Adam Driver, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight and Laurence Fishburne star in this project that the director of ‘The Godfather’ had for years.
Francis Ford Coppola is 83 years old and after ‘Tetro’ has focused on making new montages of his ‘Godfathers’. For years the director caresses a project that many thought would no longer be running: ‘Megalopolis’. It’s not like the filming has just been announced, but the person in charge of ‘Apocalypse Now’ has taken another step: he has revealed his cast.
Adam Driver, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight and Laurence Fishburne star in the legendary filmmaker’s new feature. Coppola proposes it as his last project and confirms that he will fund it out of his own pocket: “What’s the worst that could happen to me? I’m going to die and ruin myself? I’m not going bankrupt.”
In any case, there is no need to launch the clocks on the fly, because almost 20 years ago Coppola himself had already announced another cast that has fallen over time: then he had Oscar Isaac as his ideal protagonist and dreamed he also of Cate Blanchett, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange and James Caan. In 2001 names like Paul Newman, Robert de Niro, Russell Crowe and Nicolas Cage came on the table and then there was Jude Law. None of them have recovered it for this new project reboot.
Coppola himself has revealed that “Megalopolis” is going to tell the story of the complicated attempt to build a utopian city after a major catastrophe, supported by romantic elements and also political ambition. The film, with footage shot before the September 11, 2011 terrorist attacks, is set to take place in Manhattan in the near future. The plot follows the story of a power struggle between an architect named Serge Caitline and New York City Mayor Frank Cicero, who face each other to create an urban project in the city that will completely reshape it. The architect’s last name is inspired by a real historical event: the Catherine’s Conspiracy, a conspiracy carried out by the senator of the same name from ancient Rome to rule the Roman Republic.
His advanced age gives Coppola complete freedom to express his opinion: “What would make me happy? I’m not going to win a lot of Oscars because I already have a lot, and maybe more than I deserve. So deep down, long after I’m gone, I want them to talk about ‘Megalopolis’ and is the society we live in the only possible one? How can we improve it? Education, mental health? What the film proposes is that utopia is not a place, but how can we improve everything? That would be nice. Because I bet they would make it better if they had that conversation.”
Francis Ford Coppola’s productions have always been complicated. In everyone’s memory is the chaotic filming of ‘Apocalypse Now’ in the Philippines, with a typhoon that destroyed the sets and where the filmmaker himself went bankrupt for the first time. His wife Eleanor made a documentary, ‘Hearts in Darkness’, which absorbed all the setbacks of those shootings, but which, in addition to the beautiful results of the film, also had a positive element that Coppola lost the fear of going bankrupt. In fact, it went bankrupt again with the musical ‘Corazonada’, a film supported by the then innovative new digital techniques, which the spectators did not like. And he is no longer afraid of money: “I will not go bankrupt. All my children passed. I think if you can make a movie that people can make something out of for ten, twenty or more years, you won’t lose any money,” he told Deadline.
Source: La Verdad
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