Megalopolis Movie: All the Details of Coppola’s New Madness
After too many years of keeping a low profile, Francis Ford Coppola is back on his feet. Megalopolis, the new film from the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, is also his most ambitious project in a long time, with an astronomical budget ($120 million), a cast full of famous names… and insistent rumors about disasters in the set and off it. After a private screening that caused a queue, with several studios and platforms refusing to distribute the film, Megalopolis can finally be seen at Cannes 2024. Something that we take advantage of remembering Coppola’s long, very long path towards the culmination of a project that has already given a lot to talk about, and that will be even more talked about (for better or worse) in the future.
Believe it or not, great directors are finding it increasingly difficult to get their projects off the ground. If not, ask David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, or Ridley Scott, well-established directors who in recent years have had to desperately turn to platforms to be able to undertake their projects. Not everyone can be like Denis Villeneuve or Christopher Nolan, perhaps the only two at this time who can maintain a certain independence and creative freedom no matter what studio they work for. The success of Oppenheimer, a completely original film unrelated to any saga, should have served the studios as an example of what can sometimes be contributed to a project like this. But it has not been that way.
Megalopolis: Since When Has Coppola Wanted to Film It?
When we say that the history of Megalopolis goes back a long way, we are not exaggerating Coppola devised the film in 1979, during the (apocalyptic) filming of Apocalypse Now, and wrote the first version of the script four years later. During the 80s and 90s, the filmmaker tried to resurrect the project, but his chronically bankrupt state forced him to relegate it in favor of other more profitable initiatives such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and, well, Jack. Around 2001, Coppola even held script readings featuring Paul Newman, James Gandolfini, Kevin Spacey, Uma Thurman, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, and his nephew Nicolas Cage.
However, this new attempt was ruined after the 9/11 attacks: the film’s plot, with a city very similar to New York devastated by a cataclysm, was too uncomfortable for the studios. After this new setback, Coppola dedicated the first years of the 21st century to The Ageless Man, Tetro, and Twixt, three low-budget films with indie aspirations. However, come 2019, the director gritted his teeth and sold part of his wine business to pay for the filming of Megalopolis himself. With Coppola, that meant the real scares were about to come.
Megalopolis: Was the Filming as Bad as They Make it Out to Be?
Saving the usual dance of names in the cast, the pre-production of Megalopolis hardly presented any clouds. In March 2022, however, Oscar Isaac announced that he was withdrawing from the film due to scheduling problems: that defection served as a prologue to much more pessimistic rumors. Come January 2023, The Hollywood Reporter lit the fuse with a report on Megalopolis. Citing anonymous sources, the piece claimed that the filming was “absolute madness” on par with that of Apocalypse Now, with several layoffs and desertions in the technical team and a budget that was growing uncontrollably.
Coppola and Adam Driver, his leading actor, reacted with statements to Deadline in which they stated that everything was going smoothly. “These reports never say who their sources are. And I tell them: ‘Ha, ha, ha, wait and see’. Because it is a beautiful film, and above all because the cast is great,” said the director.
“I’ve been on sets that were chaotic, and this one is far from that,” Driver said. And, referring to the abandonments of some members of the technical team, he added: “It is a disgrace when these things happen, but this production is not out of control if you compare it with others, and even less so to deserve an article that paints us as chaos. “That portrait is not true to reality”.
Megalopolis: What is the Movie About?
“A mix of ‘Julius Caesar’ and ‘Blade Runner’ is how director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) has described the plot of Megalopolis. In more specific terms, the synopsis of the film assures that it takes place in New Rome, an immense futuristic city that suffers the consequences of a natural disaster. An architect named César aspires to a reconstruction with utopian overtones, something that will lead him to confront Mayor Frank Cicero. Between both characters will be Julia Cicero, the mayor’s daughter, and the architect’s lover, who could be the real main character. According to Coppola, she is “a woman divided between her loyalties towards two men. But not only towards them: each of those men carries with him a philosophical principle”.
Megalopolis: Who is in The Movie?
In addition to Adam Driver, Megalopolis stars Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad) as Frank Cicero and Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia Cicero. Other notable names in its cast are Shia LaBeouf, John Voight, Aubrey Plaza, Laurence Fishburne, Jason Schwartzman, Dustin Hoffman, and Talia Shire, Coppola’s sister who you will remember for her role as Connie in The Godfather and its sequels.
Megalopolis: Why Doesn’t Anyone Want to Distribute It?
At this point, the relationship between the Coppola clan and The Hollywood Reporter must be bordering on uncomfortable: on April 8, the American publication claimed that a preview of Megalopolis for potential distributors had ended up like the Aurora rosary, with several names from prominent industry players (including Netflix, Disney, Warner, and Paramount) refusing to distribute the film. “There is no way to sell this film”, said an anonymous source. And another added: “Everyone feels for Francis and feels nostalgic, but there is also the business”. Beyond the quality of Megalopolis, which aroused mixed opinions, the industry considered it a very difficult film to sell. To begin with, the film includes amounts of sex and violence far greater than expected, and its plot is also too complex to turn it into a blockbuster. “You don’t know who the good guy is and who is the bad guy”, complained one distributor.
In addition, we must take into account the costs derived from an IMAX premiere and a promotional campaign whose amount is estimated at around 80 and 100 million dollars (40 of them for the US premiere). “If [Coppola] wanted to put up that amount or endorse the expense, I think there would be many more interested parties,” declared another source. So, as happened with Apocalypse Now almost 50 years ago, Megalopolis ‘ screening at Cannes could be the film’s salvation, in case critics come around and turn it into a valuable property. If the press reaction is negative, however, Coppola would find himself in one of the biggest difficulties of his career. But let’s not fool ourselves: without his hellish filming and his friction with the industry, we would be talking about a happier director… but much less interesting.
A Long-Dreamed-of Project?
The truth is that Megalopolis is not just any film for Coppola. The director of The Godfather has had the film in his head for more than four decades, and after years of rejections he decided to finance it himself, although as a result, he had to sell a good part of his properties to get money from anywhere, until reaching to the 100 million budgets. The director himself admitted that there are works from his filmography such as Jack, Legitimate Defense, or even Dracula herself that he made to finance Megalopolis. After many years of raising money, Coppola found his protagonists in Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, and Giancarlo Esposito.
Megalopolis tells the story of a woman (Plaza) who lives in a futuristic city destroyed by a natural disaster and who is torn between two opposing positions regarding what to do with Megalopolis: that of an idealist architect (Driver) and that of her father, the mayor of the city (Giancarlo Esposito), opposed to the architect’s reforms. With a duration of more than two and a half hours, those who have already been able to see the film in an exclusive screening describe it as a strange “indie experiment.” Many others agree in pointing out the ambition of the project but also its confusing nature, to the point of not knowing “who is the good and who is the bad”. We will have to wait to see what finally happens with Megalopolis and if Coppola finds the money he needs to distribute and advertise the film, although everything indicates that a project that was born cursed is condemned to remain so once it is released.
