9/11 made Francis Ford Coppola abandon ‘Megalopolis’
Whilst Francis Ford Coppola has a string of beloved films to his name, with The Godfather taking the top spot and Apocalypse Now not far behind it, his forthcoming effort Megalopolis is also shaping up to be a cracker. It’s one of the most ambitious projects Coppola has undertaken to date, complete with an ensemble cast that includes Adam Driver, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, and more; the epic science fiction is a passion project for the director that he started writing in the early 1980s.
Megalopolis is a storied project due to its scope and lengthy period languishing in limbo. One factor that stopped the auteur from working on it for an extended time was the tragedy of 9/11. When speaking to Ain’t It Cool in 2007, only months before the release of his 2007 fantasy drama Youth Without Youth, Coppola was asked how he came to his new film’s material. He did so by revealing more detail about Megalopolis and how he felt he couldn’t work on it after September 11th, 2001. This decision eventually led him to Youth Without Youth.
He said: “I had been working for a year (during) that period, when I was working on Megalopolis, during the so-called ten years when I wasn’t doing anything, I was a little preoccupied on this script I wrote that I had made into an extremely ambitious project, that it was very difficult even to get feedback on it, given the fact that the sort of notes I would get would be related to the projects’ financial or pop-value. I didn’t want that kind of narrow movie feedback, because I was trying to write a script that was even more ambitious than that. It’ll grow up after a while… I sent it to a friend that I had known in high school who was a young woman who became a great (tape blurs here)… at the University of Chicago and she read my script and gave me some notes, from a broader literary or intellectual perspective, which is what I wanted.”
Coppola continued: “That’s what I was trying to do, and in the course of it, she sent me a lot of quotes from Mercea Eliade, who was this professor and thinker from which I learned a lot of stuff. And she had a lot of quotes relative to a couple of the themes I was playing with related to the consciousness of Megalopolis, and I became curious of the story that these quotes had come from, and I managed to get it. It wasn’t easy to get. When I read it, I just said, ‘Well, here I go. I’ll just retell everybody, and I’ll just write this and go off on my own and use my own dough and just make a film’, …instead of being, you know, stuck with this Megalopolis project which after the events of September 11th, 2001, I just didn’t know how to continue with it.”
Asked if 9/11 was what actually stopped him from working on Megalopolis in 2011, the director responded: “It made it really pretty tough… a movie about the aspiration of utopia with New York as a main character and then all of a sudden you couldn’t write about New York without just dealing with what happened and the implications of what happened. The world was attacked, and I didn’t know how to try to do with that. I tried.”
Most interestingly, since production has just wrapped on Megalopolis, Coppola was pressed on whether he would ever “revisit” the material. At the time, he said he had “abandoned” it: “I have abandoned that as of now. I’m now going to… I plan to begin a process of making one personal movie after another, and if something leads me back to look at that, which I’m sure it might, I’ll see what makes sense to me.”
