I STAYED in one of Francis Ford Coppola’s homes for a couple of nights. True story. Sitting in a living room drinking his wine, admiring his collection of DVDs, his art books. One of life’s highlights.

This was in Buenos Aires (lucky me!) the location for his underrated Argentinian family drama, Tetro. Coppola’s business empire – his movie making, his vineyards, his holiday rentals – suffered more oscillations in fortune than, oooh, perennial punchlines Partick Thistle.

He’s been up and down more times than Matt McGinn’s famous red yo-yo: from the artistic heights of the Godfather trilogy all the way down to the bankrupting failure of his beautiful neon romance, One From The Heart.

Coppola has never made things easy for himself, as Sam Wasson’s new book demonstrates, taking us on a switchback ride through the director’s vertiginous life – one that leaves you both fearful and dizzy with admiration.

Wasson immediately transports us back to the Philippines in 1977 and the making of Apocalypse Now. Here we see Coppola the artist as a supreme risk-taker, a gargantuan paternal figure, a glutton for big experience.

With a handful of Oscars from his mafia epic Coppola became Olympian. Nothing would hold him back from creating another masterpiece.

Typhoons trashed the set, Martin Sheen had a heart attack, but the show must go on. A corpulent sulky Marlon Brando – “bigger than a water buffalo” – gave it the moody brooding. Dennis Hopper acted like … Dennis Hopper. Things got madder and madder.

So where did Coppola’s manic creativity come from, this passion for glory?

Wasson points to serious competition in the family dynamic; a martinet of a father, a brilliant big brother. These tensions are reproduced again and

again in his movies as with Michael Corleone’s relationship with his brother Fredo or the slaying of the dreaded father figure Colonel Kurtz.

Add in childhood polio (rendering Coppola bedbound for a year) and you’ve got a bubbling brew of challenge that would crush a lesser mortal.

The young Francis dreamt incessantly. And once famous he continually pushed one step beyond, risking total madness.

Fear of failure – Coppola’s upbringing instilled this deep. After the success of The Godfather, he said: “I can fail for 10 years now.”

Paul Schrader thought him wrong: “He can fail for 50 years now”.

Some of Coppola’s memos are reproduced here where he sounds as speedily intense as Hopper’s war photographer. Wasson captures the zany, plate-spinning, Sufi dervish-like whirling, 78rpm nature of Coppola’s lifestyle.

He proposed buying a studio in Belize then upped the ante to buying Belize itself, the whole country. You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to think this guy needs lithium. Eventually, it gets prescribed. As for his compliance in taking the drug …

Folks were forever descending upon his zoetrope offices with batshit crazy ideas, minor artists deluded into thinking the company (like the similarly anarchic and fated Apple operation run by the Beatles) would give them a break.

When Coppola takes on the young George Lucas, he gives him one condition in his employ: “You have to come up with one brilliant idea a day.”

There was talk of making a film of Lou Reed’s Street Hassle, Devo doing a musical version of Animal Farm. Coppola’s enthusiastic support for his peers – Martin Scorsese, John Milius, Walter Murch – and their cross-pollination with scripts and technology makes the gang unbeatable in the early 1970s, just as traditional Hollywood is crumbling.

Wasson is perhaps overfond of techie talk and provides us with a page-long list of equipment Coppola must flog to pay off a loan. Meanwhile, Lucas – his protégé – is on a roll.

Spielberg once said: “Lucas has a bank called Star Wars, Coppola doesn’t have a bank – only courage and fortitude.”

Despite his financial disasters, Coppola clearly has a gift for overcoming failure. As with Samuel Johnson’s quip, we can depend upon the director’s mind to concentrate wonderfully when threatened with a hanging.

But will his new (and likely last) project Megalopolis see him at the Oscars one more time … or on the scaffold?

One thing’s for sure – he’s much too old now to abide by the apocalyptic mantra seen scrawled in his Vietnam masterpiece: “SELL THE HOUSE, SELL THE CAR, SELL THE KIDS”