Marlon Brando Worked With Francis Ford Coppola & Elia Kazan On 4 Of The Best Movies Ever Made

Marlon Brando is widely considered one of Hollywood’s greatest ever actors, but if it weren’t for two directors his legend wouldn’t be nearly as celebrated as it is today. Brando’s movies with Elia Kazan and Francis Ford Coppola bookended the prime of his career, but they were also the projects in which he did his best work. What’s more, Coppola and Kazan directed the actor in four movies which are now generally thought of as some of the best ever made.

Four of Brando’s five collaborations with these two seminal filmmakers feature in Rotten Tomatoes’ list for the 300 Best Movies of All Time, which is based on an aggregation of critic and audience ratings. Three of them also appear in IMDb’s Top 250 Movies, ranked by total votes. It’s the actor’s work with Coppola that’s won the most acclaim, with The Godfather and Apocalypse Now near the very top of many greatest movie lists. Yet Kazan’s 1954 movie On the Waterfront also has its fair share of admirers, who’d place it among the best films of all time.

Marlon Brando Worked With Coppola And Kazan On 4 Of The Best Movies Of All Time

Each Director Gave Him 2 Of The All-Time Great Movie Roles

In fact, both On the Waterfront and The Godfather are ranked in the top 10 Best Movies of All Time by Rotten Tomatoes according to critics’ and viewers’ scores. The Godfather is number two on the list, only behind L.A. Confidential, and it takes the same position on IMDb’s Top Movies list, below The Shawshank Redemption. Many would concur with the view that Coppola’s 1972 crime film is the greatest single achievement in cinema history. His later war epic Apocalypse Now is further down the Rotten Tomatoes list at number 70, but it features at number 56 on IMDb.

The fourth movie starring Brando that’s often included in discussions about the best movies of all time is A Streetcar Named Desire, which was actually released before any of his other collaborations with Kazan or Coppola, in 1951. Kazan’s film adaptation of Streetcar is number 245 on Rotten Tomatoes’ all-time list. It also appears at 754 on the all-time 1,000 Greatest Films list by They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?, which aggregates historical best films lists by movie critics from around the world.

Brando exploded onto the scene with his original Broadway performance as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, which is what convinced Kazan to make him his leading man in Viva Zapata! and On the Waterfront. It didn’t take long before the actor’s extraordinary charisma and application of Stanislavski’s method made the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sit up and take notice.

On The Waterfront & The Godfather Won Brando His Best Actor Oscars

The Actor Won His Two Academy Awards 18 Years Apart

Marlon Brando was nominated for his first Academy Award for portraying Kowalski on screen, and then again for depicting the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata in Viva Zapata! the following year. After Brando’s third consecutive Best Actor nomination, earned for playing Mark Antony in a Hollywood version of Julius Caesar 1954, it was fourth time lucky a year later, when he won the Oscar for portraying former prizefighter Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. The actor was essentially adapting the sensibility he’d brought to Stanley Kowalski three years earlier, but he managed to turn the roguish Malloy into an incredibly likable, sympathetic underdog.

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It would be 18 years before he’d win another Oscar, for playing the titular character, Vito Corleone, in Francis Ford Coppola’s screen adaptation of The Godfather. His performance was a dramatic transformation from the Brando Hollywood had been used to up to that point, and represented an incredible comeback from the position of indebted film industry outcast. Coppola had also had to fight hard to make Brando his Godfather, against the will of Paramount Studios, who the actor never forgave for their lack of support.

Kazan & Coppola Knew How To Get The Best Out Of Brando As An Actor

They Were The Only Directors Who Found Him Easy To Work With

It’s clear that no one could get a performance out of Marlon Brando quite like the two directors to whom he owed the most in his career. Many other directors allegedly found Brando difficult to work with, a claim Francis Ford Coppola responded to three years ago. Coppola said far from being a problem to work with on The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, the actor was “a kind of genius” who required minimal effort from his director during shooting.

Elia Kazan corroborated this view in an extended interview with Jeff Young, published in Young’s book Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films. The director was amazed by how few notes he had to give Brando while they were shooting together, and how easily the actor could get into character. “When he heard enough, he’d walk away,” Kazan explained, referring to the feedback he gave between scene takes. “I knew he’d gotten it. It was obvious. And he would start to behave naturally.” Acting was something that came completely naturally to Marlon Brando. No one understood this fact better than his two favorite directors.

Marlon Brando

Birthdate

April 3, 1924

Birthplace

Omaha, Nebraska, United States

Professions

Actor, Director