Now that Francis Ford Coppola is officially “back,” (though reviews for “Tetro” are still mixed, we mostly enjoyed it, despite its flaws), several interviewers are asking what of his long-gestating, then abandoned sci-fi project, “Megalopolis,” storyboards of which, leaked earlier this year.
One of the reasons Coppola decided to drop the project, was because it was too ambitious and therefore, too expensive — no studio would green light it and it appears that continues to be the case. Also, it appears that Coppola has moved on.
Speaking to Movieline, the 7o-year-old director suggested its time has past. “Eh, you know. I feel pleased to have written something, and then I’m done with it and I want to go on and write something else. Someday, I’ll read what I had on ‘Megalopolis’ and maybe I’ll think different of it, but it’s also a movie that costs a lot of money to make and there’s not a patron out there. You see what the studios are making right now.”
In a separate interview with the New York Times, Coppola shed further doubt on the project, but suggesting his time working with studios is over. “My attitude is, ‘Who cares about them?’ ” he said. “It’s an industry that just makes the same movie over and over again and rules out a climate of experimentation.”
“Megalopolis,” did sound like fairly arty, obscure sci-fi (i.e., not dorky enough) and was said to be 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.”
Apparently, 9/11 killed the project about a futuristic New York and then by 2005, interest had waned (also, no offense to Mr. Coppola, but no studio is going to give him a $100 million to make a sci-fi project, especially considering the low-key films he’s making now (also fun fact: before Vincent Gallo and before Javier Bardem (who dropped out in early 2008), Coppola wanted Matt Dillon to play the older brother role in “Tetro”).
So what of “Megalopolis”? Will it take the director’s death (sorry to be morbid) for some young auteur with Hollywood cache to dig up the script and say, “hey, I want to do this?” (ala what Tom Tykwer did with Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Heaven” – though admittedly, a slightly different situation). Could be. As it stands now, they’ll give David Fincher $100 million+ to make “Benjamin Button,” but Coppola? Probably not. Sad that McG can command that kind of dough, but a American cinema legend can’t, but that’s reality for you.
“Tetro” opens up in limited release starting this Friday, June 12.