Francis Ford Coppola: Director's Statement on Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola: Megalopolis (US 2024) with Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Voight, Shia LaBeouf, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza and Dustin Hoffman. Please click on the image to expand it.

Linked: my blog remarks on Megalopolis.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT — FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA

The seeds for Megalopolis were planted when as a kid I saw H. G. Wells' Things to Come. This 1930s Korda classic is about building the world of tomorrow, and has always been with me, first as the ‘boy scientist’ I was and later as a filmmaker.

I wasn’t really working on this screenplay for 40 years as I often see written, but rather I was collecting notes and clippings for a scrapbook of things I found interesting for some future screenplay, or examples of political cartoons or different historical subjects. Ultimately after a lot of time I settled on the idea of a Roman epic. And then later, a Roman epic set in Modern America, so I really only began writing this script, on and off, in the last dozen years or so. Also, as I have made many films of many different subjects and in many different styles, I hoped for a project later in life when I might better understand WHAT my personal style was.

Always respecting the original writer in films I made, and always insisting that their names appear above the title, such as it was with Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, or Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it was only with The Rain People and The Conversation that it could have been permitted to have my own name as original writer on it; but then I was too insecure to present myself in such grandiosity. However, early on, I remember once I took 130 blank pages and put on a title page boldly announcing Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and under that, All Roads Lead to Rome. I pretended it wasn't totally blank, weighing it in my hands so I could imagine what one day it would feel like, and believe one day it could exist. Then later, once I had a draft, I must have rewritten it 300 times, hoping each rewrite would improve it, if only a half percent better.

I considered many possibilities, becoming interested in an incident known as “The Catiline Conspiracy,” accepting that Modern America was the historical counterpart of Ancient Rome and that the Catiline Conspiracy as told by historian Sallust could be set in Modern America, just as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was set in the Vietnam War in Apocalypse Now.

I began with the essence of a plot: perhaps an evil patrician (Catiline) plotted to overthrow the Republic, but was thwarted by Cicero, the consul. I renamed Catiline to Cesar as suggested by Mary Beard because in Suetonius’s version, young Julius Caesar was very much in cahoots with Catiline, and Cesar would be more familiar to audiences than Sergius (which was historical Catiline’s name). I wondered whether the traditional portrayal of Catiline as ‘evil’ and Cicero as ‘good’ was necessarily true. In history, Catiline lost and was killed and Cicero survived. But since the survivor tells the story, I wondered, what if what Catiline had in mind for his new society was a realignment of those in power and could have even in fact been ‘visionary’ and ‘good’, while Cicero perhaps could have been 'reactionary' and ‘bad’.

The story would take place in a somewhat stylized New York City, portrayed as the center of the power of the world, and Cicero would be the mayor during a time of great financial upheaval, such as the financial crisis under former Mayor Dinkins. Cesar, in turn, would be a master builder, a great architect, designer, and scientist combining elements of Robert Moses as portrayed in the brilliant biography The Power Broker, with architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, or Walter Gropius.

Step by step with these beginnings, I researched New York City’s most interesting cases from my scrapbooks: the Claude Von Bulow murder case, the Mary Cunningham/James Agee Bendix scandal, the emergence of Maria Bartiromo (a beautiful financial reporter nicknamed ‘The Money Honey’ coming from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange), the antics of Studio 54, and the city’s financial crisis itself (saved by Felix Rohatyn), so that everything in my story would be true and did happen either in modern New York or in Ancient Rome.

To that I added everything I had ever read or learned about.

In this work, Megalopolis, I wouldn’t have been able to make without standing as I do on the shoulders of G. B. Shaw, Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham, Mill, Dickens, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Fournier, Morris, Carlyle, Ruskin, Butler, and Wells all rolled into one; with Euripides, Thomas More, Moliere, Pirandello, Shakespeare, Beaumarchais, Swift, Kubrick, Murnau, Goethe, Plato, Aeschylus, Spinoza, Durrell, Ibsen, Abel Gance, Fellini, Visconti, Bergman, Bergson, Hesse, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Cao Xueqin, Mizoguchi, Tolstoy, McCullough, Moses, and the prophets all thrown in.

Believing I had the basis of the project in 2001, I set up a production office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and began to work. I did casting, table read-throughs, and had a 2nd unit led by brilliant photographer Ron Fricke, thinking it would be easier and cheaper to begin before we actually announced principal photography. The 2nd unit was shot with an early model Sony digital camera that I was risking would be of sufficient quality, to be shot through all seasons and of elements of vital activities of the city (food distribution, sewage, garbage disposal) for the rich and the poor. The script always had an element of an aging Soviet satellite falling out of orbit and falling to earth, so we needed some shots of destruction and cleared areas, but of course no one could have anticipated the events of September 11th, 2001, and the tragedy of the World Trade Center. As we were shooting our 2nd unit at the time, we covered some of those heartbreaking images.

My first goal always is to make a film with all my heart, so I began to realize it would be about love and loyalty in every aspect of human life. Megalopolis echoed these sentiments, in which love was expressed in almost crystalline complexity, our planet in danger and our human family almost in an act of suicide, until becoming a very optimistic film that has faith in the human being to possess the genius to heal any problem put before us.

I believe in America. Our founders borrowed a constitution, Roman law, and Senate for their revolutionary government without a king. American history could neither have taken place nor succeeded without classical learning to guide it.

It’s my dream that Megalopolis will become a New Year’s Eve perennial favorite, with audiences discussing afterwards not their new diets, or resolutions not to smoke, but rather this simple question: “Is the society in which we live the only one available to us?

Megalopolis Production Notes, 13 May 2024