Mike Figgis’s documentary “Megadoc” is a diverting, at times agog behind-the-scenes look at the making of “Megalopolis,” Francis Ford Coppola’s 2024 epic. That may not sound enticing given the hostility and indifference the movie faced; it cost about $140 million but its box-office take was just $14 million. Yet the documentary is well worth watching not only for Coppola completists, but also because it offers an instructive peek at what it takes — logistically, financially, temperamentally and philosophically — to follow your muse and make a lavish independent movie without bowing to the demands of American industrial cinema.
Figgis is a British filmmaker who is best known for directing “Leaving Las Vegas” (1995), a brutal chronicle of addiction, love and death starring Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue. Cage is Coppola’s nephew, which is how Figgis and Coppola met. They stayed in touch and when the long-gestating “Megalopolis” was finally a go, Figgis asked if he could be, as he likes to put it, a “fly on the wall.” Coppola agreed and before Figgis knew it he had a visa, was en route to Georgia with a small camera that he would operate himself and had begun shooting this up-close-and-personal account of the making of the movie.
“I’m intrigued,” Figgis says in voice-over shortly after “Megadoc” opens. “I’ve never actually seen another film director at work before.” He’s also intrigued, he continues, his soft voice slowing, “to see how someone can spend 120 million dollars of their own money on a film.” Pretty easily or, at least, with terrifying ease, as you soon discover.
By the time that Coppola began talking, at least publicly, about “Megalopolis” in the early 1980s, he had achieved dizzying professional highs and endured crushing personal and professional lows. He had written and directed critically lauded films, including masterpieces that were huge hits, and he had won the industry’s love. (He has six Oscars.) He had formed his own movie studio, which nearly ruined him, and made him a target of industry derision. But Coppola endured, and he kept on making hits and misses. He also made a fortune in the wine, selling oceans of it, and in 2021 he sold part of that business.
The following year, Coppola began shooting “Megalopolis.” Set in what looks like a somewhat futuristic New York as refracted through ancient Rome, the story traces the life, love, ideals and soaring ambitions of an architect, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver). Catalina dreams of a better world, but his desires are complicated both by personal woes and by a great deal of political intrigue. Stuffed with some vibrant younger actors (Aubrey Plaza for the win) and veterans (Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Fishburne, Jon Voight, Giancarlo Esposito), the movie is often beautiful, melancholic and thoroughly, often divertingly eccentric. It’s a utopian story about art and the persistence of vision, which makes it feel very autobiographical.
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