“Certainly one advantage of ‘youth’ in the arts is ignorance, to know so little as to be fearless. To not grasp that certain things one may dream up are actually impossible to do. When I finished Apocalypse Now I of course thought, ‘If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have even tried [this].” Certainly old age brings ‘experience’ and that is not to be discounted, but in the arts, fearlessness is a more desirable genie than experience . Fearlessness is cousin to innovation, whereas experience can be the parent of fear. Once you’ve fallen out of the tree a few times; felt the pain of those bruised knees and suffered the embarrassment of the inevitable ridicule — it’s much more difficult to be as daring in what you do, or even what you attempt to do. So…I’ve decided the best course is to become an amateur and accept that I know next to nothing and love almost everything . Recently I realized that the favorite decade of my life was 50, a wonderful age for a man — at the peak of his health and experience, yet flexible enough to enjoy and also temper it. So reluctant was I to give up being in my fifties, that I began to call myself ‘fifty-ten’ or ‘fifty-eleven ‘. Now I’m ‘fiftysixteen’. And so today, like some inflated East European currency that gets two zeros lopped off, I’ve decided to lose the ’50’ and just be sixteen. Next year I’ll be seventeen, which is exactly the age that I was when I very seriously began to direct plays.” — Francis Coppola on certain dilemmas he’s faced in recent years, writing on his Youth Without Youth site.