Saying that he always intended for the films events to fit into a single linear timeline, director Francis Ford Coppola revealed in an interview this week that The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and The Godfather Part III all took place within the same narrative universe. The 74-year-old auteur explained that although each film can be appreciated as a stand-alone project, he in fact directed the movies with the conscious goal of weaving all three together into one cohesive world, dropping in subtle clues throughout to suggest that certain details and even entire story arcs within the movies were connected. Observant fans sometimes point out that a character named Michael Corleone appears in all three movies and that hes played by Al Pacino each time, and I can assure you thats no coincidence, said Coppola, who noted that all the puzzle pieces are there for anyone who looks hard enough at the three motion pictures. In fact, those arent three different people, but rather one character who appears three times. Michael in New York in the first film, Michael in Lake Tahoe in the second one, then Michael back in Manhattan in the thirdtheyre the very same man. I did a similar thing having Carlos death in The Godfather carry over into the next two films, Coppola continued. Youll notice he doesnt show up in any of the others. Thats because hes still dead in this one continuous storyline. Meanwhile, Connie is his widow, which is me kind of winking at the opening wedding scene with her and Carlo from the first film. Its subtle, but once you pick up on a detail like this, youll start to notice many other little connections. Coppola said that once he conceived of the idea of placing the movies in the same universe, he made a point of theatrically hinting at the web of intersections between all three. In addition to keeping the same characters from movie to movie, Coppola noted that viewers who pay close attention can catch other continuities among the three works, from the music playing in the background, to common phrases and manners of speech, right down to the titles of the films themselves. Indeed, rather than viewing them as separate tales of organized crime in America, Coppola said he would prefer that people instead consider The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and The Godfather Part III as a unified trilogy, or saga, portraying the story of a single Mafia family over time. Over the entire course of production, however, Coppola admitted that keeping the single interconnected world consistent became more of a challenge, especially in the third filmwhich he said was meant to be the final movie in the Godfather universe, temporally speakingas it required viewers to make the complex logical leap of recognizing that the crime family depicted in the late 1970s was still the same crime family from the 1940s and 1950s from the earlier films. Basically, all the people with the last name Corleone who appear in the films are supposed to be related to each other, said Coppola, recalling how during production he actually took the time to painstakingly map out the entire fictitious Corleone family tree that runs through all three projects. For instance, Santino Jr. from the third film is the grandson of Vito from the first film, played by Marlon Brando, who is meant to be an older version of Robert de Niros character of Vito Corleone from the second film. It sounds confusing, but believe me, this is something we actually planned out. For example, if you pay close attention, Marlon and Robert never appear on screen together, he added. That may seem trivial at first, but then it hits you: theyre playing the same person but at different ages. Noting that the nods to a common narrative were Easter eggs intended only for the real diehards, Coppola emphasized that the movies still held up individually, though he assured audiences that, after several viewings, many of them would pick up on details such as the fact that almost every character in the three films has ties to the Sicilian Mafia. We planned the films with the big picture in mind, but we always tried not to spell it out so much that it became a gimmick, and instead left it to fans to discover the connections themselves, the writer-director said. I always hoped that when people took a step back, theyd come to see how these three films sort of mesh togetherhow, if you want to think of it in this way, they are actually just one long story made up of three parts. Fans shouldnt get too carried away, though, and look for elements of The Godfather in other movies Ive worked on, continued Coppola, confirming that the Godfather storyline is only limited to the three films with Godfather in their name. For example, Apocalypse Now is a film I made thats not part of the Godfather universe, which I tried to emphasize by not having Robert Duvalls character Bill Kilgore mention the Mafiajust like Tom Hagen never mentions Vietnam. I was very careful about that kind of stuff. Coppola did note, however, that Fredo Corleone from the first Godfather and Fredo Corleone from the second were supposed to be entirely different characters, and admitted that the repeated name was an error he noticed only after the films release. 