The director has spent half his life and $120m of his own money to make his sci-fi epic. Just days ahead of its debut in Cannes, some of his crew members are questioning his methods
y greatest fear is to make a really shitty, embarrassing, pompous film on an important subject, and I am doing it,” Francis Ford Coppola said in 1978. “I will tell you right straight from the most sincere depths of my heart, the film will not be good.” The film was Apocalypse Now, and it was good, and the rest is history.
Coppola has described Megalopolis as his “dream script”. He first had the idea while making Apocalypse Now, fuelled by the same concerns about US imperialism. He has framed it as “a Roman epic set in modern America”, transposing theto overthrow the rulers of the Roman empire in 63BC to a sci-fi future. The plot hinges on an idealistic architect trying to build a utopian city on the ruins of New York, against the wishes of the mayor , with the mayor’s socialite daughter caught in the middle.
Arriving in Atlanta, Figgis was impressed, he says. “Watching an 84-year-old guy hold together that massive team, and to have enough brains to be able to direct the actors, the camera and everything … He was up every morning making notes on his way on to the set, or he’s discussing his ideas with Roman, his son. And at the end of the day, he’s also the producer, so he’s thinking about his interest rate.
“We were all aware that we were participating in what might be a really sad finish to his career,” says a crew member. But some of them felt “he was just so unpleasant toward a lot of the people who were trying to help facilitate the process and help make the movie better”.
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