Megalopolis (film)
Megalopolis is a 2024 American epic science fiction drama film written, directed, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. The film features an ensemble cast including Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, D. B. Sweeney, and Dustin Hoffman. Set in an alternate 21st-century New York City, the film follows visionary architect Cesar Catilina as he clashes with the corrupt Mayor Franklyn Cicero, who opposes Catilina's plans to revitalize New Rome by building the futuristic utopia "Megalopolis". The film draws on Roman history, particularly the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BC and the decay of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire.
In 1977, Coppola had the idea to make a film drawing parallels between the fall of the Roman Republic and the future of the United States by retelling the Catilinarian conspiracy in modern New York. Although he began plotting the film in 1983, the project spent decades in development hell. Coppola attempted to produce the film in 1989 and again in 2001, but each time, the studios refused to finance the film, due to Coppola's string of late-career box-office disappointments and the September 11 attacks, respectively. Disillusioned by the studio system, Coppola did not produce Megalopolis until he built a large fortune in the winemaking business. He spent $120million of his own money to make the film. Principal photography took place in Georgia from November 2022 to March 2023.
The film reunited Coppola with past collaborators, including actors Esposito, Fishburne, Remar, Shire, and Sweeney, cinematographer Mihai Mălaimare Jr., composer Osvaldo Golijov, and Coppola's son, second-unit director Roman Coppola. Like several other Coppola films, Megalopolis had a troubled production. Coppola adopted an experimental style, encouraging his actors to improvise and write certain scenes during the shoot, and adding his own last-minute changes to the script. Members of the art department and visual effects team, among others, left or were fired from the film.
Megalopolis was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, but polarized critics and Hollywood studios. Coppola could not find a studio that would both reimburse his production costs and pay for a large marketing campaign. He opted to pay for an advertising campaign, with Lionsgate theatrically releasing the film in the United States. It endured a troubled run-up to release: a trailer was removed for using fabricated pull quotes, and Coppola sued trade publication Variety for libel after it published allegations of sexual misconduct by him on set. The film premiered at Cannes on May 16, 2024, and was released theatrically on September 27, 2024. It was a commercial failure, grossing $14.3million against a budget of $120 to $136 million. Reviews were mixed, with some critics praising the film's ambition and style while many critics found it chaotic and uneven. Critics were also greatly polarized on the acting and story.
Plot
In an alternate United States, New Rome is dominated by an elite group of patrician families. Although the Roman elite profess to live by a strict moral code, patricians decadently enjoy forbidden pleasures while ordinary Romans live in poverty.Patrician architect Cesar Catilina is one of New Rome's leading lights. Cesar wins the Nobel Prize for inventing the revolutionary building material Megalon. In addition, he can secretly stop time. Despite Cesar's worldly success, he has fallen into alcoholism. Years earlier, his wife disappeared, and District Attorney Franklyn Cicero prosecuted him for murdering her. Although Cesar was acquitted, he remains crushed by guilt, believing his wife committed suicide because he was too focused on his work. Cesar pines for his wife, prompting his jealous mistress, TV presenter Wow Platinum, to leave him.
At a televised event, Cesar and now-Mayor Cicero offer different visions for the city's future. Cesar proposes using Megalon to build "Megalopolis", a utopian urbanist community, while Cicero argues that a casino will provide immediate tax revenue. Cesar meets Cicero's well-read but purposeless daughter Julia. Earlier, she watched Cesar stop time while a building was being demolished but was still able to move. Initially, they dislike each other, but Cesar impresses Julia with his vision for Megalopolis, explaining that New Rome needs a grand artistic vision to free itself from its political inertia and unlock its full potential. Later, when Cesar cannot stop time as he once could, Julia encourages him to do so for her. They discover they can stop time when together, and the two become lovers.
Wow marries Cesar's uncle Hamilton Crassus III, the world's richest man. Although Crassus likes his nephew, his mind and health are in decline, and he is easily manipulated by individuals like his other nephew, Clodio Pulcher, who wants to inherit the Crassus bank. Crassus and Wow throw a decadent wedding reception. The headliner is teenage pop star Vesta Sweetwater, who appeals to New Rome's puritanical sensibilities by promising to remain chaste until marriage. To neutralize Cesar, Pulcher leaks a paparazzi video of Cesar having sex with Vesta, prompting Cicero to condemn Cesar in a speech drawn from the real-life Catilinarian orations. Although Cicero arrests Cesar for statutory rape, Julia exonerates Cesar by discovering that Vesta faked her age and is actually in her twenties.
Soviet satellite Carthage crashes to Earth, destroying much of New Rome. Cesar begins building Megalopolis in the ruins, financing the project with his family fortune. In a press conference, he makes the case for bold artistic projects that show people that a better world is possible. However, the cost of building Megalopolis contrasts with poverty on the streets. Pulcher becomes a populist politician, encouraging ordinary Romans to oppose Megalopolis as an expensive folly. The allure of power draws Pulcher from populism to fascist demagoguery.
A pregnant Julia tries to broker peace between Cesar and Cicero by taking her father to see the Megalopolis construction site, but Cicero is unimpressed with Cesar's utopianism, and he begs Cesar to leave Julia. In exchange, he offers Cesar valuable blackmail material: a confession that Cicero knew Cesar's wife committed suicide and maliciously prosecuted Cesar anyway. Cesar declines. Pulcher's right-hand man hires an assassin to kill Cesar, but Cesar's doctors use Megalon to rebuild his skull.
Wow tries to force Cesar to leave Julia and marry her by freezing Cesar's account at the Crassus bank. She enlists Pulcher to manipulate Crassus into handing over control of the bank. When Crassus learns of Pulcher's duplicity, he has a stroke and collapses. Pulcher and Wow taunt the bedridden Crassus, but Crassus kills Wow and injures Pulcher with a hidden bow and arrow.
Rioting Pulcher supporters attempt to storm Megalopolis and City Hall. Cesar confronts the rioters, pleading with them to believe in his vision of a better future, while Cicero watches. Cesar's speech inspires the crowd, who go on to hang Pulcher upside down, mirroring the death of Benito Mussolini.
With renewed financial support from Crassus, Cesar finally completes Megalopolis. Cicero, holding Julia and Cesar's baby daughter, Sunny Hope, promises to help Cesar build a better future. On New Year's Eve, Julia stops time, but only the baby seems unaffected, leaving her the only one moving.
Cast
Production
Development
Growing up in New York City, Francis Ford Coppola was fascinated by science fiction films, such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis and William Cameron Menzies's Things to Come, and the scientific community's history with dangerous experiments. His reading of the Roman historian Sallust and William Bolitho Ryall's book Twelve Against the Gods inspired him to make a film about Lucius Sergius Catiline, a populist accused by Roman consul Marcus Tullius Cicero of conspiring to overthrow the Roman Republic in 63 BC. Coppola conceived the overall idea for Megalopolis towards the end of filming Apocalypse Now in 1977. Sound designer Richard Beggs described Coppola's vision as an opera screened over four nights, similar to Richard Wagner's Ring cycle in Bayreuth, in a "gigantic outdoor purpose-built theatre". Coppola hoped to have it in "some place as close as possible to the geographical center of the United States", like the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in the state of Colorado.Coppola devoted the beginning of 1983 to developing the film; in two months, he assembled four hundred pages of notes and script fragments. Over the next four decades, he collected notes and newspaper clippings for scrapbooks detailing intriguing subjects he envisioned incorporating into a future screenplay, like political cartoons and different historical subjects, before deciding to make a Roman epic film set in an imagined modern America. In mid-1983, he described the plot as taking place in one day in New York City with Catiline-era Rome as a backdrop, similar to how James Joyce's Ulysses used Homer in the context of modern Dublin and how he updated the setting of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the late 1800s amid European colonial rule in Africa to the 1970s Vietnam War for Apocalypse Now.
In January 1989, Coppola announced his plans to move to Italy to work on two productions in the next five years, including Le Ribellion di Catilina, a film "so big and complicated it would seem impossible", which biographer Michael Schumacher said "sounded much like what he had in store for Megalopolis". It was to be shot in Cinecittà, a film studio in Rome, where production designer Dean Tavoularis and his design team built offices and an art studio for drafters to storyboard the film. The Hollywood Reporter described it as "swing from the past to the present", merging "the images of Rome... with the New York of today". Of it, Coppola said, "I want to be free. I don't want producers around me telling me what to do". Coppola ultimately did not move to Italy, and instead made The Godfather Part III. Following the 1990–91 film awards season for that film, Coppola's production company, American Zoetrope, announced several projects in development, including plans to film Megalopolis in 1991, despite lacking a finished script. However, the film was postponed to "no earlier than 1996" after Coppola found himself prioritizing other projects, including Bram Stoker's Dracula, Jack, and The Rainmaker, to get out of debt accumulated from the box-office failures of One from the Heart and Tucker: The Man and His Dream.
In a 1992 diary entry, Coppola figured he should only make films he had "a burning desire to make", preferably in the independent-esque manner of Ingmar Bergman, though worried that "forget the money" would not be compatible with "a bigger film" like Megalopolis. Coppola returned to the film after directing The Rainmaker. In 2001, he held table reads in a production office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with actors including Nicolas Cage, Russell Crowe, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Giancarlo Esposito, Edie Falco, James Gandolfini, Jon Hamm, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Parker Posey, Kevin Spacey, and Uma Thurman. Matt Dillon, first approached during the filming of Rumble Fish for the role of a West Point cadet who goes AWOL, thought himself "too old for the part" by the time production was to begin, and Coppola dispelled rumors he had written a part for Warren Beatty. Jim Steranko, who previously created production illustrations for Bram Stoker's Dracula, was commissioned by Coppola to produce concept art for Megalopolis. As described in James Romberger's master's thesis, Steranko's work featured detailed pencil and charcoal architectural drawings of grand buildings and expansive urban plazas, blending elements of ancient Roman design, Art Deco influences, and speculative sci-fi aesthetics. Proposed filming locations included the cities of Montreal and New York, with an anticipated budget of $50–80million.
That year, Coppola and cinematographer Ron Fricke recorded second unit footage of New York, thinking it would be simpler to do so before principal photography, with the 24-frames per second Sony F900 digital camera that George Lucas used for Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Fricke had previously shot Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi, films which Coppola executive produced. After the September 11 attacks, during which Coppola and his team were location scouting in New York, the roughly thirty hours of footage was stashed, including more material they shot two weeks after, due to its resemblance to the script, which involved a Soviet satellite crashing into Earth and destroying a section of Lower Manhattan. Having based the New York of his film on the state of financial and infrastructural disrepair the city faced in the 1980s, he felt Megalopolis had become more relevant after the event and declared his plans to rewrite it. "I feel as though history has come to my doorstep," he said. In 2002, he shot sixty to seventy hours of second unit footage in Manhattan on high-definition video that Lucas described as "wide shots of cities with incredible detail at magic hour and all kinds of available-light material". He also disclosed his intent to self-finance the film, still in place as his next project, having become disheartened making films to pay off his debt to Hollywood.
Production on the film eventually halted. The success of Coppola's winery and resorts meant he could produce it with his own money, which his friend Wendy Doniger said "paralyzed him". "He had no excuse this time if the film was no good", she remarked, "What froze him was having the power to do exactly what he wanted so that his soul was on the line". In 2005, she bestowed him books that she deemed thematically relevant, including Mircea Eliade's Youth Without Youth, a novella about a 70-year-old man struggling to complete an ambitious project. Coppola shelved Megalopolis to self-finance a small-scale adaptation of the book, intended to be "the opposite of Megalopolis". In 2007, Coppola acknowledged that the September 11 attacks were a factor in his hesitancy to return to the film: "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". In 2009, in regards to the likelihood of revisiting the film, he said: "Someday, I'll read what I had on Megalopolis and maybe I'll think different of it, but it's also a movie that costs a lot of money to make and there's not a patron out there. You see what the studios are making right now".
Coppola began the final script of the film in 2012, about 12 years before the film's release. He said that before her death in 2015, Australian novelist Colleen McCullough wrote a novelization of the Megalopolis story. However, he did not say whether that novelization resembled the ultimate version of the film, as it was based on his "many scripts and ideas over the decades". McCullough received a credit as a historical advisor on the film, along with professional historian Mary Beard.
In 2017, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain invited Coppola on his travel show in Sicily. Coppola took note of his weight gain when he saw his episode and signed up for a five-month program at Duke University's fitness center, where he lost close to. Reflecting on his experience, he recalled listening to readings of Megalopolis during strict exercise regimens and realizing its relevance despite being written decades earlier. The 2001 draft, he explained, was an early version of the story but had evolved significantly over time. He credited Gandolfini with providing valuable suggestions when he had previously auditioned for the role of the mayor.