Francis Ford Coppola, Who Says He’s ‘Broke,’ Is Selling a $1 Million Watch

The famed director will put some pieces from his personal collection up for auction later this year.

By Jacob Bernstein

There are basically three reasons people auction off their prized possessions: death, divorce and debt.

The last of these was the reason Francis Ford Coppola was speaking on Friday morning over Zoom.

“I need to get some money to keep the ship afloat,” he said from Rome, while describing the seven timepieces he would be offering for sale on Dec. 6 through Phillips, a leading auction site in the worlds of art, antiques and, especially, watches.

Losing great gobs of money can almost be seen as a Coppola family sport.

In 1982, Mr. Coppola, best known for directing “The Godfather” trilogy, made a costly whopper of a movie musical called “One From the Heart.”

As with many of his passion projects, he put up much of the financing for it himself.

Over the next decade, its failure led to a string of bankruptcies. In 1992, he described himself in a Chapter 11 filing as owing $98 million to his creditors and as having assets of around $53 million.

He re-emerged, kept making movies and became something of a collector. In addition to buying a small trove of Patek Philippes and Audemars Piguets — coveted among watch connoisseurs — he plunked his name on fancy resorts and became the prototype for A-list Hollywood talent in the liquor business by amassing Northern California wineries and bottling the booze.

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Then, in September 2024, Mr. Coppola’s latest film, “Megalopolis,” came out.

Well over $100 million was spent just making it.

The film depicted a futuristic city full of rampant oligarchy. Yet again, Mr. Coppola said the project was largely self-financed.

Much of the money came from selling two wineries, The San Francisco Chronicle reported.

But its box office gross was just $14.4 million.

Mr. Coppola has not given up on the idea that it will eventually make money. “Many of my films earn out over time,” he said on Friday, citing, for example, his masterpiece “Apocalypse Now,” which also drove him into debt, but managed to sell $150 million worth of tickets at the box office over the course of several decades.

How “Megalopolis” will do the same in today’s less theater-centric world is anyone’s guess.

So far, Mr. Coppola has resisted bringing it to streaming platforms, because he believes it needs to be screened in a theater to be truly understood. And within months of the film’s release, he was openly telling people he was broke.

“I don’t have any money because I invested all the money, that I borrowed, to make ‘Megalopolis,’” he said in Marchduring the “Tetragrammaton” podcast, speaking with the music producer Rick Rubin. “It’s basically gone.”

At the center of Mr. Coppola’s sale with Phillips is a timepiece that he designed himself in 2014 in collaboration with F.P. Journe, a Swiss watch company whose horological marvels are expensive enough to make Rolex look like Swatch.

Called the FFC, it has an openwork design, which is watch speak for timepieces that instead of having conventional dials put the guts on display. (They’re also sometimes referred to as skeleton dials.)

In the center of the face is a gloved hand. The fingers disappear and reappear in various configurations depending on the hour.

It was released commercially in 2021, and retails for around $1 million.

Just a handful have been made and, in 2021, a prototype sold for close to $5 million at Only Watch, a biennial charity auction that is held in Geneva and is sponsored by Prince Albert II of Monaco.

Another of the FFCs is owned by the man behind its initials.

“I only wore it a handful of times,” he said, explaining that it was simply too expensive to insure.

Paul Boutros, the deputy chairman and head of Phillips Watches for North America, professed to have little idea what Mr. Coppola’s might fetch later this fall. But, according to Mr. Boutros, starting bid will be around (or above) $1 million, which is less than one percent of what Mr. Coppola’s film cost to make.

The other watches he is selling are two Patek Phillipes (a Calatrava with a sales estimate of $6,000 to $12,000 and a World Time with an estimate of $15,000 to $30,000), a Blancpain Minute Repeater (estimated price: $15,000 to $30,000), an IWC Chronograph ($3,000 to $6,000), a different F.P. Journe ($120,000 to $240,000) and a Breguet Classique ($4,000 to $6,000).

Mr. Coppola is keeping his Audemars Piguet Perpetual Calendar. (“I’m going to give that to my great grandson,” he said.) His only Rolex is already gone. (“I think I gave it to my neighbor, who was a hero in Afghanistan,” he said.) And he is back to wearing something “much more plebeian.”

By which he meant the Apple Watch on his wrist.

Jacob Bernstein reports on power and privilege for the Style section