Do you think the director of the godfather i The Godfather Part II would have had carte blanche to make any movie he wanted in the late 70s and early 80s. That's when Francis Ford Coppola started to develop megalopolis. But directing two of the undisputed best films of all time wasn't enough. He never got anyone to produce his great epic. For this he needed decades of patience and $120 million of his own money. Coppola has finally made his passion project a reality. And while the film still doesn't have a studio to call home, it does have an official clip for us to enjoy. Coppola released the first footage of megalopoliswhich features Adam Driver as a man on the brink of time and death.
What is happening in this elegant, intense and strange scene? Coppola also posted a lengthy write-up to go with this clip. (The clip appears to be how the film opens.) What follows this scene is a story about “an entire civilization teetering on an equally precarious ledge, devouring itself in a maelstrom of unchecked greed, self-absorption and political propaganda, while a few daring dreamers push against the tide, striving to usher in a new dawn.”
ah I have it. May be. Or, you know, not at all. Don't worry, the rest of the information is even wilder. Everything has to be read to be believed. And even then it's hard to believe. From Coppola's YouTube page:
The man's name is Caesar (Conductor), like the Roman general who founded the Roman Empire, Caesar the labor leader who organized the California farm workers in the 1960s, and some other remarkably great men in history. But he's also clearly an avatar of Coppola himself: a great visionary witnessing something that was once great (call it cinema if you must) fizzle out before his very eyes and is determined to revive it. And after decades of planning, the film Megalopolis is the powerful elixir it has produced: a large-screen film of provocative ideas and relentless cinematic invention that belies its creator's 84 years of age.
Coppola seems to have been born again by a stroke of filmic lightning, and the film – no, the experience (complete with “live cinema”) in the theater – that has emerged feels both the work of an uninclined film school prodigy. by notions of convention, but also by the work of an aged master who knows much about life and the ways of the world. To paraphrase Coppola himself speaking decades ago about his Apocalypse Now, Megalopolis is not a film about the end of the world as we know it, it is the end of the world as we know it. Only, where Apocalypse left us in a haze of napalm-bombed fever dreams, Megalopolis surprisingly and poignantly gives us a bright final image of hope for the future.”
According to the paper, this is a “clear and concise” analysis of the film.
I have to see this movie. I. HEU. If it's as weird and weird as this writing, it'll be worth every penny Francis Ford Coppola spent. And it will be proof that the studios should have let him do it a long time ago.
megalopolis it also stars Giancarlo Esposito as the film's main antagonist, Mayor Franklyn Cicero. It also stars Nathalie Emmanuel, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, DB Sweeney, Jon Voight, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, Grace VanderWaal and Talia Shire.
