By 1971, Francis Ford Coppola had written and directed several cheap films produced by Roger Corman, directed The Rain People (starring Godfather co-stars James Caan and Robert Duvall) and won an Academy Award for his screenplay of the George C. Scott film Patton. But the reason he was chosen as director of The Godfather was because he was young (i.e., the studio assumed, cheap and pliable) and Italian, which certainly wouldn’t hurt when the inevitable protests arrived. But several big names were considered before Coppola: Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront), Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde), Peter Yates (Bullitt) and Greek director Costa-Gavras (Z, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film). Author Mario Puzo wrote that although Costa-Gavras was interested in the film as an “indictment of American capitalism … he declined because it was too American and he felt that he, as a foreigner, couldn’t handle the nuances.”