I often thought it would be a relief if we lost it all, then we could go back and have a more quiet life.”

Coppola’s profits from “Godfather III” seemed to put him back on solid financial footing. Despite lackluster reviews, the film earned roughly $160 million worldwide and rejuvenated the entire “Godfather” franchise, boosting video sales and cable reveunes. Cajoled by Paramount into taking the job, Coppola rushed the film into production, hurriedly completing it to make a Christmas 1990 release date. The frantic pace showed. The film lacks the classic sweep of the first two “Godfathers,” though a re-edited version available on video plays much better today.

The film’s reception was colored by an uproar over Coppola’s decision to cast Sofia as Michael Corleone’s daughter when the original actress, Winona Ryder, dropped out of the film. Coppola remains aggravated about the matter today, though less with the media than with Paramount, which he claims orchestrated much of the bad press.

“Paramount didn’t want me to use her,” he says, “They sent a guy to the set from Vanity Fair who had these files from Paramount--he could only have gotten them from Paramount--saying there were all these letters complaining about Sofia, saying the cast didn’t want her. She was perfect for that character. If she’d been some young Italian girl named Sofia, no one would have made a fuss.”

The film marked a turning point for Coppola. “It brought to an end the dark period in his life,” says Fuchs, president of American Zoetrope, which currently has a staff of 15, has expanded into TV production and is even contemplating the launch of a new literary magazine. “Francis owns a lot of his own films, like ‘Apocalypse Now,’ which still make a lot of money from TV and video. With a career like his, you have profit participation in a lot of films.”

Fuchs credits Coppola’s financial resurgence to his indefatigable work ethic. “A lot of people would’ve run away,” he says. “But Francis worked real hard to pay off his debts and he lived to rise again. Hey, Henry Ford went bankrupt four times before he finally succeeded. It’s a very American thing.”

The difficulty of coping with youthful greatness is a very American thing, too. After his early “Godfather” films, Coppola was held to high expectations by his audience as well as himself. In the past, Coppola found ways to make studio fodder his own, but the returns have diminished in recent years. Perhaps the maestro no longer trusts his instincts. “Francis is in this constant turmoil to balance his art and commercial success,” says George Lucas. “He doesn’t always have a lot of faith in his ability to be successful, so he figures if he works on a commercial picture maybe it will allow him to have the success and impose his personal vision in the process.”

Here at his Napa Valley estate, Coppola has adapted to the ways of modern-day entrepreneurs--he’s turned himself into a brand name. In his wine-tasting room here, you can buy “Apocalypse Now” T-shirts for $20. Italian vases go for $475, a set of place mats is $6, candles $3 each. The wine itself ranges from $16 to $19 for the Coppola Family wine labels to $40 for recent Rubicon vintages. After you’ve tasted a glass of Cabernet Franc or Zinfandel, you can gawk at photos of the young director, including a skinny, beardless Coppola posed with the legendary Sam Goldwyn, accepting a film-school prize.

The winery building is being renovated to feature a multimedia room, a cafe, a museum of wine history and movie memorabilia and a computer-controlled fountain. As always, the entire family is involved--the retail area will offer a Sofia Coppola-designed T-shirt and postcards of the property photographed by Roman Coppola. Even now, you can buy Carmine Thrifty cigars in the wine-tasting room--a pack of five for $2.79. “They’re a good deal,” Coppola assures you. “They’re just as good as the $40 cigars Arnold Schwarzenegger smokes.”

The filmmaker has more grand plans for the estate--he seems happiest when his imagination runs free. “He loves planning things because it’s closer to his real dream,” Eleanor says. “When you shoot a film, you have to contend with the reality--the weather is bad, the actor is sick. But in a script, Francis can say, ‘There’s a herd of 2,000 elephants.’ He can imagine 2,000 elephants--he doesn’t have to worry about where to find them. That’s when Francis is happiest, when he’s writing and planning, when it’s all in his mind.”

Coppola’s finances aren’t the only thing that is more stable today--his friends say he’s more at peace with himself, too. The giddy highs and lows seem to have leveled out, leaving the maestro at a comfortable cruising altitude. Speculation has Coppola using antidepressants, but he denies it. “I’ve never gone to therapy. I’ve never taken any antidepressants,” he says. “I’ve learned that when I’m having a big low, it’s just part of the way I feel. It’s like riding a bike--I’ve learned to ride myself.”

His career is also secure. His recent movies have been moneymakers, even if they lack the gusto and grandeur of his earlier work. “Jack,” which stars Robin Williams as a 10-year-old boy inside a rapidly aging 40-year-old man’s body, continues the trend. Populated with stock characters and telegraphed emotion, it plays like another feel-good product from the Disney assembly line.

It’s easier to see Coppola’s presence in the movie, which opens Friday, if you remember his history. Trapped inside his bulky adult body, Jack is kept home from school by his parents, much as Coppola was when he had polio. Jack’s accelerated aging will cut short his life--at 21, he’ll have aged like an 84-year-old. Having lost his own 22-year-old son, Coppola knows the anguish an early death brings. The film is dedicated to granddaughter Gia, who was born after her father died.

“I don’t want to make a big deal out of it,” Coppola says. “Gio only lived 22 years, but he lived a very complete life. Life is short for everybody, whether it’s 20 years for a person or 200 years for a tree. It’s about how you live. As a kid, I was always fascinated by seeing a mosquito and thinking--does it know it only has a couple of days to live?”

One of the film’s most affecting moments shows a dispirited Jack hiding in a bulky cardboard box as he goes thudding down the stairs in his house. It’s reminiscent of a classic scene from Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo,” where his defeated samurai warrior hides in a cardboard box to escape his pursuers.

“I’m like that character in ‘Yojimbo,’ ” Coppola says late one night, on the phone from his new apartment in Paris. “He’s beaten, he’s lost everything, so he lies low and gathers his strength until he’s able to be a warrior again. When I feel I have the power and resources, then I’ll muster the effort to make a big movie again. So if it’s necessary to have a couple of hits with commercial-type films, I’ll do that.”

He laughs. “The other alternative is for me to pursue heiresses, but for now, I’ll make movies.”