At an age when some directors might be content to take a fat pay cheque for, say, a relatively easy little drama or maybe sit on the porch and enjoy a glass of wine and reflect on past glories, of which there are many, Francis Ford Coppola has been off running around Europe spending his own money making an “experimental” film.

The Godfather, the film that changed his life and won him huge acclaim as arguably the most gifted director of a golden generation – Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas and the rest – also changed radically the direction of his career, and it’s only now, he says, that he’s finally got it back on track. At 68, he feels like a student film-maker again, taking risks and ruffling a few feathers. And that makes him very happy indeed.

“The Godfather changed a lot for me, because I became famous and important,” he says. “And after it I should have said I’m going to go back to what I was doing before. But you don’t. Suddenly I had money, so I bought a big house and invested in a magazine – and lost it of course. And later, after many, many years, I thought, ‘Well, as a young man I had an old man’s career, now maybe as an old man I can have a young man’s career.’

“What I would really like is to be a student, an experimental film-maker, to make films that I don’t know how to make. That means that they will not be so perfect, but maybe they will be full of something else that might be interesting.”

The result is Youth Without Youth, Coppola’s first film for nearly 10 years, a piece that sits happily with the innovative films, such as The Rain People, The Conversation and the magnificent Apocalypse Now he made half a lifetime ago.

“I always wanted to be a ‘personal’ film-maker,” he says. “But there are other words you can use – experimental, you are not allowed to say that; avant-garde, that’s even worse; auteur, what does that mean? But the idea was that you make films out of love, out of interest in doing it rather than a job.”

When Youth Without Youth, a sprawling, often surreal, at times stunning muse on time, love and life starring Tim Roth premiered at the Rome Film Festival, the audience was rather bemused by it. Coppola doesn’t seem particularly bothered.

“There was a Variety review that said that the film was a ‘mish-mash’ of stories and it didn’t know which story it was telling. And mish-mash is a way of saying they didn’t like it, I know that.”

Coppola is in Rome – one of his favourite cities, where they treat him like a long-lost, very special son – and has just returned from lunch. He’s tanned but heavy, dressed in light slacks with a mauve shirt open at the neck and his grey hair swept back. He moves slowly across the room.

“Obviously, I’m very overweight and I don’t walk around as much as I used to,” he explains. “You can exercise to stave off old age, but it will get you in the end. I’m OK. I do my little things.”

Several members of his family are here with him – his wife of 45 years, Eleanor, their daughter, Sofia, now an acclaimed director in her own right after Lost In Translation and Marie Antoinette, and her two-year-old daughter, Romy.

“Do you know I now have one granddaughter of 21, so in theory, pretty soon I could be a great grandfather. I think that would be very nice,” he says. Sofia’s success is clearly a source of great pride. “She is very tough, Sofia. She likes what she likes and that’s great because her films have her personality. If you took her name from a film, you would still know it’s hers because of the way she uses music, the way she uses images.”

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