Francis Ford Coppola was warned he’d never walk again after terrifying diagnosis Francis Ford Coppola was warned that he might never walk again after he contracted polio as a child.
Francis remembered seeing the kids in ‘iron lungs’ who were all crying for their parents, and explained: ‘I remember being more frightened for those kids, and not myself, because I was not in one of those things.’.
It was so crammed with kids that there were gurneys piled up three and four high in the hallways because there were so many more kids than there were beds in the hospital,’ he said:.
The 85-year-old director recalled feeling ‘frightened’ for the other kids on the hospital ward, only to realise his own situation was worse than he initially thought.
‘The idea was that if you were immobile, you wouldn’t further damage muscles,’ Francis told Deadline, recalling his experience.
