Already, the legend of Megalopolis looms large. It’s an ambitious original sci-fi apocalypse drama from the legendary Francis Ford Coppola, who spent decades trying to get it made; he eventually sold some of his personal wine fortune to make it happen; it debuted at Cannes to an air of bafflement, with reviews landing all across the board. But the filmmaker himself – the man who gave us The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to name but a few – wouldn’t have it any other way. Creating something confounding and wildly original was, it seems, always the point.
“The movie business tries to encourage everyone to think that there’s only one way a movie can be,” Coppola tells Empire in a major new interview. “It has to have a protagonist, then, in the first few minutes, it has to have an antagonist. They are prescribing a formula that they’ll be able to sell over and over again. So when a movie comes along that doesn’t fit that formula and they don’t think it’s a new formula that can be repeated, they don’t want to do it because they feel there’s too much risk.” Everything about Megalopolis – from its future-America-meets-Roman-Empire setting, to a scene requiring literal audience participation – was intended to take risks. “As we know, the art we revere — Bizet’s Carmen, artists like Picasso, Monet and Matisse — is art that in its time was considered too risky or a failure,” Coppola points out. “Apocalypse Now is a perfect example. When it came out, people said, ‘What the hell is this?’ But they never stopped going to see it. With Megalopolis you can’t put a label on it. And that’s great. That’s the kind of film I like.”
As ever, there’s much of Coppola himself in the work – even if he didn’t notice it until after he was done. “I didn’t know that so much during the filming, but as I see the finished film, I understand that now,” he says, looking to Adam Driver's Cesar Catilina. “When I was making Apocalypse Now, they said I was Kurtz. When I was making The Godfather, they said I was Michael. So maybe it’s my fate that my life is, in fact, being made by the films.” Get ready, then, for another bold artistic expression from a filmmaker like no other. “Artists are the ones who shed light on our human condition. That’s why artists are necessary,” Coppola says. “We give them a chance to illuminate contemporary life. The film leaps into the unknown unafraid. It’s a dangerous thing to do.” Who else is ready to take the leap?
Read Empire’s full Megalopolis interview with Francis Ford Coppola in the Gladiator II issue – on sale Thursday 29 August. Pre-order a copy online here. Megalopolis comes to UK cinemas from 27 September.