Francis Ford Coppola

I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini. That was an unusual profession for a kid to have as his father. He would dress up in a tuxedo. A concert musician has to practice a lot, and my earliest memories are of that. He was a great musician, very knowledgeable, and he used to tell us the stories of the operas, and all about the composers. He had a lot of knowledge, and he would make a point of telling us about it. I had an older brother who was five years older than me. He was a very successful student, a very handsome kid. Having an older brother by that many years was really an edge that I had. I had an older brother who would protect me. He was a very sensitive and talented boy, and he became interested in literature. So at the same time that I had all this information from my father, I also had a brother who was giving me books at a young age that I would not normally have run into. Brave New World, of course, which was fun, because it was sort of science fiction. As a kid, he was showing me books by James Joyce, and André Gide. So I was really stimulated at a younger age than I normally would have been exposed to that kind of thing.