With Francis Ford Coppola finding new life with smaller budgeted fiercely independent films “Youth Without Youth” and “Tetro” (both of which deserved a much better reception that what they got), it’s easy to forget that in the 1990s, the director flirted with tentpole filmmaking helming “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” producing Kenneth Branaugh’s “Frankenstein” and at one point was developing a new take on “Pinocchio” over at Warner Bros. Also in his pocket, was a dream project, an ambitious sci-fi picture titled “Megalopolis.” And while Hollywood is currently falling over themselves to turn every big budget production into 3D, it seems Coppola was way ahead of the trend,considering the format for a couple of projects that, unfortunately, never came to pass.
In an interview with British GQ to promote “Tetro,” which is now just opening on UK shores, the director talked a little bit about the format and his feelings on it, “I’m fascinated by 3D. As a kid I knew about all the processes like “cinerama” and my older brother and I would spend countless hours with red and green spinning wheels trying to achieve the effect. But I really feel you have to have 3D without the glasses. I even think more like Abel Gance’s ‘Napoleon’ where you saw the movie but then put the 3D glasses on for the big battle.” And indeed, it’s that latter prospect, of using 3D for select sequences instead of just spreading it over an entire film with no rhyme or reason, that had a particular interest for the director.
“I had worked on ‘Pinocchio’ for a while and the intention was sections were to be in 3D. Even ‘Megalopolis’ had a whole act in 3D. The idea was that the film told the audience when to put the glasses on,” he added and the mind reels at the possibilities what those sequences could have looked like.
For those of you who might not recall, “Megalopolis” was a long-gestating project about an architect in a futuristic New York who tries to create utopia through architecture. Coppola, who dropped the project officially in 2005, once described the film as, “The setting is modern New York. It deals… with the idea that the future world we’re going to live in is being negotiated today… It’s kind of a shape-of-things-to-come film in which the characters are concerned with artists, businessmen, proletariat all having a stake in the future but very few of them having a hand in what it’s going to be like. It’s a little bit like an Ayn Rand novel.”
If it sounds ambitious and expensive, it is, and it was largely the reason it never got made. It probably would’ve required a budget north of $100 million and then as in now, unless it was based around a successful franchise or you’re the (very) rare talent that can command that kind of cash at a major studio, the kids of brainy sci-fi never get made (see Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity”; without Robert Downey Jr. that film would not be getting made).
As for “Pinocchio,” Coppola was in talks to direct the film for Warner Bros. in the early 1990s but the project stalled, leading to an ugly lawsuit between the director and the studio when Coppola tried to bring the project over to Columbia (and you wonder why he’s soured on working within industry). We can’t seem to dig up what Coppola’s version might have entailed, but given some of the wonderful Powell/Pressburger inspired set pieces and sequences in his latter two films, it certainly would’ve been something to behold.
For now the 3D craze continues, even with uninspired 3D conversions like “Alice In Wonderland,” “Clash Of The Titans” and this weekend’s “The Last Airbender.” Coppola’s contemporary Martin Scorsese will have his hand at the format for his latest film, “Hugo Cabret.” As for Coppola, no word on what he plans next but newly inspired and freed from the constraints of studio system, we’ll be looking out for his next project.