His accidental career as a vintner - he and wife Eleanor long ago bought a house on a patch of Northern California land, site of a small vineyard, and things took off from there - has allowed him to do something he hasn't done in more than 30 years: dream up an idea, write a screenplay, and go off and shoot a film. Tetro, that dream, that film, opened Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse.

"I didn't get into the wine business to be successful, to make a lot of money," says Coppola, whose Rubicon Estate Winery and its wine and food offshoots have nonetheless done just that. "It was something that sort of happened."

And that success has allowed Coppola, 70 now, to go back to his roots as an indie, art-house kind of guy. He yearned to return to the type of moviemaking he did in the 1970s, after apprenticing with low-budget genre-meister Roger Corman - work like You're a Big Boy Now, The Rain People, The Conversation.

After a decade (the '90s) of director-for-hire work - Bram Stoker's Dracula, Jack, The Rainmaker - Coppola began to reassess his life, his career.

"I wanted to make a film, but I didn't know where my place was," he says, on the phone one morning last week, expressing his frustration with the "so-called Hollywood industry way" and its emphasis on familiar formula fare.

"Experimental, that's a bad word, you're not supposed to say it," he says with a chuckle, acknowledging that experimenting was exactly what he ached to do. After a few false starts, he made Youth Without Youth, a trippy philosophical number based on a novella by famed Romanian writer Mircea Eliade. Filmed in Bucharest and around the Black Sea, it was released in 2007. "About four people saw it," Coppola deadpans.

And now, Tetro - a black-and-white reverie about a reclusive writer and the younger brother who comes looking for him in a bohemian precinct of Buenos Aires. Coppola lived in the Argentine city for more than a year, writing, casting, shooting, editing.

"With Youth Without Youth, I finally decided that I would just finance it myself and use my old Roger Corman skills to try to make a good-looking, beautiful movie for less money than normal," he explains. "And then I found myself with a second career . . . and Tetro is the second film of my second career. And I'm thinking, well, if I can make them for the money that I have, which is greatly helped by the winery and the successful businesses, then I can make them be more personal, and I can write original screenplays and not have to go begging hat in hand to get people to let me do it."

Tetro stars Vincent Gallo, of Buffalo 66 and Brown Bunny fame (or infamy), in the title role. Coppola had written the part for Matt Dillon, his long-ago Rumble Fish star, but then there were scheduling conflicts.

"I lost Matt Dillon, and someone down there in Argentina said, 'What about Vincent Gallo?' I saw Buffalo 66 and liked it, and thought he had a great look . . . and then everyone said, 'Oh, don't use him! He's a nightmare, he's crazy, he's difficult!'

"But he came down and spent a few days with me, and I found him extremely intelligent. Yes, [he has] an exotic sense of humor - which I think you don't realize he's pulling your leg - but I committed to him and found him a pleasure to work with. All in all, it was a very wonderful collaboration. . . . It's a pity that he isn't in more things, really."

Newcomer Alden Ehrenreich plays Tetro's sibling. Klaus Maria Brandauer is the brothers' domineering father, a world-renowned conductor. Spanish actress Maribel Verdú (Y Tu Mamá También) is Tetro's girlfriend. There are flashback scenes in saturated color, with musical and dance interludes inspired by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman. The Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño is referenced. Tetro is eclectic, to say the least.

Or, as Coppola puts it, "it's heartfelt and handmade."

Tetro is also very much about family, a theme the filmmaker explored on an epic scale in The Godfathers I and II - pictures that won Coppola five Oscars and changed the course of his career.

"Well, I would think family is important to most people," he explains. "But I think in my case, because for some unknown reason my father moved around a lot" - he was the musician and composer Carmine Coppola - "we tended to always be in new neighborhoods, going to new schools. So the people I really loved and focused on were this little family of five: the talented father who we were all hoping was going to get his break, though it didn't seem to come; my mother, who was more magical, a childlike person but who was the housewife and who was very beautiful and a supporter of this guy's dream; and then, an older brother and a younger sister. . . .

"Emotionally, I attached myself to the mystique of this family."

Coppola reports that his daughter, Sofia - with whom he first traveled to Argentina, when she was "20 or 21" and had a short film in a festival there - is currently at work on a new feature: Somewhere, with Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning.

And as for his next project?

"I'm in a writing mode here, which means I'm happily at home, and just enjoying this beautiful place where we live, and I'm writing a script and doing a lot of reading.

"This is the no-pressure part of life," he adds, "where I'm not just wringing my hands over, you know, 'Oh, the actor isn't showing up,' or 'This isn't happening' and 'That's not working out. . . .'

"I feel like my life's a clean sheet of paper, and I'm getting to write something that will be personal. But by personal, that doesn't necessarily have to mean it's about a family. . . . We'll see."

philly/blogs/ onmovies.