An Exclusive Sneak Peek at Director Francis Ford Coppola's 'Megalopolis' Retro-Futurist Masterpiece | Vanity Fair
Written by Anthony Breznican
Megalopolis, a project that has been growing in Francis Ford Coppola's imaginations for about half his life span, is finally ready to be unveiled to the global audience. This 85-year-old director, who is famous for his iconic movies, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and The Conversation, is set to showcase his recently completed opera-themed endeavor that has cost him significantly on a personal level. Its first showing is scheduled for next month's Cannes Film Festival, with the hope it will attract international distributors willing to risk investing in it.
The film uses a tale of battles involving personal dilemmas, politics, and romance in the journey to build an American utopia. This idea was built from numerous different inspirations. These included H.G. Wells’s speculative foresight, an ancient Roman conspiracy plot of murder, the September 11 attacks trauma, among many other sources. “Everything I have ever read or learned provided inspiration”, Coppola acknowledges via a press statement.
The first look at the movie, exclusive to Vanity Fair, presents Adam Driver as the hopeful architect and artist planning to revive a fallen city. It also features Nathalie Emmanuel, a socialite daughter of his arch-rival, an unethical mayor (played by Giancarlo Esposito). The mayor prefers his municipal domain as it is. Coppola’s brief for the movie outlines Driver's character having the "ability to halt time", with Emmanuel’s character torn between her lover and her assertive father, which forces her to determine "what she truly thinks humanity deserves."
The movie also includes an illustrious list of cast members such as Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne (who previously starred in Apocalypse Now as a teenage soldier), Kathryn Hunter, singer Grace VanderWaal, and James Remar. The director's sister and The Godfather actor Talia Shire, as well as his nephew Jason Schwartzman also star in the movie.
A preliminary screening for industry executives resulted in a variety of anonymous responses that ranged from being awed to being bewildered. The diversity in reactions has only amplified interest in the film, leading to a surge in eager social media responses in the recent weeks, as fans are excited to witness this adventurous endeavor of this veteran film maker.
For this exclusive preview, Coppola chose not to be interviewed (having just lost his wife of 61 years, Eleanor, he and his family are still in mourning.) Instead, he provided Vanity Fair with a written statement about the movie's origin story.
Coppola traced the inspiration for his new movie to his childhood in New York. He was fascinated by stories of scientists and researchers and was often involved with experimenting with kits carrying amusing risks. Movies offered another avenue for his creativity. A 1936 drama about a society attempting to avoid its own collapse that was produced by pioneer Alexander Korda and authored by H.G Wells of The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine fame left an indelible mark on his mind.
“The roots for Megalopolis were sowed when I, as a child, watched H.G. Wells’s Things to Come.” Coppola explains, “This 1930s Korda classic, based on constructing a future world, etched its mark on me initially as the 'boy scientist' and later as a film maker.” Coppola confirmed rumors about the long conception of Megalopolis in his Vanity Fair statement, admitting to selling part of his Northern California winery estate to finance its $120 million budget.
“Contrary to what's written, I've not spent 40 years working on this script. Instead, I've collected notes and clippings in a scrapbook. These are things I find interesting and might want to incorporate into a future screenplay, or they're examples of political cartoons or different historical subjects,”Coppola clarifies. “Ultimately, I chose to base this movie on a Roman epic. Then later, I decided that it should be a Roman epic placed in modern America. So, I really only began writing this script over the past dozen years or so. As I have made many films of many different subjects and in many varied styles, my hope was that this project, arriving late in my life, might help me understand my personal style better.”Given that Megalopolis encompasses his life's work, Coppola decided to attach his name to the title for the first time, in honor of the original writers whose names often appear above the title, like Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, or Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he added. "It was only with The Rain People and The Conversation that it could have been permitted to have my own name as original writer on it; but then I was too insecure to present myself in such grandiosity.”
"In my early days, I remember creating a title page for an unseen 130-page novel titled Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, with a sub-title of All Roads Lead to Rome. Although the pages were blank, I held it in my hands, imagining its future existence. After finishing the first draft, I rewrote it about 300 times, believing each edit would make it at least half a percent better."
One significant influence in his writing was a coup attempt in 63 BC, during a time when ancient Rome was in a state of turmoil due to failing trade economy, internal conflict within its large republic, and escalating debts for the rich and poor. Catiline, an insurrectionist, planned a city-wide arson and targeted assassinations of political figures to create anarchy. His aim was to build a debt-free society after the chaos. But his plan was uncovered by the Roman statesman Cicero and was stopped.
Coppola explains that he saw parallels between this historical event and modern America, stating, “I looked at numerous possibilities and became fascinated with 'The Catiline Conspiracy'”. He saw that this conspiracy could be set in contemporary America in the same way that the story of Heart of Darkness was adapted to Vietnam War in Apocalypse Now. His next step was to rename and modernize some historical figures. He says, “I thought of a basic plot where a malevolent patrician plots to overthrow the republic but is stopped by the consul Cicero. I changed Catiline's name to Cesar based on Mary Beard's suggestion as in Suetonius's account, a young Julius Caesar was heavily involved with Catiline and the name Cesar would be more identifiable to the viewers than Sergius."
The director also reconsidered the common perception of these historical figures. He questioned the portrayal of Catiline as 'evil' and Cicero as 'good'. He says, “History has it that Catiline was defeated and killed while Cicero survived. However, it is the survivor who tells the story. I questioned, what if Catiline's vision for society was progressive and beneficial whereas Cicero was actually conservative and detrimental?”
The director further adapted this plot to a somewhat modern context. He says,"This story would be set in a somewhat stylized New York City, portrayed as the world's power center. Cicero would be the city's mayor during a financial crisis similar to the one under former Mayor Dinkins's tenure. Cesar would be a multifaceted character, a brilliant architect, designer, and scientist, combining the characteristics of Robert Moses, as depicted in the remarkable biography The Power Broker, and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, or Walter Gropius."
Coppola further adds, "I meticulously crafted my story from interesting cases I found about New York city from my scrapbooks: the Claus von Bülow murder case, the Mary Cunningham–William Agee Bendix scandal, Maria Bartiromo's rise to fame (a lovely financial reporter known as 'The Money Honey', known for her broadcasts from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange), the Studio 54 saga, and the city’s financial crisis that was resolved by Felix Rohatyn. I ensured everything in my story was based on real incidents that either happened in modern New York or in ancient Rome. I also incorporated everything I had ever read or learned about."
In his statement, Coppola includes what is essentially his bibliography, a litany of scholars, poets, novelists, filmmakers, and artists across the centuries whose work nourished Megalopolis: “I wouldn’t have been able to make it without standing as I do on the shoulders of G.B. Shaw, Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham, Mill, Dickens, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Fournier, Morris, Carlyle, Ruskin, Butler, and Wells all rolled into one; with Euripides, Thomas More, Moliere, Pirandello, Shakespeare, Beaumarchais, Swift, Kubrick, Murnau, Goethe, Plato, Aeschylus, Spinoza, Durrell, Ibsen, Abel Gance, Fellini, Visconti, Bergman, Bergson, Hesse, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Cao Xueqin, Mizoguchi, Tolstoy, McCullough, Moses, and the prophets all thrown in.” He describes beginning early work on the idea about 23 years ago. “Believing I had the basis of the project in 2001, I set up a production office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and began to work,” Coppola says. “I did casting, table read-throughs, and had a second unit led by brilliant photographer Ron Fricke, thinking it would be easier and cheaper to begin before we actually announced principal photography.”
Coppola’s nascent Megalopolis team set about documenting everyday life in the city. “The second unit was shot with an early-model Sony digital camera that I was risking would be of sufficient quality, to be shot through all seasons and of elements of vital activities of the city (food distribution, sewage, garbage disposal) for the rich and the poor,” he says.
Then the fictional story of a city left in ruins after a terrible moment of destruction came true. “The script always had an element of an aging Soviet satellite falling out of orbit and falling to Earth, so we needed some shots of destruction and cleared areas, but of course no one could have anticipated the events of September 11, 2001, and the tragedy of the World Trade Center,” he says. “As we were shooting our second unit at the time, we covered some of those heartbreaking images.”How much of that makes it into the final film is unclear. As Coppola strained to make something allegorical and epic, he also returned to the personal touch that made his classic films so resonant. “My first goal always is to make a film with all my heart, so I began to realize it would be about love and loyalty in every aspect of human life,” he says. “Megalopolis echoed these sentiments, in which love was expressed in almost crystalline complexity, our planet in danger and our human family almost in an act of suicide, until becoming a very optimistic film that has faith in the human being to possess the genius to heal any problem put before us.”
Megalopolis also stands as a commentary on his own nation, with the filmmaker echoing the opening line of The Godfather. “I believe in America,” Coppola says. “Our founders borrowed a constitution, Roman law, and senate for their revolutionary government without a king. American history could neither have taken place nor succeeded without classical learning to guide it.”
As the film nears its Cannes debut, Coppola expresses lofty hopes for its future: “It’s my dream that Megalopolis will become a New Year’s Eve perennial favorite, with audiences discussing afterwards not their new diets or resolutions not to smoke, but rather this simple question: ‘Is the society in which we live the only one available to us?’”
