In the beginning, The Corleones made him famous, and Francis Ford Coppola is still making films about family. Just not that family.

The famed filmmaker, 70, continues with what he calls his second career with the release of Tetro, a drama about brothers from a dysfunctional family. This film, along with his 2007 release Youth Without Youth, are a new chapter in a career that included The Godfather movies, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, Peggy Sue Got Married, Rumble Fish and The Cotton Club, among many others.

In Tetro, the sins of the father really are visited upon the sons. Vincent Gallo and Alden Ehrenreich star as brothers separated by family drama, but it's drama that belongs to the previous generation.

During a phone interview from California, Coppola says, "Every family has its story. There's always some brother or sister who's the successful one, or they married well or started a car agency for Toyota or something," he says, laughing a little.

"Suddenly they're the rich one, so all the kids like to go to their house because they have the swimming pool. And then people stop talking to each other and you don't know why. From a kid's point of view, you never understand why the adults are acting like that. So there's that kind of theme, family rivalries and stuff like that, that I wanted to look at in my own family, where there's all kinds of talented people in all kinds of careers. Generally, I feel certain films should be personal and should expose some of the feelings of the author."

Not that Tetro is autobiographical in any way, he hastens to add. It's just that it employs things from his own experience, such as opera and theatre.

Since Coppola is in a position to make any sort of film he wants to make, the question now is whether he's enjoying this new phase in his work.

The answer is a very big yes.

"It's what I wanted to do originally, when I was 19 or 20. I wanted to make films like Billy Wilder was making, after I saw The Apartment, but I also wanted to make movies like Alfred Hitchcock made when I saw Vertigo, and I also wanted to make films like Federico Fellini when I saw La Strada. I think young people start out like that, they want to do the things they find beautiful or impressive. I wanted to make movies like Stanley Kubrick's.

"So, here at age 70, having already had the other kind of career, I feel I'm starting a second career. And for me it's like having a clean sheet of art paper, and I can cook up whatever I like."

He's already working on the third movie of this second career. He's not ready to say too much about it, but he will say this: "I'm known for a gangster movie and a war movie. That's what I got famous for, but this is neither a gangster film nor a war film. It's more personal, like The Conversation or some of my other films."

Coppola talks about popular movies and indie films, and says in passing that he made Rumble Fish as an 'art film' for young people.

"So I'm going to make it about kids, but it's going to be in black and white and use all the tools of cinema. People liked it, but it was an enormous financial disaster," he says, laughing. "Every time in my career I tried to make, dare I say it, an art film, it never did well ... The more unusual the film, usually the less well it does."

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