When the first - and to date the only - showing at the IMAX Universal Citywalk cinema in Los Angeles of Megalopolis
ended at the end of the morning last Thursday, March 28 ,
the 300 guests stood up to applaud wildly, according to one of the attendees at that private session. They cheered its director, Francis Ford Coppola, because at 85 years old (84 that day, because his birthday is April 7) he has managed to capture on the screen his dream of four decades, the script that he began to concoct during the production of
Apocalypse Now.
Now, can it be seen throughout the world? The same people who praised his creative risk that day also wrote about the complexity of his economic side: Coppola has put the $120 million of his budget out of his own pocket, selling part of his wine business. But what Hollywood studio or what distribution company is going to pay that money and another 100 million more for its launch (including copies and advertising), if
Twixt,
the previous feature by the director of
The Godfather,
grossed only 1 .3 million dollars?
There were Al Pacino, Nicolas Cage, Spike Jonze, Shia LaBeouf, Darren Aronofsky, Anjelica Huston, John Favreau, Roger Corman and Andy García, as well as friends and family, like his sister Talia Shire, for example, or his son Roman, who He has helped his father on filming as head of the second unit. Her daughter Sofia, who has dedicated herself to caring for Eleanor Coppola in recent months, the filmmaker's wife, who died last Friday, the artistic and vital support of her husband, was not seen. A witness said that García — who ends up leading the Corleone family at the end of
The Godfather Part 3
— shouted to the audience when the applause died down: “This man is the reason we all make movies.” An attendee assured that the drama will not be a popcorn blockbuster, but "that there is a stratum of fans who will want to see it, especially if the critics support it and if its premiere is accompanied by a huge advertising campaign." Another understood that “its audacity will make some love it and others reject it, and its launch will require careful and loving handling, which would seem an impossible task in today's market.” The film is shot to be seen in IMAX theaters, and at one point in the footage an actor physically gets up in the stalls, goes to the screen - at least that happened that Thursday in Los Angeles - and from there Adam Driver ( his protagonist) responds as if listening to him. A third viewer defined
Megalopolis
as a cross between a Coppola film and a work by Ed Emshwiller, a pioneering visual artist in experimental cinema and science fiction illustrations.
Director Gregory Nava (
Selena
) told
IndieWire
that it is “a brilliant and visionary masterpiece.” “It left me so overwhelmed that I couldn't do anything for the rest of the day but think about
Megalopolis
and feel the powerful and uplifting message of it. Mike Figgis, who has been in charge of the documentary about its filming in the last three years, defined it as
“Julius Caesar
meets
Blade Runner.”
Another witness to the event,
Mike Fleming, editor-in-chief of
Deadline
, highlighted the influence of Ancient Rome, which is reflected in the characters' hairstyles.
What is
Megalopolis about?
Driver is Cesar, a visionary architect, a character similar to the one he has embodied in recent years in
Ferrari
and
The House of Gucci,
and that Coppola already drew in
Tucker, a man and his dream:
a tortured innovator, a transcript of Coppola himself . Nathalie Emmanuel plays Julia, the woman who lives in contradiction between her love for Driver and respect for her father, Mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a conservative man in his vision, and who clashes with the more progressive architect. and who wants to rebuild New York after its devastation following the patterns of a utopia. Lawrence Fishburne (a teenager in
Apocalypse Now)
is the narrator; Aubrey Plaza, Emmanuel's love rival, and Jon Voight, Shire, LaBeouf, Jason Schwartzman (Coppola's nephew) and Dustin Hoffman also participate. They are the ones who have finally appeared in a film that half of Hollywood has gone through.
Also at that screening were those responsible for the major Hollywood studios, Netflix and Amazon MGM Prime Video... And so far, none of them have made an offer for the film. Instead, Thierry Frémaux, general delegate of Cannes, announced last Thursday with immense joy that
Megalopolis
will be screened on May 17 in the French festival's competition, just 45 years after
Apocalypse Now
won the Palme d'Or. There the next fight will begin: Coppola hoped that
Megalópolis
would come out of that screening with global distribution closed at the stroke of a pen, something almost impossible in these times, and now the director and Barry Hirsch, his lifelong lawyer and today producer, They will have to do what most auteur filmmakers do: convince local distributors in the competition market to sell the exhibition rights for their film territory by territory. And so they may also find someone to show it in the United States.
A journey of four decades
The journey has been very long, because it began in 1979 with the original idea, and in 1983 the filmmaker announced his first script. Six years later, Coppola considered filming
Megalopolis
in the Roman Cinecittà studios, and even the production design genius Dean Tavoularis opened an office in the Italian capital to finalize sketches and build sets. But other films began to sneak in, such as
The Godfather Part III, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Jack
or
Self-Defence:
there was neither a complete script nor closed financing. Coppola flirted with a possible injection of Arab money, petrodollars that never flowed. In 2001, in an interview, the filmmaker pointed out that the libretto projected the plot of Lucius Sergius Catilina, who wanted to achieve power in the Roman Republic in the year 63 BC. C. by military means, in a New York of the future. And that's why he began filming with a second unit in the American city, to accumulate material, a few weeks before 9/11. After the terrorist attack the images were discarded. At that time, he met an actor at the peak of his fame, Russell Crowe, at a dinner in Paris, a bombastic name at the time. Since then, over the decades, Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio (another possible protagonist), Robert De Niro, Edie Falco, James Gandolfini, Paul Newman, Kevin Spacey, Uma Thurman have performed different script readings at various casting meetings. .. and others. In 2002, thanks to high definition, Coppola accumulated more material from big cities, and when a friend gave him the book
The Ageless Man,
by Mircea Eliade, he put his adaptation to
Megalopolis first.
Since 2007, Coppola's career has behaved like a roller coaster: neither
Tetro
nor
Twixt
had commercial or critical success, a respect that he regained with the new production of
The Godfather III.
His negotiations to produce
Megalópolis
failed, just the opposite of his wineries. Thanks to the sale of part of this wine empire, it has become self-produced, and in 2019 he was finally able to announce the start of his project... although in the summer of 2021 he continued to change actors; This time those enrolled were Oscar Isaac, Forest Whitaker, Cate Blanchett, Jon Voight, Zendaya, James Caan, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange.
Of this cast, only Jon Voight has survived, and the deceased Caan has been replaced by Dustin Hoffman, in the filming of a drama, which they say moves between epic and opera, which took place from November 2022 to March 2023 in Atlanta (Georgia). The director's original idea was to use StageCraft, the technology that became fashionable with
The Batman
and
The Mandalorian,
and that surrounds the actors with giant LED screens; Economic hardships have forced him to return to the traditional green screen.
And for that change of course, Coppola decided to change the crew: the penultimate tremor—before the frustrated sale to some major studios—in the production of
Megalópolis
was suffered that January 2023, when he fired part of the technical team.
The Hollywood Reporter
spoke in a report of “chaos”, after the departure of the production designer, the art director, the visual effects supervisor and their entire team. The director and Driver responded quickly to the article by calming the waters, and Coppola's fans remembered that the same thing happened halfway through the filming of his
Dracula,
without its quality suffering. Finally, last summer, some shots were retaken and a handful of new shots were filmed.
Now we just have to wait for May 17, when the lights go out at the Grand Théâtre Lumière at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes and the almost 140 minutes of
Megalópolis are shown.
That day will have ended the longest cinematic journey of Coppola's career, a creator who has already navigated economic disasters like Heartbreak and bankrupted his production company three times, American Zoetrope. He will only have to wait for someone to make him an offer for his film that he cannot refuse.
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