In "The Kid Stays In The Picture" (autobiography of Robert Evans, who helped produce The Godfather) he says that Coppola did not initially want to make the film and had to be convinced. He also forced Coppola to make The Godfather longer and pushed back release to do so, in order to tell the fuller story of the family.
I watched the documentary adaptation of his book and it is quite interesting, Paramount helped to pioneer the practice of helping to foster good books for film adaptation - The Godfather being the most notable example.
Coppola also said tha he did not want to direct the second movie of the saga, so he asked three conditions: to have no interference, a lot of money and to name the the movie the Godfather part 2. Strangely the third condition was the one which was most difficult to satisfy.
Of those three conditions it’s the one that sounds the most like it’s just there to give the studio a chance of getting the last word in a negotiation.
I don't care at all about note taking, but I am obsessed with algebra, and seeing how Coppola evaluates the "directors' homomorphism": first analysing Puzo's linear (aperiodic crystal) text into a set of chunks of meaning ("glass beads") explicitly connected by arrows and implicitly connected by order in The Book, then forgetting everything superfluous (in general, novels contain way more ideas than feature-length screenplays), and finally synthesising a new linear video stream encoding the few remaining beads (plus a few of your own, if you're feeling cosettish?); seeing that would almost be worth being indebted to Don Corleone.
[Some day (and that day may never come) I hope to be able to carry out, as masterfully as Coppola, the work of transmutation]
I learned this fact because I had a first date with a girl who suggested that place, knowing I'm a writer. Five years later I chose that same spot to propose :)
The alternative would have probably been worse, considering that Trieste has been slowly dying since WWI, more or less. Like Venezia (and arguably, various other parts of Italy), it was built to do something that is now largely unnecessary, so it will likely survive only as a curiosity.
And, by coincidence,in The Godfather Part II he shot some scenes in the actual city of Trieste. The Ellis Island building is a an old fish market in Trieste.
On the subject, I really enjoyed The Offer miniseries about the story behind making The Godfather.
It's fiction, not documentary, but really well made.
I watched the documentary adaptation of his book and it is quite interesting, Paramount helped to pioneer the practice of helping to foster good books for film adaptation - The Godfather being the most notable example.