Whether it’s “Despicable Me,” “Star Wars” or “The Wolf of Wall Street,” many movies and TV shows have paid homage to “The Godfather” over the years. Helmed by Francis Ford Coppola, considered one of the greatest directors of all time, the trilogy represents filmmaking at its absolute finest — a fact that has been acknowledged time and again as creatives across generations continue to draw on it as a source of inspiration. While Coppola is rightfully best known for his mafia masterpieces, he’s proven his range extends far beyond that. He’s experimented with gothic horror, psychological thrillers and wartime epics, among other genres, to cement his place on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Coppola was born into a family of artists — his father was a composer and his mother was a part-time actress. He harbored a passion for the arts from early on, creating 8mm home movies and playing the tuba to earn a musical scholarship to the New York Military Academy. After deciding to instead attend Hofstra University, Coppola determined that his long-term calling lay in filmmaking. He later graduated from the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, where he honed his trademark directing and screenwriting styles that would launch his career.

The early years of Coppola’s time in Hollywood yielded mixed results. Though he did not receive immediate opportunities to direct big-time feature films, Coppola made his talent known in other ways on set. He served as a director’s assistant, dialogue director and sound man, going from one production to the next and developing a well-rounded understanding of all the different roles necessary to make a motion picture successful. Eventually, his boss — the celebrated independent filmmaker Roger Corman — gave Coppola his first shot at directing a feature film in 1963. 

Coppola turned Corman’s belief in him into “Dementia 13,” a low-budget gory horror movie that turned into a cult hit. He followed up his debut with several other under-the-radar feature films that brought him acclaim in the filmmaking community. In particular, Coppola’s 1969 road drama “The Rain People” garnered positive reviews. During production, Coppola showed off the diehard commitment to narrative storytelling he would later become widely known for. The film was shot across 18 states with a skeleton crew of ten people over the course of five months. 

From his directing experiences in the 1960s, Coppola knew that he wanted to make unconventional movies that did not always fit into the formulaic Hollywood studio system of the time. He founded the production company American Zoetrope alongside George Lucas in 1969 to create a space where he could pursue his unique vision of filmmaking unfettered by the constraints of bigger studios that had bottom lines to protect. This decision paid off handsomely for the director, who experienced incredible success in the following decade. “The Godfather” was released in 1972 as a three-hour-long adaptation of Mario Puzo’s best-selling mafia novel and netted Coppola his first Academy Award for Best Picture. Not only did it win the top prize at the Oscars, but audiences and critics alike recognized it as one of the best films of all time. To this day, “The Godfather” sits atop rankings such as the American Film Institute’s “100 Years…100 Movies.”

“The Godfather Part II” hit screens in 1974, to even more celebration. Some of the creatives in Coppola’s brain trust, like George Lucas, had initially criticized the movie for attempting to interweave two storylines, that of Vito Corleone’s upbringing and Michael Corleone’s reign as the godfather of the mafia family. However, audiences who saw it appreciated Coppola’s daring decision. It won six Academy Awards, giving Coppola another Best Picture win as well as a Best Director win. Though Coppola’s last movie in the trilogy, “The Godfather Part III,” did not make the same splash in 1990 that its predecessors did, the expert craftsmanship and epic storytelling in the three movies by Coppola have immortalized them in the public consciousness.

Coppola delivered several other monumental works, such as “Apocalypse Now,” the epic Vietnam War film in 1979, and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” the innovative spin on the classic vampire tale in 1992, that deserve just as much acclaim as his Godfather trilogy. Through his spectacular filmography, Coppola has proven himself to be a timeless director whose movies should be watched by everyone who professes themselves to be a cinephile.