The pressure is unbelievable," says Francis Ford Coppola. "This is just another movie. It's a Godfather movie. But it's become a big sporting event. It's about Francis—is he going to die or live?" In the last frantic days before the release of The Godfather Part III on Christmas Day, Coppola feels like a bull facing an army of matadors—the public that's been waiting for the next chapter in the Godfather saga for 16 years, since the release of the second Godfather in 1974. It's doubtful whether a movie director has ever felt this much pressure. Godfather I (1972) and its sequel were that rarity, a tremendous critical and box-office success that earned its studio, Paramount, a total of $800 million, plus nine Oscars and a permanent place in American culture.

For 15 years Coppola was besieged by successive regimes at Paramount, begging him to do a third Godfather. Always he refused, cracking that the only way he'd ever do it was as a farce, "Abbott and Costello Meet the Godfather." It was Paramount's current chairman, Frank Mancuso, who finally broke down Coppola's resolve. After a succession of classically inane ideas of how to do a Coppola-less Godfather, involving directors like Soviet expatriate Andrei Konchalovsky and actors like Sylvester Stallion and Eddie Murphy, fate came to Mancuso's aid in the form of financial catastrophe that overwhelmed Coppola. A slew of box-office disappointments like One from the Heart, Rumble Fish, Gardens of Stone and Tucker forced the director into an apocalypse now of debts; litigation and bankruptcy. Mancuso ambushed Coppola as neatly as Don Corleone waylaid his victims. A rat-tat-tat of dollars—$3 million to direct, $1 million to write the script, 15 percent of the box-office gross—and the deed was done.

Problems, problems: What followed was nearly a year of filming, in Rome, Sicily and New York, that made the problems of the first two "Godfathers" look like a makeup fix on a Pee-wee Herman movie. Budget Problems, starring a rise from the projected $44 million to $54 million. Casting Problems, starring the last-minute drafting of Coppola's inexperienced, 18-year-old daughter. Sofia, to replace an ill Winona Ryder. Most of all Coppola Problems, starring a brilliant American director who couldn't understand why the gods kept singling him out for troubles and torments. "What is there about me that invites this controversy?" asks Coppola. "Why do I have to be an oddball on the edge of extinction? Why do people enjoy that?"

Between daily self-questionings in this Jobean vein, Coppola managed to finish his movie in time for the Christmas 1990 release that Paramount had desperately beseeched. Coppola points out that meeting this deadline caused the kind of financial hemorrhaging that escalates budgets. Working with an "army of editors," he says, means that "we're paying maybe 50 times what it would cost if we could just mix with one editor." Plaintively he adds. "I started out saying 'I'm going to be a good boy. I'm going to do everything perfect. I'm going to work day and night.' And unavoidably I got tagged with my budgets going over. It's impossible to be a good boy." Mancuso bears out Coppola's self-defense. "No one was more responsible about the budget than Francis himself," he says. "He did everything possible to live up to it. I'm upset with the perception that he's irresponsible. It's absolutely untrue."

Now, as technicians are whizzing out 1,800 prints for a wide national release (Coppola is rightly concerned about the quality control that could affect Gordon Willis's lusciously somber, Renaissance-hued cinematography), reactions are coming in from professionals, critics and cinema sneaks who have seen the early screenings. These range, perhaps inevitably, from thumbs turned downward with dislocating force to huzzahs for the best Godfather of them all. While the nation prepares for an orgy of Godfolderol, let's pan-and-scan through one of the most dramatic production stories in movie history.

First, Coppola and Mario Puzo (whose 1969 best-selling novel was the cause of it all) meet in the spring of 1989 to bat out a screenplay. They do this in the inspiring ambience of a gambling hell in Reno, Nev. "We'd work for hours and when we ran out of ideas, we'd go down to the casino," says Coppola. "Mario would play roulette and I'd play craps or 21. After a while we'd be embarrassed about losing so we'd go upstairs and work on the script."

Pooping out: Coppola needs six or eight months to write the script. He and Puzo get six weeks. This means that when shooting starts in Rome he spends every night plus weekends making revisions. When Robert Duvall angrily rejects Paramount's cheapskate offer of $1.5 million to reprise his role of Tom Hagen, the Corleone family consigliere (Al Pacino gets $5 million as mob scion Michael Corleone, Diane Keaton $2 million as Kay, his ex-wife), Coppola has to write Duvall out of the script and beef up George Hamilton's role of B. J. Harrison, Michael's smooth WASP lawyer. Paramount doesn't want Hamilton (a pale reflection of the studio's recalcitrance on Gl, when they didn't want Marlon Brando. Pacino, Keaton and just about everyone who made the movie a classic. But those were autres temps and autres schmoes).

The Duvall matter is soon eclipsed when Winona Ryder, who has been making one film after another, poops out. The timesqueezed Coppola calls on his daughter, Sofia, a Mills College freshman on holiday, to play the role of Michael's daughter, Mary. Sofia, fresh from the shower, is whisked to the studio to do a scene immediately. Everyone, from Paramount officials to Coppola's wife, Eleanor, is aghast. The director is accused of "child abuse" and warned that nicekid Sofia, who had only played walk-on bits in her father's films, would be "scarred for life" by vicious reviews. But Coppola, who has in fact written Mary with Sofia in mind, accepts the trade-off of an unfledged actress for "the real thing." "Mary is this kind of idealized, innocent daughter," says Sofia, "and he definitely sees me as his innocent daughter." Once again fate has linked the mythic Corleones with the real Coppolas. Sofia, who joins Coppola's sister, Talia Shire (as Michael's sister, Connie), Coppola's 80-year-old father, Carmine (composer), and sundry other relatives in what the director calls "the biggest home movie in history," is clearly answering an inner need of her father. "I knew the only way I could come through with this film was to make it as personal as I could." says Coppola. Assigning Sofia a place in the fateful Corleone saga clearly helps Coppola to exorcise the grief that still clings to him over the loss of his 23-year-old son Gian-Carlo, who died in a boating accident in 1986 during the filming of Gardens of Stone.

The gutsy Sofia breaks down and cries several times under the pressure, but she gets stronger. She is aided by a dialogue coach who takes her through "psycho-relaxation" exercises, and by the entire cast, especially Andy Garcia as Vincent, the sexy killer who falls for first-cousin Mary. Whatever the fate of the film, it's clear to everyone that G3 is going to make Garcia a big star, as Gl did for Pacino and G2 did for Robert De Niro. The darkly handsome 34-year-old (The Untouchables, Internal Affairs) can smolder, explode, charm and, best of all, act. In his scenes Garcia loves to improvise, land unexpected punches, which delights Coppola but drives the meticulous Gordon Willis nuts. As Coppola puts it: "Andy is an exciting and essential part of the story; without him it would be rich old guys brooding about their sins."

While Garcia is heating up the film, Pacino discusses Shakespeare with Bardo-philiac Coppola, who sees elements of Lear, Hamlet and Coriolanus in the character of Michael. Coppola creates a diabetic seizure for Michael inspired by the mad scenes of Lear and Hamlet. But the Method-trained Pacino says: "As much as I love Shakespeare, I couldn't really connect it to my role. I was busy figuring out how to get from one side of the room to another." Coppola, says Pacino, is "an amazing asset. He fills you up with the world of the movie."

It's a tough world. Coppola's problems range from a financial lawsuit that crops up in the middle of shooting, to worrying about Diane Keaton, who is going through a real-life romantic crisis with Pacino. "She didn't really want to do it," he says. "It's tough to come back 16 years later and still be in the thankless job of a supporting player. You could tell it was tough for both Diane and Al, especially when they were both in Rome but not living together."

Another problem is the violence that Paramount, and Godfather fans, expect Coppola to cook up not as fast-food action with gore sauce but as haute cuisine. "Everyone's seen everything," he says. "The trick is to stage it so that some detail or odd thing makes it stick in your mind and renew its horror," Despite his stated aversion, Coppola comes up with some recipes for carnage in G3 that are classics of shock, worthy of Kurosawa, whom he calls "the great father of screen violence."

Bedeviled: The real violence is the disruption and anxiety that buffet Coppola as he wills together these huge, exhausting Godfather movies, his recognized masterpieces toward which he has ambivalent feelings. They are "their movies," he says, meaning they really belong to the system, not to the artist. He says he prefers his small, intimate films like The Rain People (1969) and The Conversation (1974). Of course he is wrong and he surely knows it. There is more poetry, more inspired invention, more fun and wit and vision and power in the G-movies than in any but a few American films. The fear and terror that bedevil Coppola on his globe-trotting, money-gobbling, deadline-crushing Godfathering may really be the fear that this is his true work, work he has been dragooned, cajoled and forced into by the failure of his more cherished projects. "It's not as though we were walking around in the Godfather movies thinking we were making art," he says. "We were just trying to get through it." Not to force a comparison, but Coppola's favorite, Shakespeare, probably said the same thing. Necessity is the Godmother of invention.