Taking such an approach, The Path to Paradise strays from the precepts of traditional auteurism – which is primarily concerned with identifying the recurring ideas that run through an artist’s work and the formal strategies that give expression to them – and instead regards Coppola’s creations as “rites of passage”, reflections of his mode of being, his temperament and moral character.

To make his point, Wasson focuses on Coppola’s personal work, as distinct from the films he made as a director for hire (when he needed the money to prop up Zoetrope, the company he founded). He takes us from You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), “its very title literalizing the first rite of passage”, to Apocalypse Now, during which his wife, Eleanor, became fearful that he was becoming like Marlon Brando’s Kurtz, and warning that he was “creating the very situation he went there to expose”.

And then from The Godfather films, in which the Al Pacino character’s reviewing of his family circumstances creates an opportunity for Coppola’s pondering of his, to One from the Heart, Wasson identifying its story about “lovers drawn apart by their fantasies, reunited by deeper acceptance and love” as Coppola’s way of thinking through his estrangement from Eleanor.

Wasson’s sources are interviews, diaries, news stories and other accounts drawn from a wide range of people with firsthand experience of the now 84-year-old filmmaker’s extensive career. Colleagues on both sides of the camera, business associates, journalists, critics and family members, including Eleanor, who wrote the admired Notes (1979), about the making of Apocalypse Now, and daughter Sofia.

The information Wasson gleaned from them might not always be trustworthy – some sources appear to have been off their heads at the time – but the author uses it all to take us inside Coppola’s hell-bent approach to his work and life and to illuminate his often fevered dreams of how it should be. And, although it’s only mentioned in passing, he evocatively links the director’s obsessive ways with the late Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima’s in relation to his art.

Citing a Vogue interview, Wasson tells us that, for Coppola, Mishima was the ultimate artistic hero, his ritual suicide a theatrical act that illustrated the depth of his beliefs. “Everything you always wanted to define, he tried to define once and for all. And on that final day of his life … he turned it all into an act of art.” Wasson’s Coppola never goes that far, but he seems to be constantly teetering on the brink.

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