FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA HAS WANTED TO MAKE MEGALOPOLIS, ABOUT A MAN CONSTRUCTING AN URBAN UTOPIA, FOR ALMOST HALF A CENTURY. AS IT FINALLY ARRIVES, HE TELLS US HOW HE MADE HIS OWN DREAM COME TRUE

WORDS IAN FREER

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA LOVES TO GAMBLE.

Megalopolis, his 23rd feature as a director, represents the biggest punt of his 61-year career. Making Apocalypse Now look like a flutter on the Grand National, few films have been the focus of such intense entertainment-press speculation. The decades in the planning. The 300 rewrites (Coppola’s fanciful estimation). The self-financing, by the filmmaker, to the tune of $120 million. The subsequent runaway budget. The art department quitting. Wow Platinum, Aubrey Plaza’s character name. It has all come under microscopic scrutiny. Even the Cannes premiere caused a stir when, during the screening, the house lights came up and Adam Driver’s protagonist started talking to an actor placed in the auditorium, Sadly, this won’t be the case at the Romford Cineworld.

Given the brouhaha around its making, it’s easy to forget the movie beneath the melee. Until you see it. Set in the American city of New Rome, Megalopolis is a self-described ‘fable’ about Cesar Catalina (Driver), a visionary artist capable of stopping time, taking on regressive mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) to create a utopian, idealistic future for all. Featuring a huge cast (Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Shia LaBeouf, Laurence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman), it courses with typical Coppola bravura, mixing lengthy pontificating (Driver delivers Hamlet’s “To be or not to be...” soliloquy in full) with dazzling, trippy imagery. Part treatise on politics, philosophy, media, hedonism and love, part state-of-the-nation address, all celebration of the power of cinema, it might well be the most spectacular (not to mention expensive) arthouse film ever made.

Given the financial pressure on his shoulders, not to mention the loss of Eleanor, his wife of 62 years, in April, Coppola is in good spirits when he and Empire chat: he is candid, a disarming cross between a ridiculously well-read academic and a warm, favourite uncle. Time will tell if his gamble will pay off at the box office. But there’s a sense that for Coppola, the creative juice has already been worth the financial squeeze.

When did you first have the idea for Megalopolis?

There’s been a lot of confusion about this, that I was working on it for 40 years. That’s not really true. What’s true is that when I was making movies, I pretty much made them in the style that I thought the theme required. The Godfather was a very classical kind of movie. Apocalypse Now was a very wild, out-of-control film. So, my movies as a younger filmmaker were all very different styles. I wondered, when I was older and more seasoned, what my style would be. And I’m still wondering. (Laughs) So I started to keep notebooks of things I was reading or newspaper clippings or political cartoons or just things which might be interesting. And that I did for 40 years.