Buzz continues to grow for Megalopolis, the decades-in-the-making movie from director Francis Ford Coppola. The movie, which the 85-year-old director funded himself, has yet to find a U.S. distributor. With first-look photos released earlier this week, as well as today’s trailer, its fortunes might soon change: according to Coppola, the $120 million epic will be offered up to buyers at the Cannes Film Festival, where it will officially premiere in competition on May 16.
The movie boasts a vast cast that includes Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Giancarlo Esposito, Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, and Laurence Fishburne. What it’s about is far harder to quantify: writing to Vanity Fair, the director cited H.G. Wells, the September 11 attacks, and a 63 BC battle between Roman politician Cicero and an insurrectionist named Catiline.
“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,” the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now wrote to explain the 40-year evolution of his Megalopolis script.
“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.”
We don’t see any of that in the clip, which shows a black-clad Driver stepping off the edge of a domed skyscraper and then seemingly stopping time. Those who attended an April screening in Los Angeles might have more insight into how the teaser might play into the final film, in which Driver’s character—an architect intent on rebuilding a ruined city—goes up against a corrupt mayor (Esposito) who prefers the status quo.
As opposed to explaining the clip, Coppola opted to caption its YouTube release with “an appreciation” of the film from former Variety chief film critic Scott Foundas, who departed the trade pub for Amazon Studios last year. Driver “is also clearly an avatar of Coppola himself – a grand visionary witnessing a once-great thing (call it cinema if you must) withering before his very eyes and determined to revivify it,” Foundas is quoted as saying.
“Coppola seems to have been born-again by a strike of filmic lightning, and the movie – no, the experience (complete with in-theater “live cinema”) – that has emerged feels at once the work of a film-school wunderkind unbowed by notions of convention, but also the work of a wizened master who knows much about life and the ways of the world … [Megalopolis] isn’t a movie about the end of the world as we know it, it is the end of the world as we know it. Only, where [previous Coppola film Apocalypse Now] left us in a napalm-bombed fever-dream haze, [Megalopolis], surprisingly and movingly, bestows on us a final image glowing with hope for the future.”
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