Fantasy Life

"Look at this!" I remember saying to my amazed parents when I slowly raised my left arm. Stricken with polio in 1949, I had lost all feeling in the arm and from the waist down. The doctors said I'd never walk again. I was 9. I shocked everyone by recovering 18 months later. But my guess is that I never would have become a filmmaker and developed such a rich fantasy life necessary for my work had it not been for my battle with the disease.

Back when I got it, polio was an epidemic in New York City. Without warning, I went from being an active New York kid who loved baseball and being a cub scout to an invalid, confined to bed and isolated. The illness started with a high fever, which was painful and scary and lasted two days. After that, I was paralyzed. I wasn't frightened, though. But I was lonely. I had been quarantined from other kids, except for my older brother and younger sister.

To fill the empty hours, I entertained myself with the latest gadgets and my imagination. I was lucky because my wonderful father, a revered classical musician, was always bringing home the high-tech equipment of the day, such as a tape recorder and television set, long before most families owned them. And my beautiful, childlike mother had already instilled in me a belief in magic, feeding my love of fairy tales and storytelling. I was an avid reader of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm and comic books.

I would sit in bed and create my own little world. I'd do ventriloquism in a squeaky voice, using the simple language of a kid, and make my puppets dance across my lap. I also worked out sound tracks for the silent cartoons I played on a 16-mm projector, with music from records and added lines I had written and tape-recorded.

Those were also the early days of live television, which I loved, especially Horn and Hardart's Children's Hour. I longed to be one of the show's talented kids who tap-danced and sang. Of course, that was so far from where I was then. Being paralyzed, I had to night-crawl on my bedroom floor just to change the channel; there was no such thing as remote control.

Because of my fascination with stories, I decided to become a playwright. But I was so frustrated by my early efforts, I cried myself to sleep many nights while attending military school at age 16. So instead I decided to direct for stage and enrolled as a theater major at Hofstra University on Long Island. And then one afternoon in 1956, while a freshman, all my interests came together as I watched Sergei Eisenstein's 1927 silent masterpiece October: Ten Days That Shook the World, about the Russian revolution. I knew instantly I could combine storytelling with the innovation and technology of cinema.

My career took off a few years after film school at UCLA. By 1971 I had won my first Oscar, for co-screenwriting Patton, followed the next year by my success with The Godfather. Later I made a wide variety of films, such as Apocalypse Now and One From the Heart, a romantic musical shot entirely in a studio, just like the live television shows I had enjoyed as a 9year-old.