Coppola's Hideaway - filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola

Talk, Nov, 2001 by William Georgiades

There may be a mosquito or two at the Apocalypse Now director's new Caribbean resort but who said paradise was always a picnic?

THE TURTLE INN LOOKS NOTHING LIKE KURTZ'S COMPOUND IN Apocalypse Now, and getting there isn't as complicated or treacherous as Willard's river journey. Yes, there are a number of natives slavishly devoted to its owner, who is referred to as "Mr. Coppola" by one and all, but there are no bodies on sticks. Where Kurtz made a friend of horror, the Turtle Inn makes a friend of beauty. Still, director Francis Ford Coppola's newest resort in paradisiacal Belize on the Caribbean Sea does owe a certain debt of inspiration to the Philippine setting of one of his most famous films.

"Whenever you leave a place you like, you have a desire to hang on to some part of it," Coppola says from his production office in Brooklyn. "So [after I did the movie] I started looking for places as beautiful as the Philippines but closer. In 1981 I read that British Honduras was becoming Belize and I became intrigued. Then I read about the high literacy rate and the fact that everyone spoke English and Spanish, and I went on a trip with my son."

Once there, Coppola trekked to the jungle highlands and bought an abandoned lodge called Blancaneaux, which he opened to the public in 1993 (after using it for more than a decade as a family retreat). While waiting to be discovered as the next Al Pacino or Teri Garr, hotel guests could wander nature trails, ride horses, dive off waterfalls, scribble in a hammock, and, of course, eat lots of pasta accompanied by Coppola wine. If a little more adventure was required they could hop a plane to the idyllic coastal town of Placencia for the day.

A small fishing village at the end of a peninsula resting between a vast lagoon and the sea, Placencia now boasts Coppola's second resort, the Blancaneaux Turtle Inn, which consists of seven huts on 650 feet of white sand and which Coppola bought from an America called Skip White in August 2000.

At first sight the Turtle Inn looks to be every movie star's just reward. It would be perfect as the setting for a languid B-movie sex romp or as a South American drug dealer's compound or, better still, as the place the chiseled hero and busty heroine go for the closing credit sequence, having triumphed over great odds. In fact the producers of Temptation Island approached Coppola about shooting their second season of love and loss there. He declined.

Viewed from the sea, Turtle Inn features on main house on the left (Coppola's home in the compound, available to guests when he's away), four large cabanas to the right on the beach, and three smaller cabanas raised high on stilts directly behind the beachfront rooms. A few feet away from the sea is a large, thatched dome that houses a semicircular bar framing the sea just so, and a restaurant, the floor of which is sand. Throw in some swaying palm trees, a blinding sun, and several terribly sweet employees and you've got the picture.

"It's changing all the time," Coppola says the day after returning from a quick trip to the inn for a meeting with the architect and contractor to discuss the planned development for the coming season. He's particularly excited about the fact that while the lodge is Guatemalan in design and aesthetics, the inn is more infused with Bali. "At first we did a kamikaze job to change the infrastructure and change the kitchen and build a nice bar. We tried to give it more style but keep it rustic and just get through the first season. Later we'll build a dive shop and put in a pool and bring in dive instructors." There are also plans to build some new cabanas and to put in some outdoor bathrooms.

Despite the changes, occupancy will be kept to a civilized few. "In terms of 'keys,' as hotel people call it," says Coppola, "there will be 24." At the moment there are eight.

The front cabanas (which go for $210 a night) are all airy and beautiful, while the back ones (at $150) were literally just being finished when I was there last April. Though they are no doubt spiffed up by now, the varnish hung heavy on the doors, and a hole in the grassy ceiling allowed not entirely exotic creatures to crawl in. The back cabanas were also shelter for the work gear, so all day power tools would rage like chain saws (in fact they were chain saws) as workers hurried to finish everything.

Occasionally guests have arrived to discover that there's no running water. One couple was given a bucket of yellowish water to do whatever it is one does with buckets of water in a bathroom. This is being amended, Coppola says. "We're just about to build a 35,000-pound water tank and a pump to make the showers." Certain guests, finding the lack of water a problem, received stays at the eight-year-old Blancaneaux Lodge in place of their Turtle Inn reservations. "The lodge is more finished," Coppola says. "It took years to make. So the success of the Turtle Inn is a question of how much money I put into it. Successes require more money than failures." Few men could imbue a line with such gravity.