‘CQ’ Romances the ‘60s

Roman Coppola reclines in his chair in his cramped office at the Directors Bureau, the flourishing commercial and music video production company he co-founded with Mike Mills in 1996. He’s discussing “CQ,” his feature directing debut, which he calls a “first film about a first film” and “a big love letter to the cinema of the ‘60’s.”

“Largely it’s meant to be a fun romp in that time and place and a chance as a first-time filmmaker to try a lot of stuff. I got to do a personal film, I got to do a car chase, I got to do a dramatic film,” Coppola says. “And it is a little disjointed or crazy or whatever, but I think it celebrates that too.”

“CQ,” which opens Friday, follows Paul, a young American filmmaker played by Jeremy Davies, in Paris in 1969 as he edits a campy sci-fi spy flick titled “Dragonfly” by day and at night works on an intimate black-and-white documentary of his home life with his increasingly frustrated girlfriend, played by Elodie Bouchez (“The Dreamlife of Angels”).

As Paul is drawn further into his work, reality and fantasy begin to blur. Long infatuated with the films, music and look of late 1960s Europe, Coppola suffuses “CQ” with nods to numerous films of the era, from kitsch like “Barbarella” to the poetic masterpieces of Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard.

“CQ” “reeks of Roman,” says Jason Schwartzman, Coppola’s cousin, who plays a wunderkind director in the film. “He’s always had a million fascinations, and he’s found some way to put at least 2% of each of those fascinations in this film.”

The Directors Bureau is housed just off of Hollywood Boulevard in an unmarked building, rumored to have once been Ed Wood’s studio. A couple of dogs noisily roam the workplace, their barks and the adjoining office’s phone conversations penetrating the thin walls.

Wearing a gray sports jacket and a light blue shirt, Coppola, 37, runs his hands through his hair and swivels in his seat as he ticks off some of the many films “CQ” references: “Modesty Blaise,” “The 10th Victim,” “THX-1138,” “Diva,” “Girl on a Motorcycle,” “Last Tango in Paris,” “Contempt.”

Son of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and brother of director Sofia Coppola (“The Virgin Suicides”), Roman is a music video and commercials director, perhaps best known for the award-winning music video for Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You,” which featured Sofia’s husband and “Being John Malkovich” director Spike Jonze.

Coppola has also directed videos for Moby, the Strokes, the Presidents of the United States, Wyclef Jean and Green Day (the Grammy-nominated “Walking Contradiction”). He has filmed eye-catching commercials for a slew of companies, among them the Gap, Levi’s, ESPN and the Game Show Network.

Coppola had been wanting to direct a feature but hadn’t found a project he felt would be distinctive. Because of his reputation and family name, he knew the film “would be examined more closely, and I wanted to really feel in my heart that it was something that only I could do, whether it was good or bad,” he says.

He started with a title, “CQ”--Morse code for the phrase “seek you,” a call for contact--a metaphor for trying to connect. Coppola was particularly inspired after watching the antic 1968 spy adventure “Danger: Diabolik” and thought it would be interesting to set a film in 1969 that imagined our present--at the time, the year 2000.

More ideas came from hearing his father’s stories of working for Roger Corman in Europe in the 1960s, shooting extra footage to cut into films Corman had bought. “He was a young guy who got involved in this B-movie stuff, aspiring to do more personal type of work, but happily doing genre stuff,” Coppola says of his father.

Coppola also found inspiration in what he calls “the sub-genre of artist-reflecting-on-their-life movies,” films like “8 1/2,” “Day for Night,” “Stardust Memories” and “All That Jazz.”

One other essential influence on “CQ” was the 1968 conceptual art film “David Holzman’s Diary,” a faux documentary account of a week in the life of a film student, which is a model for “69/70,” the cinema verite film that “CQ’s” Paul is making. L.M. Kit Carson, the actor who played David Holzman, appears in dream sequences of “CQ” as a dismissive film critic.

“It dawned on me that maybe I could make a movie that somehow was a fusion of those different types of movies I’m attracted to and somehow do it all--to make some kind of arty commercial film or commercial art film,” Coppola says.

Targeting More Than Cinephiles

Despite “CQ’s” film allusions, “I hope that it’s appealing to not just cinephiles,” he says. “It’s filled with references and quotes, but it’s meant to be taken as its own movie.”

In the lead role of Paul, which he concedes some will see as his alter ego, Coppola cast Davies, whom he had first seen in “Spanking the Monkey.” For the part of Felix DeMarco, a fun-loving, unwittingly arrogant hotshot director who is brought in to rework “Dragonfly,” Coppola cast his cousin Schwartzman (“Rushmore”).

Several reviewers have noted a resemblance in Schwartzman’s character to William Friedkin during that era, but Coppola says it’s unintentional. “I’d be embarrassed if William Friedkin thought I was poking fun at him personally, because it’s not true,” he says.

Casting the part of Valentine, the actress who plays the sexy spy Dragonfly, was more challenging. After Coppola auditioned scores of women, several people separately but coincidentally suggested model Angela Lindvall.

He met with Lindvall at a hotel in New York, where she did a cold reading on videotape. She initially turned down the part. “I’ve never acted before and I thought maybe I’d ruin the film if I did it, so I just decided no,” she says. Coppola tracked her down at a photo shoot in Spain and convinced her to go for it. “

The eclectic cast also includes Gerard Depardieu as a temperamental auteur, Giancarlo Giannini as a Dino De Laurentiis-type producer, Dean Stockwell as Paul’s father, John Phillip Law (of “Diabolik” and “Barbarella”) as Dragonfly’s employer and Billy Zane as an outer space revolutionary in the “Dragonfly” film.

“CQ” was unveiled at Cannes last year, where it drew mixed reviews and where the talk of the festival was Francis Ford Coppola’s re-edited “Apocalypse Now Redux”--admittedly, Roman Coppola says, “a pretty hard act to follow.”

He’s less stung by the reviews, which he expected, than worried that they could dissuade audiences who might like the film.

For his next film, Coppola is still kicking around ideas, but he keeps himself busy at the Directors Bureau, where the mandate is “to try to do things that are fresh and original and still work commercially. To try to straddle that thing which again comes up in my life and my movie,” he says.

Among Coppola’s recent projects: music videos for the Strokes and buzzed-about Australian band the Vines, and a commercial for the Gap with Ashton Kutcher.

With friends and colleagues like Jonze, Mills and Michel Gondry (“Human Nature”) now working in features, Coppola believes there is a burgeoning community of young talent, perhaps one that hearkens back to the New Wave directors upon which “CQ” draws.

Seeing his sister, who has a cameo in “CQ” as a producer’s mistress, make the well-received “The Virgin Suicides” inspired Coppola to get moving on his own first film.

“If you ask my friends, I’m kind of a slowpoke,” he says. “My friends say, ‘When are you getting married? When are you having kids?’ I’m 37, so I guess I’m pretty mature, but at the same time I feel like a kid.”