Is ‘Megalopolis’ Francis Ford Coppola’s final movie as a director?
In late 1979, Francis Ford Coppola began ruminating on an idea for a cinematic epic named Megalopolis. At the time, he’d just finished Apocalypse Now, a labour of love that almost drove him mad and was released to polarised reviews. Of course, that gargantuan movie is now widely proclaimed as one of the best films ever made—and Coppola may be hoping his latest long-gestating labour of love follows a similar path.
You see, Megalopolis – a movie that took 40 years and $120million of Coppola’s own money to make a reality – has been released to even more negative reviews than Apocalypse Now. Unfortunately for the legendary helmer, it has also been a box office bomb. It all begs an uncomfortable question: after that kind of disappointment, will his latest big swing prove to be Coppola’s last movie as a director?
To be fair to Coppola, he’s been open about how the experience of pouring his heart and soul into Megalopolis has been hugely creatively fulfilling—and he’s fairly sanguine about critics tearing him a new one over it. He told IndieWire: “In the end, only the director knows what they’re trying to accomplish…there’s something in me that has an idea that I’m trying to achieve, and the only way to achieve it is to go through the Sturm and Drang of the experience.”
The Godfather icon feels he can take comfort in the cultural shift over his now-celebrated Vietnam War epic. He theorised: “The making of this movie was very similar to the making of Apocalypse Now, and Apocalypse Now is still being seen 40 years later. I hope that Megalopolis is a movie like that, where the more you see it, the more it changes in your mind.”
Amazingly, even though Coppola stands to lose a substantial chunk of his own fortune thanks to Megalopolis’ box office performance, he doesn’t seem to care too much. The director—who has always had a unique relationship with making and losing large sums of cash—told AP News: “Everyone’s so worried about money. I say: Give me less money and give me more friends. Friends are valuable. Money is very fragile.”
To Coppola, Megalopolis has been everything he ever wanted it to be. He got to spend his own money to make the movie he wanted to make, and he did it entirely his way, with no studio watching over his shoulder. In many ways, though, this was how it had to be, given the current state of Hollywood as Coppola sees it. He claimed, “I’m a creation of Hollywood. I went there wanting to be part of it, and by hook or crook, they let me be part of it. But that system is dying.”
So, will Megalopolis be the last of the Francis Ford Coppola movies?
To his credit, Coppola refused to be bitter about the change in Hollywood’s economics and creative drivers. He stated, “I couldn’t be more blessed,” and was adamant that Megalopolis would not be his last film. In fact, at 85 years old, the visionary director was still looking to the future of filmmaking for his next project.
To Coppola, there should be no rules when it comes to filmmaking. He sees cinema as “something alive and ever-changing” and believes that the future of the medium will look nothing like the staid IP-obsessed landscape of today. He mused: “The movies your grandchildren will make are not going to be like this formula happening now. We can’t even imagine what it’s going to be, and that’s the wonderful thing about it.”
Overall, Coppola sees the period of his life that has produced Megalopolis and other smaller indie films – Twixt, Tetro, and Youth Without Youth – as an ongoing process of education. He told IndieWire, “I’m still someone with one foot in the theatre and one in the cinema. At my age, I can’t eat too much because I’ll get fat. I can’t drink because that’s not good for you. But I can learn and listen to music. Those are two pleasurable things that I’m allowed to do. So I’m always learning.”
