LOS ANGELES – The year’s fresh face on the independent-film circuit is a guy named Francis Ford Coppola.

Yes, THAT Francis Ford Coppola, the director behind “The Godfather” trilogy, the man with all those Academy Awards, the filmmaker who went into the wilderness on his own dime and came back with “Apocalypse Now.”

For all that, the 68-year-old Coppola talks as though he were an unknown just out of film school, making the sort of smaller-budgeted idiosyncratic stories that never would cut it at blockbuster-minded studios.

Though Coppola repeatedly put himself on the brink of financial disaster on such films as 1979’s “Apocalypse Now” and his 1982 musical flop “One From the Heart,” he has not lost the daring to use his own money to shoot his films.

The latest: “Youth Without Youth,” a strange tale of swirling ideas and images that stars Tim Roth as an elderly language expert given a second chance to realize his dreams after a freak lightning strike restores his youth.

Coppola adapted the screenplay from a story by Romanian author Mircea Eliade, whose protagonist is overwhelmed with regret over a lost love and the academic tome he has been unable to finish. Those themes resonated with Coppola, who had not made a film in 10 years and was wearied by failed attempts to make “Megalopolis,” the big-budget story of an idealist aiming to build a utopian city.

Eliade’s story “dealt with a man roughly my age who was reaching a point of disillusionment about himself and lost opportunities, as in the case of the girl he should have run off and married when he was a student, when he had his nose in the books too much, and as an old man realizes he’s going to die unfulfilled and without the woman he loved,” Coppola told The Associated Press in an interview.

“And he gets this extraordinary lease on life. Which for me was, “Well, I’ll go and make this movie like a student. I won’t be a 68-year-old.”‘

He thought he’d return to his youth, when he started out on original projects such as 1969’s “The Rain People” before wild success with “The Godfather” drew him into big Hollywood.

Coppola would not disclose the precise budget of “Youth Without Youth” but said his winery and other family businesses have done well enough that he can afford to make a film a year costing up to $20 million without jeopardizing his finances.

That’s a dream come true for Coppola, who rails against the studio interference and red tape that can stifle a filmmaker’s creative vision.

In a way, the director is following the lead of daughter Sofia Coppola, who co-starred in “The Godfather Part III” and rose to filmmaking stardom with her own personal little tale, “Lost in Translation,” while her dad was stuck in his “Megalopolis” quagmire.

“‘Megalopolis’ was very ambitious, probably would be very expensive,” Coppola said. “And I never quite felt comfortable that I had licked it, licked it to the extent that if I brought it to Warner Bros., they would say, “Yeah, let’s make this.’ …

“So I was very frustrated. Here I was, time was going by, I was very aware that it would be Christmas, I would see my family, it would be New Year’s. Next thing I know, it was June, and I was no further along, year after year. Just do the math. I realized, how many years do I have to have this revived career that would be more along the lines of what I had hoped when I was younger?”

A friend who read the “Megalopolis” script introduced Coppola to Eliade’s writings. “Youth Without Youth” dealt with themes of consciousness and time that Coppola had been exploring with his own screenplay.

Starting in the 1930s, the story follows Roth’s Romanian scholar, intent on suicide but instead reborn as a young man on the run from Nazi scientists desperate to study his transformation. The film flits from thriller to romance as Roth’s character rediscovers his lost love, then moves into the supernatural and themes of reincarnation as his darling regresses through past lives.

“When I read it, my first impression was, how the hell do you do this?” Roth said. “And when I asked Francis that, he said, ‘I don’t know.’ So that was the beginning of the relationship. At least he was honest about that. He said, “We’ll figure it out as we’re going.”‘

Coppola quietly bought the film rights to Eliade’s story, hoping to shoot it undercover in Romania, with no one but family and colleagues knowing he was making the movie.

Word leaked out just as shooting was about to begin, but Coppola still was able to make the film in relative peace, since the only money man he had to answer to was himself.

Coppola said he was embarrassed that he was unable to make “Megalopolis” after talking about it so publicly for years. He’s willing to discuss his next film, “Tetro,” in general terms, as a quasi-autobiographical tale drawing on elements of his family history, but said he prefers keeping details of his upcoming films more to himself now.

“I find without telling anyone, it’s sort of like having a million dollars in your pocket in cash that no one knows you have. When you talk a lot about what you’re doing, you’re sort of losing the energy that you need to actually do it,” Coppola said.

Coppola plans to shoot “Tetro” in 2008 then move on to the next idea. He said he might eventually consider resurrecting “Megalopolis,” but for now, he’s content with more-affordable films that he can pay for out of his own pocket.

“I don’t feel a big studio wants to do movies in this kind of adventurous way, where making a movie is like asking a question, and the finished film is the answer. They want to know the answer before they even finance it,” Coppola said.

“As long as everything holds out and I stay within my budget limit, I can keep making one movie after another, unless the audience stays away in droves, and they say, “Hey, stop making movies, Francis. We don’t want to see them, anymore.”‘