Megalopolis has been taking shape inside Francis Ford Coppola’s mind for nearly half of his life, and now he’s finally ready to show it to the world. The 85-year-old director of The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and The Conversation has finally completed his operatic passion project, at considerable personal cost. It will debut next month at the Cannes Film Festival, hoping to attract global distributors willing to take a similar chance.
The movie is about the personal, political, and romantic clashes that arise during a battle to construct an American utopia, and it was shaped in part by the speculative prophecy of H.G. Wells, a murderous conspiracy from ancient Roman history, the devastation of the September 11 attacks, and the outsize influence of attractive cable news hosts, among a litany of other inspirations. “To that, I added everything I had ever read or learned about,” Coppola says in a statement.
Vanity Fair has the exclusive first look at the result: Adam Driver as the idealistic architect and artist planning to rebuild a city that has fallen to ruins, and Nathalie Emmanuel as the socialite daughter of his nemesis, a corrupt mayor (Giancarlo Esposito), who likes his municipal kingdom the way it is. In his official logline for the film, Coppola describes Driver’s character as having the “power to stop time,” while Emmanuel’s character is caught between the two, deeply in love with the artist but loyal to her hard-charging father, “forcing her to discoverwhat she truly believes humanity deserves.”
The sprawling ensemble also includes Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne (who was a teenager soldier in Apocalypse Now), Kathryn Hunter, singer Grace VanderWaal, and James Remar, as well as the filmmaker’s sister, The Godfather actor Talia Shire, and her son (Coppola’s nephew) Jason Schwartzman.
An early industry screening for studio executives resulted in anonymous leaked reactions that ranged from impressed to perplexed. For some moviegoers, this only increased curiosity about the project. Enthusiastic social media reactions soared in recent weeks as fans expressed even more interest in seeing the veteran take a wild chance.
Coppola declined to be interviewed for this exclusive first look. (His wife of 61 years, Eleanor, passed away earlier this month, and the director and his family remain in mourning.) Instead, he offered Vanity Fair a written statement about the origins of the film.
Coppola traces the origin of his new movie back to his childhood in New York, when he was fascinated with tales of scientists and researchers and tinkered with amusingly dangerous experimentation kits. Movies, of course, provided another outlet for his imagination. One film that stuck in his mind was a 1936 drama about a society that desperately attempts to halt its own collapse, made by pioneering producer Alexander Korda and written by War of the Worlds and The Time Machine author H.G. Wells.
“The seeds forMegalopoliswere planted when as a kid I saw H.G. Wells’sThings to Come,” Coppola says. “This 1930sKordaclassic is about building the world of tomorrow, and has always been with me, first as the ‘boy scientist’ I was and later as a filmmaker.”
In his statement to VF, the director also addresses rumors about the long gestation of Megalopolis. To maintain total control of the project, he sold part of his winery estate in Northern California to self-finance the $120 million budget.
“I wasn’t really working on this screenplay for 40 years as I often see written, but rather I was collecting notes and clippings for a scrapbook of things I found interesting for some future screenplay, or examples of political cartoons or different historical subjects,” Coppola says. “Ultimately, after a lot of time, I settled on the idea of a Roman epic. And then later, a Roman epic set in modern America, so I really only began writing this script, on and off, in the last dozen years or so.Also,as I have made many films of many different subjects and in many different styles, I hoped for a project later in life when I might better understand what my personal style was.”
Since Megalopolis was the distillation of that lifetime, he decided to brand the title with his own name for the first time. “Always respecting the original writer in films I made, and always insisting that their names appear above the title, such as it was with Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, or Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” he says, “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.”
“Early on, I remember once I took 130 blank pages and put on a title page boldly announcingFrancis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis,and under that,All Roads Lead to Rome.I pretended it wasn’t totally blank, weighing it in my handsso I could imagine what one day it would feellike, and believe one dayit could exist. Then later, once I had a draft, I must have rewritten it 300 times, hoping each rewrite would improve it, if only a half percent better.”
Among his touchstones was an attempted coup from 63 BC. At that point, ancient Rome was in the throes of crisis, with its trade economy stalling, an ongoing struggle to hold together its vast republic, and debt for rich and poor alike skyrocketing. An insurrectionist named Catiline plotted to assassinate a number of political leaders and spark a dozen fires around the city, destabilizing it to the point of anarchy. After chaos, Catiline would build a new society, erasing all debts from the previous one. But his scheme was exposed and thwarted by the Roman statesman and orator Cicero.
