Michael Corleone died, like his father, a lonely old man. His brothers Sonny and Fredo got whacked, his daughter Mary was gunned down outside the opera, and even his trusted consigliere Tom Hagen was written out. Frankly, The Godfather trilogy did not end well for anybody. Least of all for Francis Ford Coppola, the writer/director who reluctantly returned to the Mafia series that made his name after, appropriately enough, receiving an offer he couldn't refuse. As such, two of the finest cinematic experiences of the 20th century received an awkward final chapter that simultaneously failed to live up to the monumental expectations of film-goers and the huge ambition of the film-maker himself.

Sitting opposite GQ in a bustling French bistro while promoting Tetro, Coppola remembers his initial thoughts on the matter. "I never believed The Godfather was a serial," he says matter of factly. "It was a very complete book. It was only because it made a lot of money that there was pressure to keep doing it. That's the business formula of movies today, where sequels do better than the first one." It's a defence tactic Coppola has been using for the past 38 years, ever since it was first suggested that he should turn his Corleone family epic into a franchise. "I absolutely didn't want to make any more

Godfathers even after the first one - for sure I didn't want to make a third or fourth. If I had had my way, there would only be one Godfather."

Given this frustration, why did he do the third? After the first two films made more than $400m and brought in nine Oscars, Paramount had been unsurprisingly keen for a sequel. As detailed in Peter Cowie's definitive 1997 book of the trilogy, the studio approached Coppola with a series of increasingly lurid plots and some less-than-inspired casting suggestions. Coppola always refused to consider any concept that wasn't his own, demanding complete control. But after a series of disappointments - not least the failure of his musical One From The Heart and the financial collapse of his Zoetrope studios - he finally agreed to it on his own terms. For Coppola, the personal and professional stakes were sky high - during an interview conducted shortly before the release of the third film David Breskin from Rolling Stone described Part III as "[Coppola's] bid for both financial and artistic redemption, his ticket to the third act of his own life".

It's often forgotten how eagerly anticipated was The Godfather: Part III. Coppola and Paramount had persuaded the vast majority of the key actors to reprise their roles, albeit with the notable exception of Robert Duvall (who balked at being offered a pay-deal significantly smaller than Pacino's). The biggest casting surprise came in the form of Coppola's own daughter Sofia, drafted in at short notice when Winona Ryder pulled out through illness. Despite being shot at breakneck pace to meet a Christmas 1990 release, all the key ingredients seemed to be there: cinematographer Gordon Willis behind the camera, Pacino as an aged patriarch on screen, Sicilian flashbacks, high-Church intrigue and even cannoli (albeit in poisonous form). Despite Peter J Boyer's savage Vanity Fair piece "Under The Gun" revealing the strained circumstances of the film's conception, the press still had high hopes. The Los Angeles Times called The Godfather: Part III "the most anticipated film of the last decade". The papers started to talk excitedly about further possibilities for the characters, primarily focusing on Vincent Mancini played by Andy Garcia. It seemed entirely possible that Coppola could, as he had before on Apocalypse Now, wrestle a remarkable blockbuster out of a difficult shoot.

Initially, the reviews were good enough to lead one to believe that Coppola had succeeded. Despite the film's labyrinthine plotting, awkward new characters and the occasional misstep, it appeared that the director had defied the odds. Both

Variety and the Hollywood Reporter gave favourable early notices and the Evening Standard's resident Coppola-phile Alexander Walker singled it out for particular praise. Some were more cautious. Roger Ebert talked about how, because of our kinship with the first two films: "Part III works better than it should, evokes the same sense of wasted greatness, of misdirected genius."

Other critics were less convinced. Many treated the third film as a personal betrayal of the adored originals - as Rolling Stone's Peter Travers put it at the time, "Seeing a

Godfather film isn't business as usual. It's personal."

Hal Hinson in the Washington Post memorably described how the third film "isn't just a disappointment, it's a failure of heartbreaking proportions... It's hard to tell if this thing's serious or a parody and, if it is a parody, whether or not it's intentional." Time lamented the lack of pace: "For two hours, the movie labours up the winding path of its story, wheezing like an old man who won't admit his age." Most forthright of all was The New Yorker's Pauline Kael who, having described the first two films as "our gangster epic, our immigration epic, our national passion", dismissed the third for being about "a battered movie-maker's king-size depression".

Despite the negative feedback, the film's early box-office takings showed promise, achieving an opening weekend of $19.5m, second only to the more family-friendly Home Alone's $25m in 1990. But it never looked like Coppola's final part of the trilogy would reach the stratospheric financial heights of the earlier films. Having cost $55m, it went on to make $66m in America (and the same again internationally): eminently respectable for any film that didn't have Godfather levels of expectation behind it. There was another problem - Martin Scorsese's ultra-violent, foul-mouthed

GoodFellas was released in the same year, giving those people who loved the original cold-hearted Michael Corleone new antiheroes to quote and root for. As for the Oscars, although the third Godfather was nominated for seven awards, it emerged empty-handed - Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves got the accolades.

It may not have lived up to the expectations of the first two films but fans still had unfinished business. The cast and crew, however, moved on. Coppola started to make smaller, more personal films, as well as producing work directed by his daughter, Sofia, and shooting the odd money-making venture (the mawkish Jack, the operatic

Bram Stoker's Dracula). The stock of *The Godfather:

Part III* also dipped as the film began to be parodied - notably by Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live in February 1991 who corrupted Pacino's line, "Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in..." long before Steve Van Zandt made it his knowing catchphrase in The Sopranos. Coppola's associates also began to badmouth it - Mario Puzo told Larry King, "The Godfather: Part III, I think maybe we didn't do as well. You know, sometimes you are lucky, sometimes you are not."

If The Godfather: Part III proved an unsatisfactory conclusion for viewers, it was even more frustrating for one key protagonist. Andy Garcia, who everyone was expecting to move the franchise on, was one of the few participants who received near universal praise. The New York Times talked breathlessly of, "Mr Garcia's high-voltage performance... not only insures him a bright future but suggests the series may have one as well," while Time gushed, "Garcia, an electric actor, swaggers so handsomely that he makes one wish for another sequel."

On 21 June 1999, the Hollywood Reporter claimed a fourth film was in the works with Garcia in a lead role.

Sipping strong black coffee in a Soho hotel while promoting

City Island, Garcia explains to GQ what might have been. "I almost had it going because I had an idea: at the time I was working with an agent who was also looking after Leonardo DiCaprio, and I told him about an idea Francis had about a saga. Leonardo was the right age to play Sonny at the time. Francis was enthusiastic enough to hire Mario to write a script, but then Puzo died and it fizzled out." Coppola, in turn, confirms that he had been talking to the writer. "We had an idea for a fourth one," he says. "I talked about it but Paramount wouldn't hear of it.

Mario knew he was sick and wanted to leave his kids some money. So I said to Paramount, 'Give Mario a million dollars to write it and I'll work with him for free.' And at that time, Paramount had a very low-budget mentality and didn't do it."

Garcia is aware that he came closer than anyone to persuading Coppola to even consider another film. "That was a big step as Francis is not one to address that issue," he says. "He probably knows people want to see it. It wouldn't be a movie we could make without garnering a lot of attention." The huge media curiosity about a potential fourth film proved the appetite was still there.

Even the denials of some of the key figures mentioned seemed only to increase the excitement. When the announcement leaked out, DiCaprio's representatives told the New York Times the report was "very, very premature... There's no script, there's no deal...", but he would be interested in talking to Coppola about such a role.

Ten days after Garcia's desire for a fourth film had been made public, Mario Puzo died. When asked about the status of the unfinished Godfather IV, Puzo's lawyer, Bert Fields, said, "Mario was very pleased to be asked to do it by Paramount and he looked forward to working with director Francis Ford Coppola again - he enjoyed the relationship very much. What Paramount will do now, and whether Francis wants to go ahead with the project, is pretty much up in the air." After paying heartfelt tribute to his late friend and collaborator, Coppola fell silent on the subject.

So GQ decided to ask him outright. "I doubt a fourth film could happen," says Coppola. "When you do every project, you demonstrate what you've got and what will be good that no one has ever seen before.

When you make the second one, you've got to show it again." He warms to his theme. "I have a theory that the fourth in the series in a tetralogy is always the weakest. The second one is usually the best. The third is sometimes good, sometimes not. For instance, there's a great [Yukio] Mishima tetralogy and the fourth is the weakest, and certainly in [Lawrence Durrell's] The Alexandria Quartet it is. Partly what happens is that by the time you get to the fourth, you are using up the same stuff a fourth time."

Given his reluctance, there is the tantalising possibility of another director taking the reins. Garcia, for one, remains sceptical. "I don't know," he says. "I think people could do it, but I don't think it would necessarily be the same thing. Only because it's one man's trilogy. If he wanted to produce it and Sofia direct it, that would be the closest thing as she's grown up with him. Of course, a lot of people could probably make a very nice movie. But the lineage, somehow, would be lacking." Still, Garcia knows he may spend the rest of his career answering questions about it. "I get it all the time, people saying, 'Hey man, Godfather IV!' I'm happy with PartIII but people want to know what happens. With Francis, I'm up for everything. But [the question is] whether Francis wants to be in that world? He wants to make very personal movies now."

Coppola's refusal to return to the series hasn't only frustrated the film industry. In October 2002, it was announced that Jonathan Karp, Mario Puzo's editor at publisher Random House, was looking for an outline of a new Godfather book entitled The Godfather Returns. Karp was specific as to what he wanted: "Someone who is in roughly the same place in life that Mario Puzo was when he wrote The Godfather - mid-career, with two acclaimed literary novels to his credit, who writes in a commanding and darkly comic omniscient voice." Karp tried to keep his search from the press, but the story broke to a storm of criticism.

Although Coppola remained quiet, key individuals dismissed the whole project. "Leave it alone," was Godfather producer Robert Evans' verdict. "They're just prostituting themselves. I wouldn't want to be the guy who has to write it. Even if you're better you're worse. I'm giving it to you straight: you don't f around with a classic."

The man who was given the daunting task of going against Evans' advice was Mark Winegardner, a Florida-based creative-writing professor and American GQ contributor. "When I was initially approached, my first thought about the contest was, 'Boy, I bet that'll suck!'" says Winegardner with a laugh. "It was kind of a media circus initially. Usually when you start writing a book no one gives a damn." There was a predictable outcry that Winegardner's Irish-American heritage prohibited him from understanding the great Italian crime families, but Winegardner is pragmatic. "I understand that to a degree, but that was something Puzo himself resented - the fact he knew about the Mafia just because he was Italian. He famously said there was nothing in

The Godfather that he hadn't learnt in the New York Public Library." When pushed, Winegardner adds, "People are untroubled that JK Rowling isn't a wizard."

As well as the weight of expectation, there were a number of significant problems Winegardner also had to contend with: primarily a far more sophisticated audience than Puzo's original faced. "Keep in mind that [the original] novel was started only two years after J Edgar Hoover stopped saying there was no such thing as the Mafia," says Winegardner. "I was writing for an audience who, after a few episodes of The Sopranos, knew more about the mob than the FBI claimed to when Puzo started writing."

Winegardner also wanted to avoid some of the mistakes he perceived Coppola made in the final film. "Even in terms of trying to think of keying it up for the next generation - why do we need a bastard story when Sonny had a legitimate son we don't see in The Godfather: Part III? I suspect that's where they might want to go, but I think it might be like the brats on [American reality-TV show] Growing Up Gotti."

Such was the demand for new Corleone fiction that Winegardner published two novels: in 2004, The Godfather Returns (known as Godfather: The Lost Years in the UK) and two years later The Godfather's Revenge. Thoroughly enjoyable thrillers in their own right, they capture some of the scale of Coppola's original film while avoiding the excesses of Puzo's more pulpy material. Winegardner started looking for plot loopholes and considered what he could offer: a greater degree of realism (Puzo had court papers rather than wire taps), scenes he felt were missing (despite the Sinatra character and Vegas setting, there's no clear Rat Pack scene) and an explanation of key chapters (for example, how close to legitimacy does Michael Corleone really come before The Godfather: Part III?). Giving the project even greater scope, Winegardner also introduced real political context. "If the story is about that mythology of immigrants and the American Mafia, the 800lb gorilla is how much the mob had to do with the Kennedy assassination."

Winegardner focused primarily on the two main issues. Firstly, "the utterly unsatisfying plot arc of the Tom Hagen character".

This isn't, as you would believe, confined to his absence in

The Godfather: Part III - it begins when his character is introduced in the first film. "We never really get the real story of why Tom Hagen came home with Sonny [in the first place]. He's not Italian! There's no connection there whatsoever!" Secondly, Winegardner also outed Fredo as possibly bisexual. "That seemed to bother cultists but not reviewers, who seemed to think it was so obvious it wasn't that much of a revelation," says the author. "It comes from Puzo's novel: Fredo's name comes up and the don reacts with a 'terrible Sicilian profanity'. Puzo clearly forgot he ever wrote that line and never comes back to it."

As for Winegardner's own thoughts on a fourth film, he's prevented from discussing the possibility of turning them into a film. What he does know is that without the original director's blessing the project is doomed. Still, he says, "I always thought the public would accept the recasting of the roles much more if it's on TV, but if you make a feature, people are going to expect to see Pacino and, God help him, Andy Garcia. I think it'll be a much better work of art if you do what they did on the original - hire really terrific, young, hungry actors and let them have a go at it. Take something like

Death Of A Salesman: every generation has a definitive Willy Loman, then you don't see it staged for ten years. At that point it belongs to someone else."

There was one final attempt to resurrect The Godfather.

In 2006 EA Games created an elaborate video game of the film, featuring, improbably enough, freshly recorded dialogue from James Caan, Robert Duvall and even Marlon Brando. Although EA's project had big names and a sizeable budget (an estimated $15m), what made the trilogy so beloved - the emotional intensity, the operatic scope, the familial relationships - didn't transfer neatly into "Grand Theft Corleone". It wasn't helped when Coppola publicly distanced himself from the game - although several EA staffers had visited Coppola's Napa winery, Coppola defiantly claimed in a TV interview: "I knew nothing about it. They never asked me if I thought it was a good idea. I think it's a misuse of the film."

It appears that despite his schizophrenic relationship with

The Godfather sequels, any new project has to have Coppola at its centre. So how about it, Francis, what would it take? "For me? At my age? Being on a big, expensive movie that has a producer who'll want to give me notes? They don't have enough money on earth to give me to spend a year doing that. The amount of money they would have to give me to do [Godfather IV] probably doesn't even exist. The movie business is now so petrified and is run by people wanting to make fortunes." Would he ever consider bringing in an alternative director? After all, back when the first sequel to Godfather was mooted, Coppola suggested a fellow director, Martin Scorsese, might be a more suitable candidate: "It wasn't just giving it to someone," he says with a shrug. "I knew this was a really smart idea. He was such a natural." So would he hand over the reins to someone else now? "It would be very tricky to be involved in, even if I wasn't the director. I don't know a director I could give it to. There are so many great young directors I like but the ones I like are all doing personal films. There's no one I can think of who I'd send to do a Godfather."

Coppola eyes me sceptically and begins to list the inherent problems with any such endeavour. "What happens in it? How does it have to relate to the first one, the cast, the look? I would safely say The Godfather was a complete movie. It wasn't a serial and it didn't lend itself to being a serial. I wouldn't even know what the story is for a fourth one. All the people are dead." Then he adds with a faint air of resignation, "You'd have to do it for money."

A pregnant pause. "It might be great."

Click here to read how creatives like Robert Duvall, Oliver Stone, Irvine Welsh and many more more would create The Godfather Part IV.