Youth Without Youth

Based on the novel by Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth tells the story of a professor who is struck by lightning and miraculously begins to decline in age but grow in intellect.

The film is the first to be directed by Francis Ford Coppola since The Rainmaker in 1997.

Coppola described Youth Without Youth as a very personal project of his. When it premiered at the Rome Film Festival in 2007, he reportedly asked people to find it interesting and consider seeing it more than once.

Over 170 hours of footage were captured on a Son HDC-F900 digital video camera in high definition and Walter Murch edited the film entirely in Final Cut Pro. Murch was the first editor to cut a major motion picture on Final Cut Pro for Cold Mountain in 2003.

Youth Without Youth received mixed reviews in its limited release in December 2007. The film has a score of 43 on Metacritic and a 28% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The Los Angeles Times' Carina Chicano says the film poses more questions than it answers, giving intriguing hooks but drowning under their own weight. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer agrees, calling the film "beautiful, but empty."