Youth Without Youth (2007) on Netflix
In 1938, Dominic Matei, a 70-year-old linguistics professor, travels to Bucharest to end his life and is struck by lightning. He recovers younger, with powers that draw Nazi attention.
- Netflix2.4/5
- IMDb6.1/1014,807 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes33%
Trailer
Plot summary
Dominic Matei teaches linguistics in Piatra Neamț and has spent decades hunting the origin of human language. At 70, convinced the search has left him alone and unfinished, he travels to Bucharest in 1938 intending to take his own life. A lightning strike changes that: he recovers as a much younger man and shows abilities he cannot explain. Word of him spreads, and Doktor Josef Rudolf takes an interest. As Nazi Germany closes in on Romania, Matei stays with Professor Stanciulescu, who urges him to flee the country. Matei reaches Switzerland, where, years afterward, a young woman named Veronica crosses his path.
Cast
- Zoltan Butucas Dr. Chirila
- Dan Astileanuas Professor (as Dan Astilean)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Youth Without Youth (2007)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Francis Ford Coppola came across Mircea Eliade's novella while researching his long-gestating passion project Megalopolis. Identifying with its plot of a 70-year-old man struggling to complete an ambitious project of his own, he shelved Megalopolis and self-financed the adaptation with $1 million of his own cash.
- In 2024 Coppola told Rolling Stone that Youth Without Youth was never meant to be successful but was a test for himself, teaching him what making a movie really means after he had "sort of retired" as a professional director since The Rainmaker in 1997.
- Coppola hired a 28-year-old cinematographer straight out of film school to shoot on cheaper high-definition digital video, and with help from his friend George Lucas he equipped a Dodge Sprinter cargo van for all the camera gear, a technique learned working with Lucas on The Rain People.
- Coppola optioned the script on the sly, did not tell his wife Eleanor and went to Romania to film, financing the production with incentives from movies he had made in Europe and some "scrappy" filmmaking.
- The cut kept shrinking after shooting: from an original 210 minutes down to 170, then to 140, before Walter Murch brought it down to the desired 124 minutes.
