Francis Ford Coppola up with fellow Oscar-winning directors Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen for an anthology film called "New York Stories". Coppola directed the "Life Without Zoë" segment, starring his sister Talia Shire and also co-wrote the film with his daughter Sofia Coppola. "Life Without Zoë" was mostly panned by critics and was generally considered the segment that brought the film's overall quality down. Hal Hinson of The Washington Post wrote a particularly scathing review, stating that "It's impossible to know what Francis Coppola's "Life Without Zoë" is. Co-written with his daughter Sofia, the film is a mystifying embarrassment; it's by far the
Francis Ford Coppola in cinema. The near 3-hour-long epic, which chronicled the saga of the Corleone family, received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics and fetched Coppola the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, which he shared with Mario Puzo and two Golden Globe Awards: for Best Director and Best Screenplay. However, Coppola faced several difficulties while filming "The Godfather". He was not Paramount's first choice to direct the movie; Italian director Sergio Leone was initially offered the job, but declined in order to direct his own gangster opus, "Once Upon a Time in America". Peter Bogdanovich was then approached but he also declined