After decades of development and delays, Francis Ford Coppola starts production on his epic film “Megalopolis” this Fall. It’s the ultimate passion project for the 83-year-old director. Coppola first hatched the idea for the film, about an architect’s doomed attempt to rebuild New York City as a utopia, while making “Apocalypse Now” in the late ’70s. Now, over four decades later, “Megalopolis” is finally in the works, with a cast led by Adam Driver and a $100 million budget funded entirely by the director himself.
But this isn’t the first time Coppola has tried to make “Megalopolis.” In a recent interview at the Taormina Music Festival in Sicily, the director explained he almost shot the movie in 2001 before the tragedy of 9/11 made the film impossible to make. According to a translation of the interview, Coppola said, “I was ready to shoot the film in 2001. Then there was 9/11 and I realized my vision of such a generous and friendly future world was shattered. I could not have made a film that talked about the goodness of the human being, when there was terrorism. So I let it go.”
But Coppola couldn’t entirely let go of the project. “Years later, while I was trying to lose a few pounds, I happened to listen to the recordings of that screenplay again and the spark started again.” Coppola is now on the brink of making the film again, with a cast that includes Laurence Fishburne, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, and Jon Voight. As for the film’s synopsis, Coppola states, “it is a Roman epic set in New York. Epics have often inspired American cinema and Rome has been an example from which US politics has also drawn inspiration. In my film there is indeed a decay, the senate is corrupt and things don’t work out. But then someone comes along to change things. Although it is a story born twenty years ago, I think it is very current and realistic, thinking about what happens.” So, an idealist trying to save an empire in its twilight is a timeless but tragic story, to be sure.
Coppola sounded excited about “Megalopolis” coming to fruition, even after a decades-long wait. “I always try to do things in my style, but in the end I always find myself making films that I don’t know how to do,” he said. “It’s a feature of my career, just think of works like Apocalypse Now. Now with “Megalopolis,” I would like to make a Roman epic with the story of an architect who wants to reconstruct a utopian New York City after a devastating disaster.” And it appears like Coppola finally gets his chance to do so.
Here’s a logline for the upcoming film: “The fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems in this epic story of political ambition, genius, and conflicted love.”
So, will “Megalopolis” be a late-career masterpiece for Coppola or a disaster that derails his legacy? Only time will tell, but it’s undoubtedly one of Hollywood’s most anticipated projects at the moment.