The Big Picture
Star Wars was influenced by various sources, including filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, who inspired the character of Han Solo. Both Coppola and Solo are known for their daring, risk-taking nature and their willingness to take on ambitious projects. Coppola and George Lucas had a close friendship and collaboration, starting their own production company together, which faced challenges but ultimately contributed to their success in the film industry.
It’s no secret that Star Wars is a huge boiling cauldron of influences that George Lucas dosed together to create something new, original, and fresh. From the Samurai movies of Akira Kurosawa to the legendary structure devised by Joseph Campbell, nearly all of it has been extensively analyzed and explained – but not everything! One of the key aspects of the making of Star Wars was Lucas’ friendship with a clique of young and ambitious filmmakers like him. You may have heard of them: Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian de Palma. And one of them inspired the creation of none other than Han Solo himself.
Of course, none of those legends look anything like Harrison Ford, so we’re clearly not talking about the looks (all due respect to them), but rather about the attitude of our favorite scoundrel. When coming up with Han Solo, Lucas was inspired by his own friend Francis Ford Coppola. Different as they may be, the legendary filmmaker and the smuggler have a lot more in common than it would seem, and that’s what this is about.
Francis Ford Coppola and Han Solo Have a Lot in Common
Image via 20th Century Studios
Everyone loves a scoundrel with a heart of gold, and that’s the perfect description of Han Solo. In the original Star Wars, we meet him in the Mos Eisley Cantina as he’s negotiating with Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) to take them to the planet Alderaan. Things quickly take a turn for the worse when his passengers are identified by the Empire as fugitives, but he’s promised a handsome reward, so why not? Han is the kind of guy who trusts his guts as much as he trusts his skills, and he’s not afraid of taking huge risks if he knows the payoff may be equally big. And he always pulls it off.
That’s what George Lucas wanted when using Francis Ford Coppola as one of the basis for Han Solo. Coppola is not a smuggler and his line of work is a lot less dangerous than Solo’s, but he has no problem in taking his own huge risks if it means getting his project done. Some time ago, Coppola himself admitted that Lucas based Han Solo on him precisely because of his daring nature: “George felt that I just took crazy reckless chances, that I would jump off the mountain without knowing what was there to land on, and that I would end up with no money, so he created him. I’m sort of the dashing failure.” Of course, no one in their right mind would call Francis Ford Coppola a failure, but dashing? Well…
George Lucas certainly nailed the inspiration, because Francis Ford Coppola and Han Solo do have a lot in common in terms of both of them liking to take risks. The filmmaker’s career is one of the most successful in Hollywood, sure, but it’s also so filled with great stories, it became the subject of many works itself. For example, Paramount+ recently launched The Offer, a series about the making of The Godfather, and there is even another whole other feature film in development about it, with Coppola himself being played by Oscar Isaac – and he’s very dashing. Another of his classics, Apocalypse Now was a big gamble in terms of production, its story becoming one of the best documentaries about movie production ever made, Hearts of Darkness. Even now, Coppola worked directly on The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone while doing pre-production for Megalopolis, his dream project that he’s funding from his own pocket. It’s the worst nightmare of any insurance company.
In Star Wars, Han Solo didn’t have to manage multi-million-dollar productions for feature films, but he has his fair share of risk-taking, often putting his and his friends’ lives on the line, but, like Coppola, being so sure of his skills, he knew it couldn’t go wrong. The Death Star rescue in A New Hope, the asteroid field sequence in The Empire Strikes Back and the whole rebel attack on the forest moon in Endor in Return of the Jedi are perfect examples of how he too “jumps off the mountain without knowing what is there to land on,” as Coppola says.
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Francis Ford Coppola Was Once George Lucas’ Mentor
Image via LucasFilm
George Lucas was only able to build a character using Coppola as inspiration because they obviously know each other very well, even starting their relationship with one of Coppola’s typical risky endeavors. The two of them met as young filmmakers in the Warner Bros. studio lot, right after Lucas won a filmmaking scholarship that put him on the set of Finian’s Rainbow, a musical starring Fred Astaire and directed by then-30-year-old Coppola. They hit it off immediately, consolidating their friendship and collaboration in Coppola’s following movie, 1969’s The Rain People, a traveling road movie that he wrote and directed while Lucas made a documentary about it.
Later that same year, Coppola and Lucas would once again come together to start their own production company, American Zoetrope. The whole objective of this was to build an environment that fostered and financed filmmakers to provide them with artistic and creative freedom without having direct studio interference. The first movie by American Zoetrope was Lucas’ first proper feature film, sci-fi THX-1138, based on his student film of the same name, and in YEAR he would release his second one, American Graffiti, under Coppola’s banner, too.
Sadly, not everything can go right all the time, and American Zoetrope faced a lot of trouble for its idealistic view of filmmaking, which made studios think twice before funding projects. But it was still a risk Coppola took, and one Lucas saw firsthand and even took part in, which may also explain why he became so “conservative”, according to Coppola. And in the movies, even Han Solo couldn’t make it work every time, too – he was frozen in carbonite, almost eaten by giant space worms, and captured multiple times… But the risks paid off (most of the time), and that’s what makes him and Coppola such important figures for movie fans.
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