83 years old, Francis Ford Coppola has been quiet for a long time as the director behind masterpieces like “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now”. But now he’s back – with “Megalopolis”.
For a little more than a week they have really been going on. The filming of “Megalopolis” has started after all, after 40 years. In the sci-fi epic, New York was destroyed by a catastrophe. But an architect wants to see this as an opportunity. He wants to rebuild the city – but not in its old version, but as a gigantic, completely new utopia. This leads to a conflict with the arch-conservative mayor, which also has a private component. For the architect’s mistress is the daughter of his rival. And she herself is torn between loyalty to her father and her great love.
Francis Ford Coppola already wanted to make “Megalopolis” in the 1980s. But his 1982 musical romance “One with a Heart”, although it advanced to become a film-historical milestone that introduced techniques still used today, is also one of the biggest flops in Hollywood history. It ruined Coppola’s company and him personally. For most of the rest of the decade of the 80s, he had to take jobs to work off his debts. No one wanted to finance “Megalopolis” for him – especially since many doubted that Coppola’s vision could even be realised.
9/11 PREVENTED “MEGALOPOLIS “
After that, he tried again and again to bring the film version forward. In 2001, it seemed like the time had finally come. With stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe and Nicolas Cage on board, everything was ready when the terrorist attacks of 11 September shook New York and the world. Faced with the tragic reality, Coppola felt unable to make a film in which the destruction of the US metropolis plays such an important role and abandoned the project.
He has now been trying to revive it for several years. Because the big Hollywood studios were reluctant to give the necessary budget to a director over 80 years old, whose last really big box office hit with “Dracula” from 1992 was a whopping 30 years ago, he took action himself.
$100M FROM HIS OWN POCKET
Coppola set about raising the originally targeted budget of $120 million himself. He is said to have now raised at least 100 million dollars from his own pocket – enough to get started. Among other things, he sold most of his vineyard. It is a record. None of his films has ever been so expensive, and probably never before has a filmmaker spent so much of his own money to realise his idea.
In addition, he wants to use revolutionary technology, most of which is still being kept under wraps. What is known is that he wants to combine traditional filmmaking with LED technology, such as that used in the “Star Wars” series “The Mandalorian”. Although so much is to be made in a brand new studio, however, first photo shots now show Coppola and his two central stars Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza on classic outdoor shoots.
STAR CAST AROUND ADAM DRIVER ON THE TRAIL OF SCI-FI UBER-CLASSIC “METROPOLIS “
“Star Wars” creep Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza (“Child’s Play”) lead the illustrious cast as already mentioned. It also includes Oscar winners Forest Whitaker (“Rogue One”) and Jon Voight (“Mission: Impossible”) as well as Laurence Fishburne (“Matrix”), Shia LaBeouf (“Transformers”) and Nathalie Emmanuel, known from “Game Of Thrones” and “Fast & Furious”, among others.
Much of “Megalopolis” sounds like the aforementioned flop “One with a Heart”, in which Coppola also raised personal money (and went into massive debt) and used revolutionary technology. Fingers crossed that this will not happen again. Incidentally, Coppola himself cites Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” as the model for “Megalopolis” and pays homage to it with his title. After all, with the sci-fi epic published in 1927, Lang also realised a unique vision that hardly anyone believed in. Today it is one of the sci-fi uber-classics that is quoted again and again.
Francis Ford Coppola’nın yıllardır gerçekleştirmeyi beklediği dev projesi Megalopolis setinden fotoğraflar. pic.twitter.com/8ob6YoqahW
– Moviewa (@wannamovie) December 20, 2022
However, there is a side that Coppola certainly does not want to repeat from his model: “Metropolis” became a commercial disaster, the original film version was even destroyed afterwards. Only afterwards did “Metropolis” earn its sci-fi classic status. Attempts at restoration were made for years, and it was not until 2011 (!) that a version was released that comes very close to Lang’s original version (long considered destroyed forever).
We will see how “Megalopolis” fares and whether Francis Ford Coppola will once again succeed in making a great film that follows up on earlier masterpieces. Filming is now scheduled to run until spring 2023. There is no cinema release date for “Megalopolis” yet. While at first glance 2024 seems realistic, there are also reports that it could take until 2025 because the still-secret “revolutionary technical approaches” entail such an elaborate post-production that it could take well over a year.
By the way, there will be a sci-fi actioner with Adam Driver much earlier. In “65”, from which our article picture is also taken, he lands as the pilot of a spaceship on a planet that quickly turns out to be not entirely unknown. The film is currently scheduled for release on 9 March 2023, but could be slightly delayed. Here is the trailer:
