The filmmaker talks about the inspirations for the characters in
“Megalopolis” and “The Godfather,” and responds to recent allegations.
The first time that Francis Ford Coppola had a movie in competition at the Cannes Film Festival was in 1967. He was 28 and the movie was “You’re a Big Boy Now,” a neo-screwball studio comedy about a young guy trying to cut loose from his parents. Coppola made it while he was in film school at the University of California, Los Angeles, and it became his master’s thesis project. A month after the festival, he began directing his first big-budget studio film, “Finian’s Rainbow.” It flopped. He then poured some of his savings into a low-budget studio movie, “The Rain People.” It flopped. The next film he directed was “The Godfather.”
Coppola, now 85, was back again at Cannes last month with the epic fantasy “Megalopolis,” a big-screen dream that he has nurtured for more than 40 years. It’s his first movie since “Twixt” (2011), a little-seen horror tale about a genre novelist who says he wants to make something personal. It’s a plaintive refrain that Coppola has voiced repeatedly throughout his career. However celebrated he remains for the studio films that he has directed, Coppola is and has always been an unequivocally personal filmmaker, one whose love for the art of film has recurrently put him at odds with the industry and its media mouthpieces.
Given Coppola’s history of independence and specifically his record of great financial risks (as with “Apocalypse Now”) and sometimes staggering losses (“One From the Heart”), it was no surprise that much of the initial chatter about “Megalopolis” wasn’t about the movie per se or the sprawling ensemble headed by Adam Driver. Rather, much of the pre-festival talk was about how Coppola had helped bankroll it with “$120 million of his own money,” a phrase that was reflexively repeated in news reports. Even at Cannes, where the word “art” is used without embarrassment, money keeps an iron grip on both minds and movies.
By the time the festival opened on May 14, though, the talk about “Megalopolis” had changed course dramatically. That day, The Guardian published a long article on it. Much of the story was based on anonymous sources and was dedicated to gripes from crew members about Coppola’s methods — “‘Has this guy ever made a movie before?’” the headline read — echoing complaints that have dogged the filmmaker throughout his career. More alarming were the allegations that Coppola had tried to kiss female extras during production. In response, one of the executive producers, Darren Demetre, said he “was never aware of any complaints of harassment or ill behavior during the course of the project.”
A FEW DAYS AFTER “Megalopolis” had its premiere at Cannes, I walked under a canopy of clouds to a ship docked near the festival’s headquarters, to speak with Coppola. The yacht belonged to an Italian-Tunisian distributor and Coppola was, as he put it, “mooching” as assorted relatives, friends, colleagues and support staff buzzed around him. He looked tired, and while that’s normal for many attendees at the world’s largest film festival, it was hard not to think that grief had taken its toll, too. On April 12, Eleanor Coppola, his wife of more than six decades, died. On May 18, his longtime collaborator Fred Roos — a producer on numerous Coppola family films, “Megalopolis” included — also died.
Yet if Coppola looked weary, he didn’t sound like he was. Wearing a pink shirt and dark slacks, Eleanor’s wedding ring dangling from his necklace, he was wholly, incandescently engaged. He answered my questions freely though he often came at them from an oblique angle, say, by starting his answer with a story that led him down seemingly unrelated byways all while he invoked history, cited books, showed me photos (“That’s Nicolas Cage’s grandfather” — Cage is Coppola’s nephew) and asked me questions: “Have you read any Hermann Hesse?” (no), “Do you know anything about what matriarchies might have been like?” (sort of).
Coppola was already publicly talking about “Megalopolis” in 1982, the year his doomed expressionistic musical “One From the Heart” opened. A bold, ravishing and deeply sincere love story set in Las Vegas that he shot entirely on soundstages, that film was one of the most ambitious of Coppola’s personal projects, and he hoped it would help him discover his own filmmaking vocabulary. A series of crushing financial blows both of his own making and not — about a third of the budget evaporated before shooting even began — finally sank the movie and proved near-ruinous for the filmmaker. Less than two months after it opened, he pulled it from theaters in hopes of a later reopening. Instead, it went right to home video.
By the time “One From the Heart” closed, Coppola owed Chase Manhattan Bank $31 million, a debt that forced him to sell the Los Angeles studio where he had shot the movie. It would have been easy for Coppola, who by then owned a large estate in Napa County, Calif., to retreat from filmmaking and bask in his past triumphs, but he has a remarkably phoenixlike capacity for emerging from the ostensible ashes of his career. The next year, two smaller-scaled movies he directed opened — “The Outsiders” and “Rumble Fish,” both based on young-adult novels by S.E. Hinton — and he was talking about a new project he called “Megalopolis.”
Coppola had, he told Film Comment in 1983, already amassed some 400 pages of “really interesting stuff” for this new project. It was set in contemporary New York yet partly based on ancient Rome because of the similarities he saw between them. “Everybody was into death,” he said, “all the values had turned into a pursuit of money.” The new project would confront big questions — the why and what of existence — and would somehow involve a historical figure named Catiline. What Coppola was interested in, he said, was the question of utopia. In the film’s second half, there’s a “really wild section which ultimately puts forth the basis for the concept of utopia in the course of this mad hallucination.”
That hallucination came to visually stunning life 42 years later in “Megalopolis,” which is set to play globally in IMAX theaters later this year. It’s an allegorical fantasy about an architect, Cesar Catilina (Driver), who dreams of a better, brighter world than the one he inhabits. Set in a city that looks like New York by way of ancient Rome, it tracks Cesar as he grapples with the past, envisions the future, falls for a brainy beauty, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), and spars with her father, the mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Other players include Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), an ambitious, dangerous TV personality, and Cesar’s jealous, duplicitous cousin, Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf).
The story, Coppola has said, was partly inspired by the so-called Catilinarian conspiracy, an attempted coup in the first century B.C.E. by a Roman named Lucius Sergius Catilina. In her book “SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome,” the historian Mary Beard (with whom Coppola consulted) describes Catilina as “a disgruntled, bankrupt aristocrat” who wanted to assassinate all the elected officials, burn the capital to the ground and write off everyone’s debts. I imagine that helps explain the character’s appeal to the chronically debt-ridden filmmaker, which gives the movie a sharp, distinctly autobiographical tang.
When I asked Coppola what specifically about the Catilinarian conspiracy inspired him, he responded with one of the discursive soliloquies that characterized much of the hour we spent together. He opened with a reference to his youth (“I was a theater student”), continued with a discussion of his love for rehearsal and veered into a lengthy account of finding the main characters in “The Godfather” over an early meal at a New York pizzeria. Coppola put Marlon Brando at the head of the table like the paterfamilias he would soon play onscreen, with James Caan trying to make Brando laugh and Al Pacino trying to impress Brando by “being intense.” Every character, Coppola said, emerged after an hour and a half.
Coppola responded in a similarly rambling fashion a bit later when I asked him about the accusations reported in The Guardian. To my surprise, he began by talking about his mother, Italia. “She looked like Hedy Lamarr,” he said, referring to the glamorous Hollywood star. “I have the picture,” he said, as he fished for his phone. (Italia did in fact evoke Lamarr.) “But my mother told me that if you make an advance toward a woman, it means you disrespect her, and the girls I had crushes on, I certainly didn’t disrespect them.” Pressed further, he added that there was a photo of one of the “girls” he kissed on the cheek that had been taken by her father. (“I knew her when she was 9.”) “I’m not touchy-feely,” Coppola said. “I’m too shy.”
COPPOLA COULD HAVE, he told me, continued making gangster films after “The Godfather,” a critical and popular hit, as well as the equally successful “The Godfather Part II.” But he wanted to learn and to make as many styles of movie that he could. “One thing you’ll notice about my stuff,” he said, “is that every film is very different from one another. ‘The Godfather’ is very classical, ‘Apocalypse Now’ is very wild, ‘One From the Heart’ is very theatrical, ‘Dracula’” — his lushly romantic 1992 horror tale — “was very archaic. The reason that my films were so different is because the themes were different.” He had found a style to fit each one. Yet after all that, he kept wondering, as he put it now, “what my style is.”
To hear Coppola tell it, the search for his style began around 1997 after “The Rainmaker,” a courtroom drama that he made, an associate said, to get out of debt. “I just said I’m going to take like a hiatus, not be a professional filmmaker anymore,” Coppola told me. He wanted to learn more and not hustle for a living, so he went on a break, albeit in his inimitable fashion. He traveled, made a few inexpensive films (“Youth Without Youth,” “Tetro”) and enjoyed his hiatus, a period made easier by his wine business, which had paid off nicely. “I made a couple of good decisions,” he said. (Sam Wasson, in his recent book about Coppola, “The Path to Paradise,” says that around 2000 that business was making almost $100 million a year in profit.)
The essential tragedy of movies is that they are wildly expensive to make and release. That’s one reason that filmmakers, especially those who want to control the means of production, have funneled their own money into their projects as long as movies have been around. Charlie Chaplin invested in his own work, as did John Wayne and Spike Lee. In 1979, when Coppola’s partly self-financed war film, “Apocalypse Now,” opened, he told The Times, “If I ever get the bucks that, say, George Lucas got from ‘Star Wars,’ I’d put every penny into changing the rules.” Lucas, who had invested his own money to help make “Star Wars,” used profits from that film to continue the series.
The day after I spoke with Coppola, he and Lucas — who met on the set of “Finian’s Rainbow” — had a symbolic reunion at Cannes. The festival was giving Lucas an honorary Palme d’Or, and had asked Coppola to present it. During the ceremony, they took the stage to deafening applause. “How exceptional it is,” Coppola said, “to be here to celebrate the imagination, the persistence and success of your own kid brother — well, the first one I ever had.”
With Lucas standing close at his side, Coppola spoke movingly about their early days and friendship. As he wound down, he added that after Lucas failed to get a “Flash Gordon” film going, he told Coppola, “Well, I’ll make my own movie. I’ll call it ‘Star Battles’ or ‘Star Wars’ or something.”
It was a good, amusing line, one that acknowledged the behemoth that Lucas would create and that would, in many respects, change American movies. Weeks later, though, when I listened to Coppola’s speech again, this time all I could think about was something he said in 1982. “It’s so silly in life not to pursue the highest possible thing you can imagine, even if you run the risk of losing it all,” he said. “You can’t be an artist and be safe.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES
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