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By Grant Rindner
Although last year brought us major works by master administrators Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, and William Friedkin, we’re still looking forward to an auteur assignment as a hobby: Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, a long-running masterpiece by the 84-year-old writer. Director of Bram Stoker’s Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now and Dracula.
Megalopolis is the sprawling story of an ambitious young architect who attempts to recreate New York City after a tragedy, through a Roman coup called the Catilinarian Conspiracy. Adam Driver stars as Caesar the Architect, alongside an eclectic cast that includes Aubrey Plaza. , Forest Whitaker, Talia Shire and Jon Voight, among others.
The history of those kinds of hobby projects is mixed. For each and every film that unfolds, like Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, there’s an ambitious flop like Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote or Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain. But even those projects are compelling additions to their creators’ framework. Next, as much as possible, is what GQ knows for sure about Megalopolis, which is sure to be one of the best-looking videos of 2024.
Coppola’s passion project, which he began writing roughly 40 years ago, has rightly generated headlines for its starry cast, the iconic filmmaker at the helm, and its unconventional funding situation, but there’s still a great deal of uncertainty as to what the movie is actually about. Per Deadline, the film’s logline is as follows: “The fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems in this epic story of political ambition, genius, and dangerous love.”
This is a confusing explanation; Other shared descriptions focus on Driver’s character’s wife, played by Nathalie Emmanuel, torn between her lover’s progressive and ambitious convictions about rebuilding the world’s most famous city and her father’s more conservative ideas. Filmmaker Mike Figgis, who filmed a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Megalopolis, described the film as “Julius Caesar meets Blade Runner,” suggesting an intriguing synthesis of futuristic urbanism and classical Roman roots at the heart of the plot. Combining romance and drama with a futuristic penchant for sci-fi is an intriguing proposition for Coppola, who has explored those genres individually, but never in a mix like this.
It’s an original screenplay by Coppola, not an adaptation of a preexisting work. But in a July 2023 Instagram post, Coppola shared several books that “strongly have influenced Megalopolis and my view of the ‘society we live in.’” These books included a trio by influential left-wing academic David Graeber and The Glass Bead Game, the future-set final novel by Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse. A few days later, he shared a second set of books that influenced the film, which “are about a time before there was writing.” These included The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama (about the creation of the modern political system), The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt (about the importance of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura on contemporary thinking), and The War Lovers by Evan Thomas, which focuses on Theodore Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst, and other key figures of 19th century America.
Finally, in a September 2023 Instagram post slightly similar to the query “How do you think about the Roman Empire? Trending on social media, the writer and director wrote that he thinks of the Roman Empire because “it served as an example for my country, the United States, and its institutions, and was an inspiration for [Megalopolis]. “(We at GQ can’t follow Coppola on IG enough. )
The movie’s unsurprisingly stacked lineup of stars includes many prominent young actors who have never worked with the legendary filmmaker before, including Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Emmanuel, and Jason Schwartzman. Rounding out the cast are Laurence Fishburne, Forest Whitaker, Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Voight, and Dustin Hoffman. Megalopolis also marks an exciting reunion for Coppola and his sister Talia Shire, whose terrific work in The Godfather trilogy netted her an Oscar nomination in 1974.
It’s through the highest-profile cast Coppola has had in a film since 1997’s The Rainmaker, and sees him reteam with a handful of actors, adding Shire, Voight and Fishburne, who made one of his first film appearances. as a young soldier on a boat carrying Martin Sheen upriver in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
Coppola’s past films this century — the horror film Twixt, the near-autobiographical Tetro and the fantasy Youth Without Youth — have been made on modest budgets, but Megalopolis is notoriously worth around $100 million, according to Deadline. It’s kind of money set aside for big-studio movies, but Megalopolis is produced independently through Coppola’s American Zoetrope. In an interview with GQ in 2022, Coppola talked about promoting part of his successful winery from Francis Ford Coppola so he could finance the film himself. “If I’m going to invest $120 million of my own cash — which I already did, I was given it here, waiting for them to write it down to make it happen — I need it to have a smart end result for humanity,” he said.
Coppola spent $30 million of his own money on Apocalypse Now, with wonderful publicity and critical acclaim, but it’s a very different gamble than the one he’s making here. The story of the chaotic production of Apocalypse Now has been alluded to in news reports. on the set of Megalopolis, specifically in an article in The Hollywood Reporter that noted that during filming, Coppola laid off much of his visual effects team, while set designer Beth Mickle and supervising art director David Scott also left the production.
In a January 2023 interview with Deadline, Coppola acknowledged the change, but said that production hasn’t been as chaotic as reports indicated, saying “It was basically about managing cost.” He also lavished praise upon his actors, saying, “I’ve never worked on a film where I was so happy with the cast.”
Driver also backed away from the narrative in a quote shared via Deadline, saying: “Yes, it’s true that the art branch has resigned and the visual effects have been abandoned. Not all branches place team spirit in the movies. ” and then they suffer and make decisions that leave a lasting impression on the film, other people quit, get fired, or break up. It’s unfortunate when that happens, however, this production is not expendable compared to other productions; especially to the point of which deserves an article about our descent into chaos. . This characterization is inaccurate.
In a January 5 interview with The Accutron Show, Coppola said that Megalopolis would be released in “a few months,” leading The Film Stage to speculate that it’ll enter into the 2024 Cannes Film Festival slate. Production wrapped in late March 2023, per Variety, There have been scant updates on the release plan since then, and its status as an independent film certainly adds some ambiguity, but it’s likely Megalopolis sees at least a modest theatrical release.
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