Earlier this month I was invited out to dinner for the first time by a world-famous Hollywood film director. It was not clever of me to be blasé about checking the time we agreed on. I had thought that by arriving at 7.20pm at The Square, central London’s smart restaurant for wine lovers and hedge fund managers, I would be comfortably early. I arrived to find Francis Ford Coppola and his bright young sales person Heather de Savoye sitting side by side in the bar area looking somewhat discomfited.

To make matters worse Coppola’s light blue tie, a gift from his wife, Eleanor, was scattered with the number 7. “My lucky number,” Coppola, born April 7 1939, told me, trying to ease my embarrassment. He really is a very normal, easy-going representative of “the industry”.

Perhaps having set down roots somewhere as agricultural as the Napa Valley 37 years ago, when he bought the old Gustave Niebaum wine estate, has helped keep him sane, despite the potential insanities associated with filming Apocalypse Now and the aggrandising achievement of directing The Godfather. “Is it true there’s a fish restaurant in London called The Cod Father?” was one of his opening sallies. Furthermore, of southern Italian stock (who infused his early diet with wine), he is very family. He always took his wife and children along when his work required him to travel, though when they set off to the Philippines for Apocalypse they ended up staying five times as long as the anticipated six months.