The first time Francis Ford Coppola had a film in competition at the Cannes Film Festival was in 1967. He was 28 years old and the film was “You’re a Man Now,” a studio comedy about a young man trying to separate from his parents.
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A month after the festival, he began directing his first big-budget studio film, “Finian’s Rainbow.” It failed. He then invested some of his savings in a low-budget studio film, “Warriors.” It failed. The next film he directed was “The Godfather.”
Coppola, now 85, returned to Cannes again in May with the epic fantasy “Megalopolis,” a big-screen dream she has nurtured for more than 40 years. It is her first film since “Twixt” (2011), a little-seen horror story about a genre novelist who says she wants to do something personal. It’s a plaintive refrain Coppola has expressed repeatedly throughout her career.
He is and always has been an unmistakably personal filmmaker, whose love for the art of cinema has repeatedly put him at odds with the industry and its media mouthpieces.
Given Coppola’s history of independence and his track record of big financial risks (as with “Apocalypse Now”) and sometimes staggering losses (“Heart Strike”), it was no surprise that much of the initial conversation about “Megalopolis” wasn’t about the movie itself. Rather, it was about how Coppola had helped finance it with “$120 million of his own money,” a phrase that was reflexively repeated in press reports.
By the time the festival opened on May 14, however, the conversation had changed dramatically. That day, The Guardian published an article that included allegations that Coppola had tried to kiss female extras during production. When asked about the allegations, Coppola said, “My mother told me that if you make a pass at a woman, it means you’re disrespecting her, and the girls I liked I definitely didn’t disrespect.”
Coppola, whose wife of more than 60 years, Eleanor, died in April, added that the photo of one of the “girls” he kissed on the cheek was taken by her father. (“I’ve known her since she was 9.”)
Coppola was already talking publicly about “Megalopolis” in 1982, the year his doomed expressionist musical “Heartbreak” was released. (By the time it closed, Coppola owed Chase Manhattan Bank $31 million.)
As he told Film Comment in 1983, Coppola had already amassed some 400 pages of “really interesting material” for this new project. It was set in contemporary New York, but was based in part on ancient Rome because of the similarities he saw between them. “Everyone was into death; all values had become a pursuit of money,” he said.
The new project would address big questions — the why and the what of existence. What interested Coppola, he said, was the question of utopia. In the second half of the film there is a “really crazy section that ultimately lays out the basis of the concept of utopia.”
That hallucination came to visually stunning life 42 years later in “Megalopolis,” which will be released in IMAX theaters worldwide later this year. It’s an allegorical fantasy about an architect, Caesar Catiline (Adam Driver), who dreams of a better, brighter world than the one he inhabits. Set in a city that resembles New York by way of ancient Rome, it follows Caesar as he grapples with the past, imagines the future, falls in love with a clever beauty, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), and argues with his father, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito).
Coppola could have continued making gangster films, he told me, after “The Godfather,” a critical and popular success. But he wanted to learn and make as many different styles of films as he could.
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