Coppola on having a theme

Whether you’re shooting a series of videos, building a microsite, or developing a content marketing calendar, what keeps you pointed in the right direction? How do you know at any given moment that you’re making the right decisions?

Movie directors have to answer a ton of creative questions, big and small, every day. In a recent episode of “Fresh Air,” Francis Ford Coppola explains why he has always relied on a theme—preferably one word.

“Once in a while, you don’t know the answer. And that’s when you say, well, what’s the theme?

His theme for “The Conversation” was “privacy.” For “The Godfather,” “succession.”

“In the case of ‘Godfather,’ I would always know that as long as I was telling the story of succession, I knew what I was doing.”

What’s your theme?