Francis Ford Coppola has been through a lot in his 85 years on Earth. He’s made hit films, raised a small army of directors, and somehow managed to start his own marijuana brand, so he really doesn’t need to return to filmmaking if he doesn’t want to.
But the director has been brainstorming his next film for decades, so if he wants to self-finance a $120M epic featuring Adam Driver, who are we to stop him?? He isn’t fazed.
Coppola’s upcoming epic Megalopolis is set to premiere at Cannes this year, and while Hollywood might be on the fence, fans of the iconic filmmaker are ready to welcome him back with open arms. Here is everything we know so far about the upcoming film.
The story follows Adam Driver as Cesar, an “idealistic architect attempting to rebuild New York as an American Utopia.” Driver becomes entangled with Julia Cicero, daughter of the corrupt mayor, Frank Cicero, and the three clash over ideas for a more sustainable future after the city continues to crumble.
Coppola told Vanity Fair he was inspired by H.G. Wells’ Things to Come which he discovered as a child. “I wasn’t really working on this screenplay for 40 years as I often see written, but rather I was collecting notes and clippings for a scrapbook of things I found interesting for some future screenplay, or examples of political cartoons or different historical subjects,” Coppola said. “Ultimately, after a lot of time, I settled on the idea of a Roman epic. And then later, a Roman epic set in modern America, so I really only began writing this script, on and off, in the last dozen years or so. Also, as I have made many films of many different subjects and in many different styles, I hoped for a project later in life when I might better understand what my personal style was.”
The star-studded cast includes Driver alongside Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Giancarlo Esposito, Laurence Fishburne and Kathryn Hunter. Jason Schwartzman, Coppola’s nephew, also appears, because nepotism is allowed in the case of very good movies.
The movie will debut at Cannes on the evening of Thursday, May 16, but does not currently have a distributor. While it does not have a wide release date yet, Coppola hopes it will turn into a New Year’s Day classic. He told Vanity Fair, “It’s my dream that Megalopolis will become a New Year’s Eve perennial favorite, with audiences discussing afterwards not their new diets or resolutions not to smoke, but rather this simple question: ‘Is the society in which we live the only one available to us'”
No trailer has been released yet, but the first image gives us a glimpse of Driver as Cesar:
