Francis Ford Coppola with Marlon Brando on the set of Apocalypse Now
Looking through the Hollywood trade press this week, Francis Ford Coppola could excuse the shiver of déjà vu. Exactly 45 years ago today, The Godfather director was about to unveil his latest film: a 135-minute epic about the state of humanity that he had been pondering for years.
Reports of a confused preview audience and uncontrollably chaotic filming led many to view it as a failure in suspense that would expose its creator as a spent creative force. But it has also been selected for competition at Cannes, where in just a few weeks, on the biggest stage in world cinema, this crazy magnum opus will either be vindicated or ridiculed.
In 1979, it was Apocalypse Now, which nearly half a century after its bumpy debut is revered as one of the greatest war films ever made. Meanwhile, its 2024 successor will be Megalopolis, a sci-fi parable described as Blade Runner meets Julius Caesar that Coppola, now 85, has been working on since the 1980s.
The action takes place in an alternate future version of New York called New Rome. It appears to be mostly about city planning, with a visionary architect named Caesar (played by Adam Driver) and the scheming mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) squabbling over city governance. future form. But there is also a romantic relationship between Caesar and Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor's famous daughter, while parallels with the fall of Rome are reportedly woven into the story of a modern empire on the brink of collapse. (Another Roman reference: the severe haircuts of the male characters.)
It cost $120 million, but was financed entirely from the proceeds of a California winery Coppola bought with proceeds from the first two Godfather films. It's Coppola's greatest project since Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1992, and reportedly combines old-fashioned spectacle with philosophical musings about humanity's ability to change our world despite existential threat. This could be a masterpiece. It could have been a fiasco. And history tells us that when it comes to Coppola, the two categories are not mutually exclusive.
It is noteworthy that the picture did not become clearer even after the first screening of the finished film, which took place two weeks ago in Los Angeles in front of an invited audience of studio executives. (The film has also since been quietly screened in London, although your critic's invitation must have gotten lost in the mail.) The old guard — Universal, Warner Bros, Disney, Sony and Paramount — were all represented at the highest level, as was tech upstarts Amazon and Netflix. Coppola's plan was to secure a distribution deal for the film before its Cannes premiere was announced this week. Ideally, he wanted to promote the film as an intellectual blockbuster in the style of Oppenheimer; pleasure for a wide audience and a prestigious gift.
But things didn't turn out that way. An article in the Hollywood Reporter this week described a «noticeable silence» at the Imax theater in the aftermath and noted that no rights had yet been filed. One participant described the film as not a regular studio release, but as «some kind of indie experiment.» Another, less restrained, called it a sad end to Coppola's career («the work of a madman») and warned that any marketing costs would never be recouped.
«It's just impossible to position this film,» said a third, having The challenge is twofold: figuring out who the film's target audience is and how to sell it to them. Others continued to express concerns about his nervousness: There was much concern about a sequence in which 85-year-old actor Jon Voight is seen in bed in what initially appears to be a state of visible sexual arousal.
Indeed, its attitude towards sex and drugs in general sounds very 1970s: supporting stars Aubrey Plaza and the (apparently excellent) Shia LaBeouf reportedly share a memorable sex scene as part of a wider «orgiastic» scene simmering with nudity and substance abuse. Meanwhile, the Puck newsletter reported that the ending involving Voight and Plaza's characters was «one of the most puzzling» their two moles had ever seen.
Into Hell: Francis Ford Coppola on the set of Apocalypse Now Photo: PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
In addition — and it is not entirely clear whether this was a one-time event or whether Coppola intended it to be a recurring memorable moment — there was audience participation. A visitor quoted by the Hollywood Elsewhere blog said that at one point during the film, the house lights came on and an actor standing in the audience shouted a question to Driver's character on screen, who then responded as if he could hear it. Speaking of theatrical stunts, it's not exactly Barbie's Cotton Candy-flavored Tango Ice Blast.
Suspicions that Megalopolis might turn out to be Megaflopolis have been brewing for some time and were first publicly voiced last year after reports of unrest on set. This was caused by the sudden departure of the visual effects team five weeks into filming, although Coppola later claimed that this was due to budgetary issues rather than creative differences. (The film was shot using virtual production techniques first used in the Star Wars series The Mandalorian, in which scenes are filmed inside a sort of LCD bubble that simulates the environment on the fly, rather than on conventional green screens.)
Metropolis star Aubrey Plaza in the film «White Lotus» Photo: HBO
Driver also went on record as saying he was downplaying rumors of chaos. «I've been on sets that were chaotic, and this is far from that,» the actor said. But Megapolis's long journey to the screen included more than its fair share of false starts and handbrake turns. In 2001, after working on the script for nearly two decades, Coppola finally put his hands on the camera, filming nearly 30 hours of modern-day New York City in motion with renowned cinematographer Ron Fricke. But after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Coppola discarded every shot, despairing that his original utopian vision of the work was no longer true — and then embarked on yet another revision.
Meanwhile, his post-Dracula films include the Robin Williams comedy Jack; John Grisham's adaptation of The Rainmaker; three little-known experimental plays — Youth Without Youth, Tetro and Twixt — felt like the work of a director whose heart was elsewhere. But in the risk-averse movie business of the 2020s, heart alone is not enough.
So the industry's game plan seems to be to watch and wait — especially for reactions after the film's Cannes premiere May 17, which should help them understand what Megalopolis really is. However, if they want to know how useful it is, the first wave of feedback may only be of limited benefit.
<р>Rewind to Apocalypse Now again. The 1979 Cannes jury may have awarded the film the Palme d'Or — albeit together with Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum, and only after a famously bitter debate, as well as some supposed heavy-handed support from festival director and founder Robert Favre Le Bret. However, critics were divided on the substance. Some, like Roger Ebert, hailed it as one of the films of the year; others described it as «deeply disappointing», «intellectually empty» and «emotionally dull». If the film's screening in Los Angeles last month is anything to go by, reviews of Megalopolis should mirror that crazy period — although, I suspect, with a much louder defense.
Why? Because it's not 1979. Originality and courage are not enough. Hollywood has never been more creatively conservative: today the term «passion project» is used for things like Zack Snyder's two-part space operas for Netflix, or video game adaptations like Eli Roth's Borderlands.
But the one thing about Megalopolis that everyone seems to agree on — and what makes it a challenge for today's businesses — is that it is truly unlike anything else around. For years, moviegoers have been hungry for bold, original, non-franchise fare—and it looks like the last of the New Hollywood pirates is taking our word for it.
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