By JJ Ledewitz, Staff Writer
It’s no secret that there are films that critics hate and general audiences love. But this past March, at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, critics were divided amongst themselves like never before. This polarization emerged when critics viewed the long-awaited utopian sci-fi drama Megalopolis, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Deadline reported the positives, stating, “Megalopolis represents a rare kind of event movie that reinvents the possibilities of cinema,” adding, “it is never, ever boring.” However, Deadline also had negative comments, including, “It will inspire just as many artists as the audiences it will alienate.” Vanity Fair saw no positives. “This is the junkiest of junk-drawer movies, a slapped-together hash of Coppola’s many disparate inspirations.”
While it’s not rare for a film to be “the junkiest of junk drawer movies,” and it isn’t incredibly unusual for a film to “reinvent the possibilities of cinema,” it is unheard of for a film to be described as both.
In order to understand how this came to be, we must look at the long history of Megalopolis, which will reveal how uncontrollable events and terrible decisions can create a cinematic anomaly.
The version of Megalopolis that exists today is about a time-controlling architect trying to rebuild a destroyed ancient-Rome-themed futuristic Manhattan. Coppola’s inspirations for this film included Metropolis and Things Against the Gods, two almost century-old sci-fi films, as well as the book Twelve Against the Gods and the writings of the Roman historian Sallust.
However, the main inspiration for Megalopolis came from the story of the Catilinarian Conspiracy, an attempted coup led by the Roman aristocrat Catiline to overthrow the Roman Republic in 63 BC. Coppola began forming the idea for the movie in 1977 on the set of his film Apocalypse Now, where he decided that this film would be a social commentary on the future of America.
Richard Briggs, the sound designer for that film, remembers hearing Coppola’s idea at the time, describing it as a “gigantic opera, shown over four nights in some place as close as possible to the geographical center of the United States – and people would come from all over.” Coppola’s dangerous ambition seemed to be a helpful trait for a filmmaker like him, but looking back, it may have been partially responsible for the film’s eventual downfall.
Coppola soon began to write and rewrite the script, receiving over 300 pages of notes. Because he wanted this to be a never-before-seen spectacle, as well as a social commentary on a topical subject, the writing period delayed pre-production until early 2001.
At this point, Coppola did three things to begin pre-production. First he held table reads with many of the popular actors of the time, including Nicholas Cage, Uma Thurman, and Russell Crowe. Next, he met with legendary comic book artist Jim Steranko to produce concept art for Megalopolis. The art has been described as “expansive, elaborate, and carefully rendered pencil or charcoal halftone architectural drawings of huge buildings and urban plazas that appeared to mix ancient Roman, art deco, and speculative sci-fi stylations.” After this, Coppola joined cinematographer Ron Fricke to record some establishing shots and second unit footage in New York City. But then, the September 11 attacks changed everything.
Coppola has stated that the 9/11 attacks “made it really pretty tough… a movie about the aspiration of utopia with New York as a main character and then all of a sudden you couldn’t write about New York without just dealing with what happened and the implications of what happened.” Additionally, the script that Coppola had spent the last 20 years writing included a Soviet satellite crashing into Earth, which Coppola viewed as too similar to the tragedy that had just unfolded. While there were many films released in the early 2000s that had to be altered due to the 9/11 attacks, the entire premise of Megalopolis revolved around rebuilding a destroyed Manhattan. Coppola felt that much of what he wrote would have to be reworked into a slightly different storyline.
Perhaps this is what led to Coppola slowing down and eventually halting production a few years later. One of the people Coppola received script notes from was his childhood friend Wendy Doniger, who, after speaking with Coppola at this time, claimed that “he was stuck.” While referring to the recent sudden success of his winery that was intended as a side hustle, Doniger said, “For the first time in his life, he could finance a movie, and therefore he didn’t have to do what anybody else said… he had no excuses this time if the film was no good.” Doniger continued, “What froze him was having the power to do exactly what he wanted so that his soul was on the line.”
Seeing his struggle with the themes of the Megalopolis script, Doniger, a University of Chicago professor of Hinduism and Comparative Mythology, sent Coppola some books by the Romanian historian and philosopher Mircea Eliade. These books were meant to be inspirational, to get Coppola back on track. One of these books, Youth Without Youth, involved themes similar to Megalopolis, as well as Coppola’s insecurities about his epic film. Coppola read it and was inspired – maybe a little too inspired. He immediately shelved Megalopolis and began working on a film adaptation of that book, which ended up being released in 2007.
Coppola didn’t return to Megalopolis until 2019. Public reception of his 2009 film Tetro and his 2011 film Twixt was not positive, and he seemed to be lacking the luster he once had. In 2015, when addressing this change, Coppola explained, “I would rather just experiment with the form, and see what I could do, and [make things] that came out of my own.” Additionally, after addressing the huge budgets that modern films demand, he said, “I felt I was no longer interested enough to put in the extraordinary effort a film takes [nowadays].”
On April 3, 2019, Coppola announced that he would be continuing with Megalopolis. He sold a large portion of his winery to gather $120 million to produce the movie himself, as other studios deemed it “too experimental.” Over the next few years, Coppola met with many of today’s most popular actors, including Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, and Giancarlo Esposito. However, once filming began, many cast members said that Coppola’s approach to the film was “exasperating.”
One crew member claimed, “He would often show up in the mornings before these big sequences… he would often just sit in his trailer for hours on end, wouldn’t talk to anybody, was often smoking marijuana.” The crew member continued, “Then he’d come out and whip up something that didn’t make sense… and we’d all just have to go along with it, trying to make the best of it.”
In December of 2022, Coppola fired the entire visual effects team of the film. He claimed he wanted a unique style that the team wasn’t giving him. He replaced them, but his ferocity and ambition were definitely out of hand.
Looking back, it is clear that there were a few different factors that may have led to the film’s polarization. There were fifty years between when Coppola first thought of this film and the film’s actual release. However, for a film trying to be a social commentary on the future of America, the worst thing possible is for it to be released far from its inception. Additionally, there were uncontrollable events that forced Coppola to change the script, but Coppola shouldn’t have abandoned the film altogether. He made strange decisions with the film that definitely contributed to the weird mess it is today.
Megalopolis is a great example of the saying, “If you want something done right you should have to do it yourself.” Which, of course, implies that you put care into it. If Coppola really cared, Megalopolis wouldn’t be released in 2024.
But general audiences are not critics, so on September 27, you can form your own opinion about Megalopolis, now knowing the disastrous history it endured.