Hotel Lutetia is not much like entering Don Vito Corleone's study. There is too much light for one thing - a bright Parisian winter day is spilling into the room through broad windows and slanted skylights.
Nor, at the age of 80, does the great film director have the imposing size of the crime kingpin he inscribed into cultural lore, via the corporeal heft of the 47-year-old Marlon Brando, in his 1972 masterpiece, The Godfather.Instead, the mould-breaker behind not just cinema's most famous mafioso trilogy but the epic Vietnam drama Apocalypse Now (1979), tautly wired Oscar-nominated thriller The Conversation (1974) and a flamboyant reading of Dracula (1992), is sitting discreetly in a corner chair.
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