Francis Ford Coppola reveals he doesn’t “have any money” for new movie
After developing Megalopolis for decades, first coming up with a rough idea for the movie in the late 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola finally released the film in 2024 to a backlash.
Now, the 85-year-old director has revealed that he “doesn’t have any money” to finance his next movies. While Megalopolis might have only generated $14.3 million against a budget of $120 million, Coppola has two new projects in mind, if only he could find some financing.
To fund Megalopolis, the filmmaker sold part of his winery after struggling to find support from studios. The movie, which envisions New York as ‘New Rome’, was deemed too ambitious to many, leaving Coppola to gather the budget himself.
Appearing on the podcast Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin, Coppola revealed that he will have to finance his next film which he hopes will be an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1922 novel The Glimpses of the Moon very cheaply.
“It’s as though Noel Coward adapted an Edith Wharton novel in England which is why I’m here in the UK. I’m actually in pre production. I don’t have any money because I invested all the money, that I borrowed, to make Megalopolis,” Coppola explained to Rubin.
He added, “It’s basically gone. I think it’ll come back over 15 or 20 years, but I don’t have it now. So I don’t have any money. I have to do this film very cheap, which is what I’m doing.”
Coppola is also interested in continuing his ongoing project Distant Vision, which he has been working on since 2015. He told the publication Le Monde that it is “more ambitious than Megalopolis,” although it seems as though he is currently turning his attention to the low-budget Wharton adaptation.
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