Upon taking the stage to accept a lifetime achievement award from the Publicists Guild on Friday afternoon, legendary auteur Francis Ford Coppola promptly announced a podium pivot. “I am taking the unprepared speech I was going to unpreparedly give, and I’m throwing that away,” said the 82-year-old after giving a quick shout-out to longtime publicist Annalee Paulo on her publicist of the year nomination. “I’m going to speak of what I was like when I was a boy because so many formative things happened.”
Coppola then gave a quick summary of what it was like to grow up in Queens in a diverse neighborhood filled with Polish, Armenian and Russian families, suggesting that it shaped his worldview as a global citizen. He used it as a segue to talk about the ongoing conflict in Ukraine that began when Russian forces invaded the country a month ago. “My heart is so filled with love of Ukrainian Americans,” he said, noting their “wonderful” dance and choral competitions. “It breaks my heart what is happening in this absurd reality of this world today, and I can’t not speak about that.”
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That said, he kept the remarks brief and pointed, offering a simple solution for the war. “I know of what I speak when I say if one word would just be said, one word with the force of meaning ‘stop,’ it would stop,” he said. “Believe me, anyone who knows this, [knows] the difference between NATO and Russian forces is 25 times greater. And Putin is not an insane, deranged person; he’s a calculating person, and if someone said ‘stop’ and meant it, he would stop.”
Coppola — feted by veteran industry figure Sid Ganis on a program that featured fellow honorees MGM’s Michael DeLuca and Pam Abdy, and Reservation Dogs duo Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo — closed his speech by confessing that “none of this is relevant” to the event of his life’s work, but “I’m saying it to you because you’re the publicists, and this is a word for the hope of the future.”
He concluded, “To be an American is to be a global citizen, which is what we are, and let the world know that.”
Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Francis Ford Coppola ditches prepared remarks to speak out on war in Ukraine. He urges someone to tell Putin (“I confess I met Putin”) to simply stop, saying that if they did and meant it, he would. pic.twitter.com/IlXuTcPwZo
— Chris Gardner (@chrissgardner) March 25, 2022
