There are few Hollywood directors more legendary than Francis Ford Coppola. This is the guy who directed The Godfather, considered one of the greatest films of all time and one that helped jump-start the blockbuster era we live in today. He directed Apocalypse Now, one of the best war films ever made. And he made One From The Heart, a self-funded passion project that bombed so hard he spent years digging himself out of the hole he dug for himself.
Whatever else he is, Coppola is not boring. (He’s one of the guys jumping on the “Marvel movies aren’t cinema” bandwagon, only he was a lot harsher than Martin Scorsese; Coppola straight-up called MCU films “despicable.”) And Coppola is continuing to make waves with his latest movie Megalopolis, another film that he is self-funding, this time for just under $100 million, per The Hollywood Reporter.
Some of that money will go to pay the top-tier talent involved, although I imagine a lot of these people signed on for the opportunity to work to Coppola rather than get a fat paycheck. THR reveals that the cast for Megalopolis includes newer names like Adam Driver (the Star Wars sequel trilogy) and Nathalie Emmanuel (Game of Thrones), established stars like Forest Whitaker and Laurence Fishburne, and a star of Coppola’s own generation: Jon Voight. But Voight and Coppola are 83 years old, for the record.
What is Megalopolis about?
As a person of vision and integrity and all that stuff, naturally Coppola is working off his own original idea here. The official logline for the film reads: “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.”
From what I’ve been able to piece together, the movie is set in a futuristic city roughly modeled off ancient Rome, which as we remember from history class was a civilization in decline. The movie will explore the notion of what it means to live in a utopia.
It all sounds pretty ambitious, which I fully expect out of a guy who talks as big as Coppola. There’s no release date yet, but color me interested, at least.
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