You’d think the director of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II would have had carte blanche to make whatever movie he wanted in the late ’70s and early ’80s. That’s when Francis Ford Coppola first started developing Megalopolis. But helming two of the unquestioned best movies ever was not enough. He could never get anyone to produce his grand epic. For that he needed a few decades of patience and $120 million of his own money. Coppola has finally made his passion project a reality. And while the film still doesn’t have a studio to call home just yet, it does have an official clip for us to enjoy. Coppola released the first-footage from Megalopolis, which features Adam Driver as a man on the edge of both time and death.
What is going on in this stylish, intense, weird scene? Coppola also released a lengthy writeup to go with this clip. (The clip happears to be how the film opens.) What follows this scene is a story about “an entire civilization teetering on a similarly precarious ledge, devouring itself in a whirl of unchecked greed, self-absorption, and political propaganda, while a few bold dreamers push against the tide, striving to usher in a new dawn.”
Ah. Got it. Maybe. Or, you know, not at all. Don’t worry, the rest of the blurb is even wilder. The whole thing has to be read to be believed. And even then it’s hard to believe. From Coppola’s YouTube page:
The man is called Caesar (Driver), like the Roman general who gave rise to the Roman Empire, Cesar the labor leader who organized California’s farm workers in the 1960s, and a few other notably great men of history. But he is also clearly an avatar of Coppola himself – a grand visionary witnessing a once-great thing (call it cinema if you must) withering before his very eyes and determined to revivify it. And, after decades of planning, Megalopolis the movie is the powerful elixir he has produced: a sweeping, big-canvas movie of provocative ideas and relentless cinematic invention that belies its maker’s 84 years of age.
Coppola seems to have been born-again by a strike of filmic lightning, and the movie – no, the experience (complete with in-theater “live cinema”) – that has emerged feels at once the work of a film-school wunderkind unbowed by notions of convention, but also the work of a wizened master who knows much about life and the ways of the world. To paraphrase Coppola himself speaking decades ago about his Apocalypse Now, Megalopolis isn’t a movie about the end of the world as we know it, it is the end of the world as we know it. Only, where Apocalypse left us in a napalm-bombed fever-dream haze, Megalopolis, surprisingly and movingly, bestows on us a final image glowing with hope for the future.”
According to the blurb, that is a “clear, concise” analysis of the film.
I must see this movie. I. MUST. If it’s as weird and bizarre as this writeup it will be worth all the money Francis Ford Coppola spent. And it will be proof studios should have let him make it a long time ago.
Megalopolis also stars Giancarlo Esposito as the film’s primary antagonist, Mayor Franklyn Cicero. It also features Nathalie Emmanuel, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, D. B. Sweeney, Jon Voight, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, Grace VanderWaal, and Talia Shire.