In project
Adam Driver, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight and Laurence Fishburne will star in this project with which the director of ‘The Godfather’ has spent years
Francis Ford Coppola is 83 years old and after ‘Tetro’ he has dedicated himself to making new montages of his ‘Godfathers’. For years the director caresses a project that, many believed, was no longer going to shoot: ‘Megalopolis’. It is not that its shooting is announced now, but the person in charge of ‘Apocalypse Now’ has taken a new step towards it: he has revealed his cast.
Adam Driver, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight and Laurence Fishburne will star in the legendary filmmaker’s new feature film. Coppola presents it as his last project and affirms that he will finance it out of his pocket: «What is the worst that can happen to me? I’m going to die, and ruin myself? I’m not going to go bankrupt.”
In any case, it is not necessary to launch the bells on the fly, because Coppola himself, almost 20 years ago, had already announced another cast that has fallen over time: then he had Oscar Isaac as his ideal protagonist and he also dreamed of Cate Blanchett, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange and James Caan. In 2001, names like Paul Newman, Robert de Niro, Russell Crowe and Nicolas Cage were on the table and then there was talk of Jude Law. None of them have recovered it for this new project restart.
Coppola himself has revealed that ‘Megalopolis’ will tell the story of the complicated attempt to build a utopian city after a great catastrophe, supported by romantic elements and also political ambition. The film, which will include footage already shot before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011, will take place in Manhattan in the near future. The plot will follow the story of a power struggle between an architect named Serge Caitline and the mayor of New York, Frank Cicero, who face each other to create an urban project in the city that will completely remodel it. The architect’s surname is inspired by a real historical event: the conspiracy of Catherine, a conspiracy carried out by the senator of the same name from ancient Rome to govern the Roman Republic.
His advanced age gives Coppola complete freedom to speak his mind: “What would make me happy? I’m not going to win a bunch of Oscars because I already have a lot, and maybe more than I deserve. So deep down, long after I’m gone, I just want them to talk about ‘Megalopolis’ and is the society we live in the only possible one? How can we improve it? Education, mental health? What the film proposes is that utopia is not a place but how can we improve everything? That would be fine. Because I bet they would make it better if they had that conversation.”
Francis Ford Coppola’s productions have always been complicated. In everyone’s memory is the chaotic filming of ‘Apocalypse Now’ in the Philippines, with a typhoon that destroyed the sets and where the filmmaker himself went bankrupt for the first time. His wife Eleanor shot a documentary, ‘Hearts in darkness’, where all the setbacks of that filming were collected, which however had a positive element, apart from the splendid results of the film, that Coppola lost the fear of going bankrupt. In fact, he went bankrupt again with the musical ‘Corazonada’, a film supported by the new digital techniques at the time, which were not to the viewers’ liking. And he is no longer afraid of money: “I’m not going to go bankrupt. All my children have been successful. I think if you can make a movie that people can keep making something out of for ten, twenty or more years, you won’t lose money,” he revealed to Deadline.
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