Megalopolis (film)

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Megalopolis
Official logo
Directed byFrancis Ford Coppola
Written byFrancis Ford Coppola
Produced by
  • Francis Ford Coppola
  • Michael Bederman
  • Barry Hirsch
  • Fred Roos
Starring
CinematographyMihai Mălaimare Jr.
Edited by
Music byOsvaldo Golijov[3]
Production
company
Release date
  • May 16, 2024 (2024-05-16) (Cannes)
Running time
138 minutes[1]
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$120 million

Megalopolis is an upcoming American epic science fiction drama film written, directed, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. Set in an imagined modern America following a devastating disaster, the film features an ensemble cast, including Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Jason Schwartzman, Talia Shire, Grace VanderWaal, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, and Dustin Hoffman.

A longtime passion project for Coppola, who first conceived the idea for the film in 1977 and actively started developing it in 1983, Megalopolis underwent significant delays and numerous cancellations over the years. Coppola revived the project in 2019 by spending $120 million of his own money on the film. Filming took place from November 2022 to March 2023. The film is Coppola's first directorial effort since Twixt (2011), marking his longest gap between films.

The film was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, where it is set to premiere on May 16, 2024.

Premise

An accident destroys a decaying New York City-like metropolis. Cesar Catilina, an idealist architect with the power to control time, aims to rebuild the city as a sustainable utopia, while his opposition, corrupt Mayor Franklyn Cicero, remains committed to a regressive status quo. Torn between them is Franklyn's socialite daughter, Julia, who, tired of the influence she inherited, searches for her life's meaning.[4][5][6]

Cast

Credits adapted from the film's entry on the Cannes Film Festival website.[1]

Production

Development

Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France.
Writer, director, and producer Francis Ford Coppola in 2001

Growing up in New York, Francis Ford Coppola was fascinated by science fiction films such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and William Cameron Menzies's Things to Come (1936), and the scientific community's history with dangerous experiments.[5] Coppola conceived the overall idea for Megalopolis towards the end of filming Apocalypse Now (1979) in 1977. Sound designer Richard Beggs described Coppola's vision as a "gigantic opera, shown over four nights in some place as close as possible to the geographical center of the United States – and people would come from all over, as they do to Bayreuth".[9]: 181 [10]: 50 

Coppola devoted the beginning of 1983 to writing the screenplay, assembling four hundred pages of notes and script fragments in two months.[11]: 333  Over the next four decades, he collected clippings and notes for a scrapbook detailing intriguing subjects he envisioned incorporating into a future screenplay, like political cartoons and different historical subjects before deciding to make a Roman epic film set in modern America.[5] In mid-1983, he described the plot as taking place in one day in New York City with Catiline Rome as a backdrop, similar to how James Joyce's modernist novel Ulysses (1922) used Homer in the context of modern Dublin and how he had updated the setting of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1899) from the late 1800s amid the European colonial rule in Africa to the 1970s Vietnam War for Apocalypse Now.[5][12]: 74 [13]: 215 

In January 1989, Coppola announced his intentions to endeavor on Le Ribellion di Catilina, a film "so big and complicated it would seem impossible," which biographer Michael Schumacher said "sounded much like what he had in store for Megalopolis".[11]: 409–410  It was to be shot in Cinecittà, a large film studio in Rome, Italy, where production designer Dean Tavoularis and his design team had built offices and an art studio for drafters to storyboard the film.[14]: 266 [15]: 234  The Hollywood Reporter described it as "swing[ing] from the past to the present," merging "the images of Rome ... with the New York City of today".[11]: 410  Following the 1990–91 film awards season for The Godfather Part III (1990), Coppola's production company, American Zoetrope, announced several projects in development, including plans to film Megalopolis in 1991, despite lacking a finished script.[11]: 436  However, the film was postponed to "no earlier than 1996" after Coppola found himself prioritizing other projects, including Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), Jack (1996), and The Rainmaker (1997), to get out of debt accumulated from One from the Heart (1982) and Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), and fund Megalopolis.[11]: 444 [16]: 110 [17]

"Do films the same way Ingmar Bergman did them, with a little group of collaborators that you know, making a script that you wrote. Otherwise, you will finally get beaten down by the fact that you are making things that you are not really interested in, from a script that you don't fully understand, by means that you don't approve of. The question is: Can you make bigger films, like Megalopolis or Cure, in that way? Certainly, the determining factor is the cast, because with a star cast comes the financing ..."

— Francis Ford Coppola, diary entry (August 15, 1992)[18]: 28 

In 2001, Coppola held table reads in a production office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with actors including Nicolas Cage (Coppola's nephew), Russell Crowe, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Edie Falco, James Gandolfini, Jon Hamm, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey, and Uma Thurman.[5][19][20] Other actors considered for roles included Matt Dillon and Parker Posey, though Coppola dispelled rumors that he had written a part specifically for Warren Beatty.[14]: 262 [21] Jim Steranko, who previously created production illustrations for Bram Stoker's Dracula, produced concept art for Megalopolis at Coppola's behest, described in James Romberger's master's thesis as "expansive, elaborate and carefully rendered pencil or charcoal halftone architectural drawings of huge buildings and urban plazas that appeared to mix ancient Roman, art deco and speculative sci-fi stylizations".[10]: 54  Locations proposed for the film included Montreal and New York, with an anticipated budget between $50 and 80 million.[14]: 263 [21][22] That year, Coppola and cinematographer Ron Fricke recorded roughly 30 hours of second unit footage of New York City, thinking it would be simpler to do so before principal photography. After the September 11 attacks, during which Coppola and his team were location scouting in New York, the footage was stashed, including more material they shot two weeks after, due to its resemblance to the script, which involved a Soviet satellite crashing into Earth.[5][10]: 54 [14]: 263 [23] In October, Coppola declared his plans to rewrite the film.[22] In 2002, he announced that his next project as a director would be Megalopolis and shot footage for the film on high-definition video that George Lucas described as "wide shots of cities with incredible detail at magic hour and all kinds of available-light material".[24][14]: 263  He also disclosed his intent to self-finance the film and the use of "some extraordinary new technology" to shoot sixty to seventy hours of second unit footage in Manhattan.[25][26][27]: xv [28]: 82 

Production on the film eventually halted. The success of his winery and resorts meant Coppola could produce the film with his own money, which his friend Wendy Doniger said "paralyzed him": "He had no excuse this time if the film was no good. What froze him was having the power to do exactly what he wanted so that his soul was on the line."[29] To help, she gave him books that she deemed thematically relevant, including Mircea Eliade's Youth Without Youth (1976), a novella about a 70-year-old man struggling to complete an ambitious project. Coppola then decided to shelve Megalopolis to self-finance a small-scale adaptation of the book, intended to be "the opposite of Megalopolis".[28]: 85 [29] In 2006, Osvaldo Golijov, who composed the music for Youth Without Youth (2007), said Coppola had asked him to write a symphony for Megalopolis that would have "dictated the rhythm of the film".[30]

In 2007, Coppola admitted that 9/11 "made it really pretty tough ... a movie about the aspiration of utopia with New York as a main character and then all of a sudden you couldn't write about New York without just dealing with what happened and the implications of what happened. The world was attacked and I didn't know how to try to do with that. I tried".[17] In 2009, in regards to the likelihood of revisiting the film, he said: "I feel pleased to have written something ... Someday, I'll read what I had on Megalopolis and maybe I'll think different of it, but it's also a movie that costs a lot of money to make and there's not a patron out there. You see what the studios are making right now."[31] In line with his films The Godfather (1972) and Bram Stoker's Dracula, where he credited Mario Puzo and Bram Stoker as the original writers, respectively, Coppola contemplated branding the film with his name as Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, with the subtitle All Roads Lead to Rome, but decided against it.[5]

Pre-production

On April 3, 2019, Coppola announced his return to the project, having approached Jude Law and Shia LaBeouf for lead roles.[32][23] Coppola reportedly spent $120 million of his own money to produce the film, having sold a "significant piece of his wine empire" in Northern California.[5][33] By August 2021, discussions with actors to star in the film had begun; James Caan was set to star while Cate Blanchett, Oscar Isaac, Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jon Voight, Forest Whitaker, and Zendaya were in various stages of negotiations.[34] Towards the end of the year, Nathalie Emmanuel auditioned over Zoom while filming The Invitation (2022) in Budapest. She described Coppola having her participate in an acting exercise, selecting a line from a famous work and reciting it in different contexts.[35] By March 2022, Talia Shire (Coppola's sister) expressed her interest in joining the cast, and Isaac was reported to have passed on the project.[36][37] By May, the budget was reported to be under $100 million, while Emmanuel, Voight, and Whitaker were confirmed for the cast, with Adam Driver and Laurence Fishburne added.[38] On July 6, Caan, who was still in negotiations for the film, died.[39][40]

Mihai Mălaimare Jr. served as cinematographer. He previously shot Coppola's Youth Without Youth, Tetro (2009), and Twixt (2011).[41] Pre-production had begun by August 2022; Kathryn Hunter, Aubrey Plaza, James Remar, Jason Schwartzman (Coppola's nephew and Shire's son), and Grace VanderWaal joined the cast, with LaBeouf and Shire confirmed to be part of the cast.[42][43] Plaza similarly auditioned over Zoom during the production of the second season of The White Lotus while staying at the San Domenico, the same hotel in Italy that Coppola resided in during the filming of The Godfather. Before the meeting, Coppola had emailed her the entire script, asking her to consider it before auditioning.[44] Chloe Fineman, Madeleine Gardella, Dustin Hoffman, Bailey Ives, Isabelle Kusman, and D. B. Sweeney would be added in October.[45] In January 2023, Giancarlo Esposito was confirmed to star.[46] VanderWaal, whom Coppola met through her father, wrote original songs for the film.[47]

In a series of Instagram posts in July 2023, Coppola shared a list of books that the film had been heavily influenced by, including Bullshit Jobs (2018), The Dawn of Everything (2021), and Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) by David Graeber; The Chalice and the Blade (1987) by Riane Eisler; The Glass Bead Game (1943) by Hermann Hesse; The Origins of Political Order (2011) by Francis Fukuyama; The Swerve (2011) by Stephen Greenblatt; and The War Lovers (2010) by Evan Thomas.[48] The character of Cesar was based on Catiline and renamed at Mary Beard's suggestion that Julius Caesar had ties with Catiline and was far more known among audiences. Coppola said the character was inspired by Robert Moses as portrayed in Robert Caro's biography The Power Broker (1974) and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, and Walter Gropius. Coppola also researched the Claus von Bülow murder case, the Mary Cunningham-William Agee Bendix Corporation scandal, the emergence of New York Stock Exchange reporter Maria Bartiromo, the history of Studio 54, and Felix Rohatyn's solution for the New York City fiscal crisis of 1975.[5]

The COVID-19 pandemic delayed the start of production. Before filming began, a week of rehearsals took place with theater-style exercises, much like the one Emmanuel described having in her audition.[35] Plaza described Coppola's workshop-style approach as allowing actors to improvise and provide feedback to the script, adding: "We wrote scenes and we conducted ourselves like a theater troupe, me and Jon Voight and Shia [LaBeouf]. We were writing scenes and giving them to the script supervisor. And then she would give them to Francis and sometimes he would like it and put it in. But every day he wanted to play. He ran it like it was a theater camp. There were games all day, and we were in character the whole time."[44]

Filming

Megalopolis was shot at Trilith Studios in Georgia from 2022 to 2023

Principal photography began on November 1, 2022, and took place at Trilith Studios and around Atlanta, Georgia.[49][50] It was to be the first film shot on Trilith Studios' Prysm Stage, an LED volume on-set virtual production stage, but due to budget constraints, the production pivoted to a "less costly, more traditional greenscreen approach".[51][52][53] In reference to ancient Rome, some male actors donned Caesar cuts.[54] Coppola bought a closed drive-in motel to accommodate his extended family and reside in during the production.[55]

For Plaza, the last two weeks of the shoot overlapped with her role on the television series Agatha. The two projects were shot on the same lot, so she was allowed to do both.[44] Driver finished shooting his part in early March and filming wrapped on March 30, 2023.[56][57] In August 2023, during the SAG-AFTRA strike, the film received an interim agreement from the union, possibly for reshoots.[58][59]

Alleged conflicts on set

Plaza spoke positively about Coppola's willingness to experiment and how sometimes "all of a sudden, he would have another idea. And then all of a sudden, we're shooting in a different location we didn't even plan to shoot. And then the whole day goes by and you're like, 'I had no idea any of that was going to happen'".[44] Others described that approach as "exasperating", as Coppola was hesitant to decide how the film's world should look. One crew member recalled: "He would often show up in the mornings before these big sequences and because no plan had been put in place, and because he wouldn't allow his collaborators to put a plan in place, he would often just sit in his trailer for hours on end, wouldn't talk to anybody, was often smoking marijuana ... And hours and hours would go by without anything being filmed. And the crew and the cast would all stand around and wait. And then he'd come out and whip up something that didn't make sense, and that didn't follow anything anybody had spoken about or anything that was on the page, and we'd all just go along with it, trying to make the best out of it."[55]

Along with difficulties with Coppola's "old-school" approach to filmmaking, spending work days completing shots practically, crew members described the filmmaker as "unpleasant", alleging that he pulled women to sit on his lap and tried to kiss female extras to "get them in the mood". Executive co-producer Darren Demetre responded to the allegations against Coppola, stating: "There were two days when we shot a celebratory Studio 54-esque club scene where Francis walked around the set to establish the spirit of the scene by giving kind hugs and kisses on the cheek to the cast and background players. It was his way to help inspire and establish the club atmosphere ... I was never aware of any complaints of harassment or ill behaviour during the course of the project."[55]

On December 9, 2022, Coppola fired most of the visual effects team, with the rest of the department, including supervisor Mark Russell, soon following. By January 2023, the film was halfway into filming when reports indicated the budget ballooned higher than its original $120 million, which The Hollywood Reporter compared to Coppola's history of challenging productions, most notoriously Apocalypse Now.[53] Due to the reported "unstable filming environment", several crew members exited the film, including production designer Beth Mickle and art director David Scott, along with the art department.[53] Coppola and Driver contested the report, saying that while there was some turnover in crew, the production was on schedule, on budget, and going smoothly.[60]

Post-production

In February 2024, Coppola recorded the score with the Hungarian National Philharmonic in Budapest.[61]

Themes

In 1999, Coppola described the film as setting the characters of the Catilinarian conspiracy in modern New York, saying: "In many ways what it's really about is a metaphor—because if you walk around New York and look around, you could make Rome there", adding: "Ultimately what's at stake is the future, because it takes the premise that the future, the shape of things to come, is being determined today, by the interests that are vying for control ... we already know what happened to Rome. Rome became a fascist Empire. Is that what we're going to become?"[62] In 2022, he said the film had an optimistic look at humanity, and the intuitive goodness in people even in a divided climate.[63] In 2024, Coppola said: "I wondered whether the traditional portrayal of Catiline as 'evil' and Cicero as 'good' was necessarily true", and described the film as a commentary for the United States, under the belief that the country's founders borrowed from Roman law to develop their democratic government without a king.[5]

Release

The film is scheduled to premiere at the 77th Cannes Film Festival on May 16, 2024.[64] Coppola saw the film in full for the first time on an IMAX screen at the company's headquarters in Playa Vista, Los Angeles. The film used camera technology for certain sequences that could cover an entire IMAX screen.[54] On March 28, 2024, a private screening of the film was presented to distributors at the Universal CityWalk IMAX Theater in Hollywood.[65]

Distribution

Coppola and his longtime attorney Barry Hirsch, a producer on the film, expressed that they would not make a final decision where to debut the film until a distribution partner was secured and a firm rollout plan was put in place.[65]

The "muted" response to the first screening made securing a distributor difficult for the film as studios weighed the return on investment, as Coppola expected a studio to commit to a print-and-advertising (P&A) campaign of $80–100 million and for producers to receive half of the film's revenues.[54][66] A distribution veteran told The Hollywood Reporter: "I find it hard to believe any distributor would put up cash money and stay in first position to recoup the P&A as well as their distribution fee. If [Coppola] is willing to put up the P&A or backstop the spend, I think there would be a lot more interested parties."[54]

In April 2024, the film secured a spot to premiere in competition for the Palme d'Or at that year's Cannes Film Festival.[4] Cannes festival director Thierry Frémaux addressed the pending distribution plans for Megalopolis, confirming that Coppola "showed it to us and to some other people in the U.S., and he's thinking about the strategy of the film. We'll see".[67] Le Pacte, for France, was the first to acquire distribution rights to an international market, with the company Goodfellas handling international sales.[68][69][70] Furthermore, Amazon MGM Studios and Apple Original Films were reportedly interested in acquiring North American distribution rights.[66]

Promotion

In March 2023, Syzygy Publishing announced their collaboration with Coppola on a graphic novel tie-in to the film; written by Chris Ryall and artwork by Jacob Phillips, this will be the first graphic novel of a Coppola film.[71] Additionally, the late author Colleen McCullough, whose book series Masters of Rome (1990–2007) partially inspired Megalopolis, wrote the novelization of the film.[72] Both the graphic novel and the novelization will accompany the film's release, along with a behind-the-scenes documentary, directed by Mike Figgis, that features interviews with Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg.[73][74] Coppola revealed on Instagram that "all three projects are independent" of him, but based on his "many scripts and ideas over the decades".[75]

Reception

The early industry screening resulted in reactions considered divisive while some were mixed, though others were primarily of general bewilderment.[76][77][78] Many attendees praised LaBeouf's performance as one of the antagonists but left questioning the film's commercial viability.[54][79] Deadline Hollywood's Mike Fleming Jr., more receptive toward the screening, praised the film's runtime and ambition, writing that it is "crackling with ideas that fuse the past with the future, with an epic and highly visual fable that plays perfectly on an IMAX screen".[65] The film was further described as reminiscent of the works of author Ayn Rand and the films Metropolis (1927) and Caligula (1979), and about a civilization teetering on a "precarious ledge, devouring itself in a whirl of unchecked greed, self-absorption, and political propaganda".[76][80] Fellow director Gregory Nava called it "a visionary masterpiece", complimenting the acting of LaBeouf and Esposito as "particularly sterling", adding: "It's an unbelievable, astonishing film, and [Coppola] is pushing the boundaries of cinema ... [Coppola] has used visual effects, and things that before have simply been limited to superhero movies, in a way to evoke other kinds of emotions."[81] On the film's early reception, Coppola said: "This is exactly what happened with Apocalypse Now 40 years ago. There were very contradicting views expressed, but the audience never stopped going to see the film, and to this day Apocalypse Now is still in very profitable distribution. I am sure this will be the same situation with Megalopolis. It will stand the test of time."[81]

Bilge Ebiri of Vulture criticized the post-screening reactions, writing: "The fact that these quotes were full of self-satisfied business-speak (amplified by an industry press that seems to love bean-counting almost as much as do the execs they cover) didn't help matters. As soon as these opinions appeared, they were met with online blowback from people who deemed these execs anti-art philistines and know-nothings ... But the real question of this most recent chapter of the Francis Ford Coppola saga isn't about Megalopolis, a movie we'll be arguing about plenty when it opens. It's about whether Hollywood and the culture into which it releases its movies still have any room left for true dreamers."[82] Moreover, The Independent's Geoffrey Macnab defended Coppola and also condemned the post-screening remarks, calling the film executives "nonplussed", and wrote: "Did they want to see [Coppola] fall on his face? That was the impression given by some of the more snide post-screening remarks. It was as if the Hollywood executives were looking for payback for all those past occasions when Coppola had criticised their way of doing business."[83] Matthew Perrino of MovieWeb also supported Coppola and the film, deeming it "the most important movie of 2024", but questioned its success and Coppola's legacy as well, concluding: "For better or worse, Megalopolis will be a crucial piece of Coppola's cinematic legacy."[84]

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