francis ford coppola distant vision

We’ve waited years for any news on Francis Ford Coppola‘s next feature, which few people seem to have any clear picture of. News from May of 2013 told us it’d be a generation-spanning epic concerning an Italian-American family, a coming-of-age story, and, more obliquely, something concerning dance. Intriguing, but also the extent of it — and this is a long time to wait for more on something you anticipate.

With the helmer at this year’s Marrakech International Film Festival, however, press have managed to get some new — and, I think, plenty substantial — information out of him. First and foremost, its title is Distant Vision, which relates to the real subject: television. But more than running parallel with television’s development — birth, growth, and “the end of television as it turns into the internet” — he’s become keen on using that medium, more specifically a live rendition, as his mode of distribution. [Screen Daily]

Don’t say it isn’t a movie, though. Coppola’s already voiced his distaste for the borders people draw between forms, and so the coinciding of focus and convenience — being that Distant Vision, in his words, “may be very long” — should only be something to embrace; the rest is noise. Said he at a Marrakech, “It has all become one. There is no more film, there is no more television – there is cinema. And it can be everywhere and anywhere and it can do anything.”

Coppola has embraced the ability to do anything — remember when Twixt was going to be a remixed-in-person experience? — so producing a lengthy, live-televised project isn’t so far out of reach. But will the people controlling television let him? If Distant Vision will, as suggested, indeed be his last film, it’d be a fittingly off-center cap to a career that destroyed so many boundaries.

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