Telefilm Canada is introducing a new system to measure the success of Canadian films. For years, the crown corporation measured the success of the films it funds merely by domestic box-office numbers. A new index will now take in worldwide sales, as well as give points to awards and film-festival appearances, and the ratio of private backing a film generates. by Guy Dixon.

Telefilm’s old system failed to account for international box office and DVD sales, to say nothing of factoring in the acclaim films receive. Such accolades have led to well-established careers and numerous jobs for actors and technicians, even though this wasn’t being officially measured, says Carolle Brabant, executive director of Telefilm.

For instance, according to older ratings systems, the 2009 Quebec comedy De père en flic – with a home box office of close to $11-million – was a clear hit. But the 2010 film Incendies might not be considered much of a winner with a box office of only about $5-million – despite the fact that it was nominated for an Oscar and won eight Genie awards, including best picture.

In fact, most Canadian films seemed to fall below expectations under the old system.

A decade ago, former Heritage Minister Sheila Copps set a goal for films to aim for 5 per cent of domestic box office – an attempt to rally Canada’s then-faltering film industry. But given the number of Hollywood films clogging multiplexes across Canada, English-Canadian films typically gross only 1 per cent of the market or worse. Quebec films do only marginally better at around 3 per cent.

And while Canadian films such as 2008’s Blindness often do very well overseas or in DVD and video-on-demand sales, these indexes haven’t been factored into whether they’ve been a “success.”

So, on Wednesday, Telefilm announced a new Success Index. Now 60 per cent of a film’s score will be based on sales figures, 30 per cent on awards and film-festival appearances and 10 per cent on how much of a film’s funding was private as opposed to public.

“The fact that we’re combining the cultural and commercial aspect into an index is quite unique,” says Brabant.

“A good example is [director] Guy Maddin,” she says. “He’s a true international star. His work has been recognized around the world. But his films are not necessarily reaching huge box office in Canada.”

And for films with strong overseas and DVD sales, Brabant argues that the new index better reflects the current reality of the film business, and helps to define what a 5 per cent box-office target might really look like. The industry is now multinational. Most large films have some foreign backing and therefore have some expectations of box-office and DVD sales overseas.

“We see it as an important tool to actually achieve that 5 per cent,” Brabant says. “Just having box office as the most important measurement was not sufficient.”

The new Success Index not only changes how individual films are measured, but how Telefilm itself is measured. Are they doing a good job of allocating public funds for films?

“It has always struck me, and maybe it’s from my background as a chartered accountant, that it was pretty unique in this industry to measure our success mainly from what we’re doing in Canada,” Brabant says. “When you look at companies in other industries – Bombardier or Cirque du Soleil, for example – these companies are not only successful in Canada, but they’re successful all over the world. I thought this was something that was missing [in Telefilm’s measurement].”

Francis Ford Coppola spoke to Cameron Bailey, the director of the Toronto International Film Festival, in front of a sold-out audience at TIFF’s Bell Lightbox multiplex.

During the discussion, Coppola also took questions from audience members about working with A-list actors, his writing process, screenwriting and rumors about another Godfather movie.

Coppola and Cameron Bailey, co-director of the Toronto International Film Festival, chat about Coppola’s career during an event at this year’s festival.

When Francis Ford Coppola was a young filmmaker, he wanted to make what he calls “little art films.”

“I think many of my colleagues felt the same way, but [we were] involved in quite a dance,” he told Bailey. “You’re always doing something that will make a lot of money so that you can wake up and make the films you want to do.”

Coppola, who directed The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, revealed that his earliest films — like The Rain People and The Conversation — were more like what he’d hoped to do over the course of his career. But then money and life got in the way.

“I had to get a job, and of course, the job was The Godfather,” he says. “That made me be something I didn’t know I was going to be. I became a big-shot director. If you take a young Long Island Italian guy and give him endless possibilities, then you’ll see what kind of crazy things I did in the course of my career.”

Coppola’s most recent films — Tetro, Twixt and Youth Without Youth — are much like his earliest pre-Godfather movies. That’s partially because Coppola was able to finance his most recent films himself. It’s a financial arrangement familiar to the award-winning director. He also financed 1979′s Apocalypse Now — notorious for its troubled production period — after studios refused to get involved.

“It could have been because there hadn’t been a so-called war film about [the Vietnam War], and studios were very cautious,” he says. “The script for Apocalypse was considered interesting … but nobody wanted to do it, so I thought, ‘Of course, I should do it.’ ”

Coppola mortgaged his properties to finance the film, which took much longer to finish than he had anticipated.

“We were supposed to be [on set] less than a year, but we ended up being there two years,” he says. “I was pretty scared.”

And Marlon Brando, who played Kurtz in the film, was scheduled to be on set in the Philippines for just three weeks. When he showed up, his physique was not exactly what Coppola had in mind.

“He had promised me that he was going to be a little thinner,” he says. “The issue was, if he was a runaway Green Beret officer — it sounds silly, but [I was thinking] what kind of uniform should he wear? They don’t make size XXXXXL … uniforms. So … I had to dress him somehow.”

Coppola suggested cutting Brando’s hair off so that Brando would at least resemble the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness. But Brando disagreed. For an entire week, the two men sat in a houseboat on set talking — but not filming — while Coppola struggled to figure out what to do.

“And on the Friday [of the first week Brando was on set], I walked in, and there was Brando sitting there with his head shaved, bald. And I said, ‘But Marlon, you said it wouldn’t work. You said you read Heart of Darkness and the idea for Kurtz that way wouldn’t work.’ And he said, ‘Well, I lied. I never read it. I read it last night.’ So he read it last night and came around to this image.”

Coppola decided to dress Brando in black pajamas, hoping to create the appearance of a gigantic person — instead of an overweight person — on-screen.

“That’s the way I got around the uniform issue,” he says.

Listen to a section of the In Conversation With Francis Ford Coppola provided by NPR www.npr.org