Francis Ford Coppola is currently pimping his latest film, Tetro, yet another family drama in which the grown children of a string-pulling patriarch continue to feel their father’s overbearing influence. In the process of talking about “his craft,” Coppola has spoken to Movieline about how those two pesky sequels to The Godfather just shouldn’t have been made:

There were also reports a few years ago that you were involved in a potential fourth Godfather film. Care to clarify?

I don’t think Godfather ever should have had more than one movie, actually. It was not a serial, it was a drama. The first movie wrapped up everything. To make more than one Godfather was just greed. Basically, making a movie costs so much money that they want it to be like Coca-Cola: you just make the same thing over and over again to make money, which is what they’re doing now. But Godfather was not really a serial, you know? I mean, how would you spin off Hamlet?

More ghosts!

Ghosts are good. [laughs] You know what I’m saying. Some things lend themselves to being serialized, but there’s also a law of diminishing returns. I mean, even as demonstrated with Godfather, once it shows you its stuff and has all these things you’ve never seen before, then each time you make it again, it’s gotta be less interesting.

Well, Coppola is certainly skilled with words and could arguably convince someone that he’s sort of talking about serialization in the same sense as the contemporary nuisance known as “Gratuitous Remakes Gone Wild.” However, it really pisses me off that Coppola is attempting to distance himself from the studio “greed” that he feels was responsible for both sequels to The Godfather. Hell, it’s not as if Coppola didn’t (willingly) get paid handsomely for his work as a director to both sequels. Further, I’m not exactly sure why he feels it appropriate to discount the importance of, in particular, The Godfather: Part II, which continued the transformation of Michael Corleone from wide-eyed prodigal son to the embodiment of pure evil. This cinematic portrayal of Michael’s systematic corruption was elemental in lifting the veil of mafia romanticization, which both Puzo and Coppola, at the time, insisted was an incredibly important element of the family saga. (Seriously, I could go on forever with this topic but will spare you, since I’ve already done so with the entirety of The Godfather Trilogy.)

Oh sure, Mario Puzo originally wrote The Godfather novel as a standalone piece. However, the novelized tales of the Corleone famly continue to this very day, and I gotta say that, even after Puzo’s death, Mark Winegardner has been carrying that torch quite well. What true fan of The Godfather wouldn’t want to know more about the underlying motivation of characters like Tom Hagen? Hence the rather riveting and continuing serialization. Coppola, get over yourself, man.