Francis Ford Coppola explains his decision to spend $120 million of own money to make his new movie, Megalopolis. For film lovers, Coppola is a name that needs no introduction. He is the legendary writer/director behind The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, which are commonly considered two of the greatest films of all time. He followed up the former with The Godfather Part II in 1974, which is widely regarded as perhaps the best sequel ever made.
Despite his unparalleled filmography and monumental reputation, Coppola hasn't made a proper feature film since 2011's Twixt, which debuted to little fanfare and garnered mostly negative reviews in the United States. In recent years, he has been gearing up to return to form with an ambitious passion project titled Megalopolis. He originally wrote the script in the early 1980s, though it just started to get off the ground recently, with Oscar Isaac, Forest Whitaker, and Cate Blanchett reportedly in talks to star, among others.
Due to disinterest from Hollywood studios, Coppola was forced to put down $120 million of own money to fund Megalopolis, a decision he explains to GQ Magazine. The movie is such an expensive and ambitious original idea that no major studios wanted to back it. Coppola points out how their reaction to his Megalopolis pitch mirrors their initial response to Apocalypse Now all those years ago. Read what he had to say below:
Same way they did when I had won five Oscars and was the hottest film director in town and walked in with Apocalypse Now and said, "I'd like to make this next." I own Apocalypse Now. Do you know why I own Apocalypse Now? Because no one else wanted it. So imagine, if that was the case when I was 33 or whatever the age and I had won every award and had broken every record and still absolutely no one wanted to join me. I know that Megalopolis, the more personal I make it, and the more like a dream in me that I do it, the harder it will be to finance.
Very little is known about the plot of Coppola's mystery movie Megalopolis. In the past, he's said it's in the tradition of a Roman epic but set in a utopic vision of New York, called New Rome. Now, it's being described as “a love story that is also a philosophical investigation of the nature of man,” an experimental premise that is certainly far from high-concept. Perhaps Coppola's biggest flaw is that he's been ambitious to a fault. Apocalypse Now is one famous example, as the film experienced a notoriously long, strenuous production process - though, in the end, it turned out to be a masterpiece.
Coppola hasn't been immune to failure throughout his career, as one of his biggest financial and critical flops includes his 1981 film, One From the Heart. Still, it certainly says a lot about the current state of Hollywood that even a legendary figure like Coppola is having trouble getting studios to fund a non-franchise film, and thus is forced to self-finance Megalopolis. Coppola has already proven the major Hollywood executives wrong once with Apocalypse Now, so perhaps they should learn not to question greatness.
Source: GQ Magazine