The $120 Million Passion Project That’s Too Ahead of Its Time
While working on his latest film, Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola had an idea: What if viewers interacted with the movie itself? He’d have microphones placed throughout audiences at every screening, so that at a predetermined moment, everyone who wanted to could ask the characters a question—and someone on-screen would respond. It would bridge the gap between fact and fiction. It would prove that cinema-going could truly be a unique experience.
And it would have worked, the director told me at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month, if he’d found someone to help make the technology work. Coppola had done everything else to create the experience: He’d come up with questions he anticipated people would want to ask—such as how the characters were feeling or what they wanted to do next—and he’d composed different answers to each one. He’d then filmed his cast reciting the responses he’d written. He even started collaborating with the programmers behind Alexa, Amazon’s AI assistant, on a mechanism that would process audience members’ queries and play a clip with the most appropriate reply. “If you went to the movie every day for a week, and you saw it seven times, every time would be different,” he said. “That was the intention originally, and we shot it that way.”
But producing the now-notorious scene, as film-festival attendees can attest, didn’t go according to plan—and not much else has either, when it comes to Megalopolis’s rollout. Lionsgate, which signed on to distribute the film weeks after its world premiere, at the Cannes Film Festival, had to pull a trailer that used fabricated quotes from critics about Coppola’s best-known work, such as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. In July, Variety reported allegations of his on-set misconduct, including trying to kiss extras. (Coppola denied the allegations and has since filed a libel lawsuit against Variety.) Box-office analysts have forecasted the film flopping. And Amazon left the project during production, leaving Coppola no choice but to diminish the interactive theater component into a single, scripted exchange.
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When we spoke, Coppola didn’t sound rattled by how wide the gulf between his aspirations and their execution had become. Instead, he saw such obstacles as inevitable for a maverick filmmaker. “Cinema is something that keeps changing,” he said. “Yet whenever you try to change it, everyone says, ‘Well, it’s not supposed to be like that.’ So we have to be much more accepting of films that we see that are different than the films we’re used to.”
Megalopolis, though, is a lot to accept. The film, out in theaters today, imagines 21st-century New York City as a retro-futurist Roman empire, in which a visionary architect, Cesar Catilina (played by Adam Driver), attempts to transform New Rome into a utopia using a space-time-altering material he invented called “Megalon.” The city’s mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), doubts Cesar’s ability to pull this off, but his socialite daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), sees promise in Cesar’s work. Built on ideas that Coppola first conceived of in 1977 and began developing into a movie in 1983, Megalopolis aims to chart how a decadent civilization on the verge of collapse can be saved by ideals. The result is a maximalist mess that engages with too many disparate themes—such as the dangers of technology, the overreach of wealth, the amorality of celebrity, and the importance of preserving artistic legacy. Characters speak in non sequiturs and platitudes. Plotlines are introduced and discarded at random. By the end of my screening, I’d filled my pages of notes with question marks.
Yet for all its shortcomings, Megalopolis is unabashedly openhearted, delivering an earnest plea to envision a better future. Maybe that sounds as trite as the underwritten dialogue, but Coppola’s intention, he explained, was to inspire his audiences to think like his protagonist—to create, innovate, and even break the rules of cinema by directly asking Cesar a question. “You see in the news every day a heartbreak that’s not necessary,” he said. “Nothing bad that’s happening these days must be … We are capable of solving any problem we have to face.” That’s why he blanketed Megalopolis with homages to “every movie I ever loved”—including works by Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, and Alfred Hitchcock—to insist on the value of art. And after having to back-burner the script until 2021, when production truly started, Coppola solved his own heartbreak by self-financing the $120 million passion project.
What he has brought to fruition is too scattershot to be deemed a masterpiece, yet too sincere to be dismissed as self-indulgence. And if audiences don’t quite get what he’s going for with Megalopolis, Coppola conceded, at least he believes they’ll be entertained. “The movie,” he said with a shrug, “is not boring.”
About midway into Megalopolis, Cesar and Julia meet atop a tower overlooking the city. They’ve fallen in love, and as they kiss, Cesar stops time. The bouquet of flowers Julia had dropped freezes in midair. The scaffolding they’re standing on stops swinging. They’re locked in an embrace, suspended over New Rome. It’s a delicate, physics-defying tableau to behold: two bodies on a motionless platform carried by wires descending from somewhere unseen. To the viewer, there’s just endless, golden sky.
Megalopolis’s best moments convey Coppola’s taste for boundary-breaking play. In addition to having an audience member get up and speak to Cesar, what if, the director wondered, Cesar recited the entirety of Hamlet’s soliloquy, as Driver did during rehearsal? What if Driver and Emmanuel’s tug-of-war acting exercise continued into a take? “I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that movies are the children of theater, and how they relate,” Coppola told me. “When we’re playing together is when we’re the most creative.”
The film falters when it tries to reconcile that whimsy with its more serious goal: to draw obvious parallels between its setting, a city crumbling under corrupt leadership, and modern America. In the final act, Cesar delivers a speech about how constructing a perfect society requires debate. But the message comes across more like a digestible slogan at best—and Megalopolis struggles to clarify how Cesar will prevent the end of New Rome, or whether Coppola himself has any guidance for democracy’s salvation.
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What the director does have are theories about human potential, a subject Coppola enthusiastically went on several tangents about when we spoke. He asked if I remembered Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar, then chuckled as he expressed his belief that—like an idea about the transcendent nature of our relationships that the spacefaring epic puts forth—love is itself a force made of particles like photons. He suspected, he said, that every person has the ability to “solve the problems we must solve to live on this planet in a sensible way.” And he told me how, in making Megalopolis, he was trying to rewrite what happened in 1936’s Things to Come, a science-fiction film written by H. G. Wells that he considers formative. It’s the story of a group of people building the city of the future, but their effort takes generations. “I never liked that,” Coppola explained. Instead, he saw room for improvement. “I said, ‘Well, my movie, when they build the future, I want them to build it faster.’” After all, “artists control time,” he told me, echoing a line from Megalopolis. “They always have.”
But such control doesn’t extend beyond the contours of an artist’s work. At my screening, shortly after the live Q&A portion, the film froze on Cicero’s face, the colors bleeding together. I wasn’t sure if this was meant to happen, and neither, it seemed, was anyone else. “This could all be a part of it?” someone wondered aloud, as theater workers scrambled to restart the projector.
It wasn’t, but it felt like it could have been. Megalopolis imagines a universe in which a man can hold memories in his hand; the command “Time, stop” actually works; and characters can hear their viewers from beyond the fourth wall. Yet none of these experimental swings quite lands, because the thing Megalopolis needed most is what Coppola couldn’t conjure: enough years for technology to be capable—and popular opinion to shift in favor—of executing his most audacious ideas.
Perhaps the key to understanding Megalopolis, then, is to see it as both unnerving and striking, its 85-year-old director’s ghastly, epic attempt to manipulate time itself at the cost of narrative logic. Coppola had so much at his disposal to bring his so-called fable about America to life: a renowned career that allowed him to hire a top-notch cast and crew; money from independent resources to fund a significant portion of the costs; and enough experience withstanding other troubled productions to confidently handle this one. But what he ultimately created isn’t the realization of his aspirations; it’s an unfinished work, waiting for our reality to catch up to his fantasy.