As the director of The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now, anything Francis Ford Coppola makes comes with a certain level of expectations. A passion project first birthed on the set of Apocalypse Now, after a 40 year long journey from initial idea to production, Megalopolis has finally made it to the big screen. With it, Coppola has achieved a feat unlike any filmmaker before him. Initially turned down by studios over multiple decades, Coppola eventually decided to self finance the project himself at a $120 million plus budget.
Megalopolis focuses on the conflict between Cesar (Adam Driver), a innovative architect who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare. This battle for the future of New Rome (an alternate stand in for a New York City-like center) is populated by a wide variety of distinctive, dynamic characters marked by idiosyncratic performances. Wow Platinum, played by Aubrey Plaza with a flair of sarcasm, snakes her way through powerful men as she climbs the social ladder while hosting a show widely seen across the country. As Clodio Pulcher, Shia LeBeouf goes for broke with a crazed performance that feels straight out of another film.
Bolstered by grand ambitions, with Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola has created a cinematic experience unlike anything before it. After a splashy world premiere at Cannes, it received wildly mixed reviews, including “masterpiece” level notices alongside one star pans like our own. Ultimately, it works best if its mere existence is viewed as a Dadaist performance art piece. The fact that it exists in this form will make you question everything you know about cinema and art itself. It is a bold, incoherent, baffling work of art wildly oscillating between madness and brilliance.
We at DiscussingFilm had the opportunity to speak with Francis Ford Coppola ahead of the film’s wide release.
Many in our audience who are making their first steps into the film industry, have various different paths laid out for them, and look to you for inspiration. What was it that drew you to pursue filmmaking, and what did your journey that allowed you to make your first films look like?
Francis Ford Coppola: Well, I was a theater student, and my family was connected with the New York theater, so I had seen shows in New York, my uncle was at the Radio City Music Hall so I was surrounded in a world of music and New York show business. I wasn’t good at anything. I would do terribly in school and I had no talent or business in a family that had a lot of talented people. But it turned out that I was very good with technology, and so I began to hang around the theater department of some of the schools, because that’s where the girls were. But I was the one who put up the lights, and I would see them below from looking down. I saw the director telling them, “oh do this, do that”. I could do that. And so I started to direct plays in college. So I was a theater student, and I was going to go into that profession. One afternoon, I was waiting for rehearsal, and they were showing some films, and I went into the little theater–they were showing a Russian film called October, 10 Days That Changed The World, by Eisenstein. I saw this, and I couldn’t believe what I saw because there was no music or sound or anything, but the way it was cut together, you could hear machine guns and I came out of that saying, “Wow, I want to do that” So instead of going continuing theater school, I enrolled and went to UCLA Film School. Ultimately, that’s how I got into the film business.
It’s been well documented that you’ve had Megalopolis on your mind over 40 years. How has your creative process for this film evolved from when you first started developing the idea to filming the project on a set in a vastly different world?
Francis Ford Coppola: I wasn’t really working on Megalopolis for 40 years. What I was doing is I knew that a lot of my films were in different styles, and they were in different styles because they were about different themes, but I was curious what my style would be so I thought I should start keeping notebooks about things I liked or things I was learning, and just over time, possibly it would help me know what what my style was. And eventually it brought me to the idea that I thought it would be fun to make a Roman epic. I had seen movies like The Robe or Spartacus. I had seen Roman stories with the Roman soldiers and the Colosseum, and you know, all of what goes with Roman stories. Then I began to think I wanted to make a film about a sort of America as Rome, because I realized that America was, in a way, the New Rome. America was behaving around the world just the way Rome had done thousands of years before. So then it became Megalopolis. Then I sort of retired from movies after I made a film called The Rainmaker, and I just took 14 years off of just, you know, I had a wine company, so I didn’t have to work, and I was just playing, trying to learn what my relationship with cinema was. And then, based on what I learned when I came out of that mode, I made Megalopolis, and I made it with all of what I thought I had learned about cinema and how I wanted to make that film.
You and many of your generation’s peers have made a defining mark when it comes to innovation in the film industry. What filmmakers or films that you’ve seen from newer generations stand out to you as the future of cinema?
Francis Ford Coppola: Well, I think there are wonderful filmmakers today. I think Denis Villeneuve, just a tremendous filmmaker. The one who won Cannes, Sean Baker, I love his film. So, I mean, there are many, and I can’t remember all their names, but a lot of young women. I had famously said years ago that one day, some little girl from Ohio was going to be the new Mozart and its happening around us. There’s a wonderful abundance of talented young people. It’s thrilling.
You’ve often mentioned still wanting to be a student of cinema. What would you say is the biggest lesson you’ve learned from making Megalopolis?
Francis Ford Coppola: That a movie is like a living thing, because it’s the sum total of all its collaborators, which includes not only all of the technical people, the editors and photographers, but also the actors. And that as a living thing you have to learn how to allow it to live and be free, and at the same time, learn how to point it in the direction you feel it should go.
In an age where more and more audiences are gravitating towards streaming, what do you believe makes this film worth going to the theaters for instead of waiting for streaming?
Francis Ford Coppola: Well, streaming is a dumb phrase, because what it really is, we’ve always had it, it was called Home Video. Streaming, I know a lot about streaming, and streaming moves in a direction of a business model where they’re trying to get subscriptions, and to me, it’s anti art. It’s better that people go to a big theater, not a multiplex, but a real theater, and see a movie with 300 people. Sure you can review it again at home, be it delivered by streaming or DVD. However, how it’s delivered is not the important thing. It’s the same experience to see a movie either totally alone or with two or three people. But that’s not the dynamic of the real cinematic experience. I still remember going to see the Bridge on the River Kwai, you know, or Lawrence of Arabia. I’ll never forget it, and you can’t have that experience just in your living room with that in home video.
Megalopolis had its World Premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, its North American Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, and U.S. Premiere as a NYFF Special Event. The film will release in theaters on September 27!
Release Date: September 27, 2024.
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
Written by Francis Ford Coppola
Produced by Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Bederman, Barry Hirsch, & Fred Roos.
Main Cast: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Jason Schwartzman, Talia Shire, Grace VanderWaal, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, Sonia Ammar, Chloe Fineman, Madeleine Gardella, Balthazar Getty, Bailey Ives, Isabelle Kusman, Romy Mars, James Remar, Haley Sims, & D.B. Sweeney.
Cinematographer: Mihai Mălaimare Jr.
Composer: Osvaldo Golijov.
Production Company: American Zoetrope.
Distributor: Lionsgate.
Runtime: 138 minutes.
