Expanding upon the visual signifiers he established in the first Godfather film, Willis creates a sense of continuity, or perhaps fatality, in The Godfather: Part II by maintaining a consistent amber-inflected color scheme to bind the two films together. A grander, more ambitious undertaking than its predecessor , The Godfather: Part  II depicts both the past and the present, unified by Willis’s camerawork, but made immediately identifiable as distinct time periods through subtle shifts in color, focus and mood. Coppola’s American epic – a gangster opera, as Willis calls it – is grounded by Willis’ exacting and subtly expressive cinematography.