Francis

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeFrancis Ford Coppola has admitted he was “heartbroken” not to win Best Director for The Godfather at the Oscars in 1973.However, he also paid tribute to the man who beat him, Bob Fosse, who took home the prize for his work on Cabaret.Writing on Instagram, Coppola recalled: “Like every young aspiring film director, I dreamed of one day winning the Best Director Oscar and holding that…

In an archival clip, which filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola posted online, the young actors all take turns with the lines Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola has made an Instagram post about the unique way he cast his adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. The movie, which came out in 1983, starred several notable actors — Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, Patrick Swayze, and Ralph Macchio, among others — but they didn’t necessarily audition for the roles they got;…

Pope Francis issued a stark warning on Wednesday of the “perverse” dangers of artificial intelligence — even noting he was a victim. “We need but think of the long-standing problem of disinformation in the form of fake news, which today can employ ‘deepfakes,’ namely the creation and diffusion of images that appear perfectly plausible but false (I too have been an object of this), or of audio messages that use a person’s voice to say things which that person never said,” he wrote in a message commemorating World…

AI Roundup: Several notable developments took place in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) today, January 24. Pope Francis warned against the dangers of AI, acknowledging that he too became the victim of a deepfake photo last year. He called for regulation of AI that will enable its use towards the greater good. Meanwhile, a new study claims that North Korea is developing AI and machine learning (ML) to achieve a wide range of tasks.All this, and more in today's AI roundup. 1. Pope Francis warns against AI…

Nearly five years ago, acclaimed filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola talked about his plans to finally create a movie he’s had cooking in his head since the ‘80s. He even tried to make it during the early 2000s, but 9/11 made that impossible, since he felt it would be in bad taste. But twenty years later, he’s finally made Megalopolis, and it’ll see the light of day later this year.Will You Click Windows’ New Copilot Button?During a recent episode of the Accutron podcast, Coppola confirmed it would be “a few months” of…

My earliest reading memoryTolkien’s The Hobbit, read around the time of my sixth birthday, when I was home from school with mumps. It turned me from a painstaking decoder of printed letters into someone flying through a new medium. Books have been portals for me ever since. Many other things too, but portals first.My favourite book growing upCS Lewis’s Narnia books. It was the sorrow of my life at the age of 10 that there wasn’t one more of them to read. A few years ago I found myself in a position to do something about…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeKeanu Reeves has recalled once giving director Francis Ford Coppola magic mushrooms as a birthday gift.“I gave Francis Ford Coppola, once, for his birthday, some mushrooms,” the 59-year-old actor told the Inside Of You Podcast with Michael Rosenbaum. “While we were doing Dracula.”Reeves starred alongside Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder and Anthony Hopkins in Coppola’s 1992 vampire romance…

Today, December 14, there were some interesting reports coming from the artificial intelligence (AI) space. Ahead of the 57th anniversary of World Day of Peace, Pope Francis urged world leaders to ensure that progress made in developing AI tools “will ultimately serve the cause of human fraternity and peace”. In other news, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared briefly lost for words when he met with an AI-generated version of himself. This and more in today's AI roundup. Let us take a closer look.Pope warns of AI…

When Francis Ford Coppola was at his frenzied peak, he created astonishing worlds onscreen. Offscreen, he was intent on doing the same, striving to build a utopian creative community with his American Zoetrope and Zoetrope Studios. While pushing boundaries and challenging conventions, however, Coppola spread himself thin, which undermined his vast ambitions. For a long time, however, he came out on top with films including “The Godfather,” “The Godfather II,” “The Conversation” and “Apocalypse Now.” Until he didn’t. The…

When Ryan O’Neal died Friday at the age of 83, the “Love Story” actor’s troubled personal life presented challenges to those who wanted to remember his positive qualities, which family and colleagues said included his “lethal combo” of charm, humor, good looks and talent. As it turns out, one of the more surprising but “gracious” tributes to this “complex” Hollywood star came from Francis Ford Coppola, who shared a particularly painful history with O’Neal. In 1986, Coppola’s 23-year-old son Gian-Carlo was killed in a…