At the 2009 Cannes Film Festival U.S. director Francis Ford Coppola said of his latest film, the "autobiographical" Tetro: "Nothing in this movie really happened, but it's all true."

Coppola's quip brought to mind another U.S. director, Terrence Malick, who when asked why there was a twenty year gap between his previous film, Days of Heaven (1978), and his then-current one, The Thin Red Line (1998), replied: "There's something to be said about not making a movie."