Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration
I just finished a film a few days ago, and I came home and said I learned so much today. So if I can come home from working on a little film after doing it for 45 years and say, “I learned so much today,” that shows something about the cinema. Because the cinema is very young. It’s only 100 years old.
Even in the early days of the movies, they didn’t know how to make movies. They had an image and it moved and the audience loved it. You saw a train coming into the station, and just to see motion was beautiful.
The cinema language happened by experimentation – by people not knowing what to do. But unfortunately, after 15-20 years, it became a commercial industry. People made money in the cinema, and then they began to say to the pioneers, “Don’t experiment. We want to make money. We don’t want to take chances.”
A lot of what Coppola says can be applied directly to the video game industry. It’s an even younger medium, and industry has come to define it early. I’m just glad that video games have a (seemingly) much larger community of independent creators, which allows us to keep pushing the medium forward.
