Francis Ford Coppola took the stage to claim the Lumière Festival’s lifetime achievement honor, the Lumière Prize, in a stirring celebration that marked the festival’s 10th edition on Friday night in Lyon, France.
The four-time Academy Award winner accepted the prize after a series of video tributes, musical performances and testimonials from family, friends and colleagues that left the filmmaker visibly moved.
Festival directors Thierry Fremaux and Bertrand Tavernier played masters of ceremony, introducing the director’s wife, Eleanor, and son Roman, as well as filmmaker Bong Joon Ho and actress Nathalie Baye, both of whom spoke about their experiences with the honoree and his work, while directors Sofia Coppola and James Gray beamed in with pre-recorded messages.
While Baye reflected on her time serving on Coppola’s Cannes jury, Bong spoke of his experience seeing “Apocalypse Now” nearly 10 years after the film’s initial release. The Palme d’Or winning film was banned in South Korea until 1988, explained Bong, and so the “Parasite” director could not see it until he himself was a fledgling young filmmaker, noting that the film fueled his own desire to work in this field.
When Coppola took the stage, he displayed particular appreciation for the tribute. “You actually represent my highest goal,” he told the recent Cannes winner.
“You work on something, you put it out there and you don’t know where it’s going to go or who’s going to see it. And I always felt that the greatest gratification of all is if some young person sees something that I worked on and decides that they want to write a novel or make a film,” Coppola added.
“That really is the greatest consequence of all. It means you have become immortal.”