Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ is one from the heart

TORONTO, ONT – Francis Ford Coppola believes he can stop time.

It’s not just a quality of the protagonist of Coppola’s new film “Megalopolis,” a visionary architect named Cesar Catilina ( Adam Driver ) who, by barking “Time, stop!” can temporarily freeze the world for a moment before restoring it with a snap of his fingers. And Coppola isn’t referring to his ability to manipulate time in the editing suite. He means it literally.

“We’ve all had moments in our lives where we approach something you can call bliss,” Coppola says. “There are times when you have to leave, have work, whatever it is. And you just say, ‘Well, I don’t care. I’m going to just stop time.’ I remember once actually thinking I would do that.”

Time is much on Coppola’s mind. He’s 85 now. Eleanor, his wife of 61 years, died in April. “Megalopolis,” which is dedicated to her, is his first movie in 13 years. He’s been pondering it for more than four decades. The film begins, fittingly, with the image of a clock.

“It’s funny, you live your life going from being a young person to being an older person. You’re looking in that direction,” Coppola said in a recent interview at a Toronto hotel before the North American premiere of “Megalopolis.” “But to understand it, you have to look in the other direction. You have to look at it from the point of view of the older looking at the younger, which you’re receding from.”

“I’m sort of thinking of my life in reverse,” Coppola says.

You have by now probably heard a few things about “Megalopolis.” Maybe you know that Coppola financed the $120 million budget himself, using his lucrative wine empire to realize a long-held vision of Roman epic set in a modern New York. You might be familiar with the film’s clamorous reception from critics at the Cannes Film Festival in May, some of whom saw a grand folly, others a wild ambition to admire.

“Megalopolis,” a movie Coppola first began mulling in the aftermath of “Apocalypse Now” in the late 1970s, has been a subject of intrigue, anticipation, gossip, a lawsuit and sheer disbelief for years.

What you might not have heard about “Megalopolis,” though, is that it’s an extraordinarily sincere message from a master filmmaker nearing the end of his life. Giancarlo Esposito, who first sat for a reading of the script 37 years ago with Laurence Fishburne and Billy Crudup, calls it “some deep, deep dream of consciousness” from Coppola.

At a time when many are consumed by bitterly partisan politics and climate change anxiety, Coppola has spent every opportunity this year pleading that we are “one human family.” His movie, a delirious dream of the future, is an unwieldy but heartfelt fable about the boundlessness of human potential. As implausible as optimism may seem in 2024, it’s Coppola’s cri de coeur — one that he connects less to his perspective as an elder statesman than he does to his abiding, childlike sense of possibility.

“I realized that the genius of human invention usually happened when we were playing with our kids. It’s in the act of play that we’re so creative,” Coppola says. “The cave paintings, you see hands but there are big hands and little hands.”

“Megalopolis” will be released by Lionsgate in theaters Friday, including many IMAX screens, culminating what has been arguably Coppola’s biggest gamble — which is saying something for the filmmaker who plunked down his own millions to shoot “Apocalypse Now” in the Philippines jungle and plunged his production company, Zoetrope, into bankruptcy to make 1982’s “One From the Heart.” That title has remained symbolic of Coppola, an eminently personal filmmaker, regardless of the success of “The Godfather,” who has often done his best work far out on a limb.

“On our first day of shooting, at one point in the day he said to everybody, ’We’re not being brave enough,” Driver recalled in Cannes. “That, for me, was what I hooked on for the rest of the shoot.”

In the film, Driver’s Cesar is at odds with a backward-looking mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Esposito), but falls for his daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel). Cesar’s powers as a time-stopper and an architect are derived from a substance called Megalon that could alter the fate of the metropolis dubbed New Rome. A lot is thrown into the mix, including Aubrey Plaza’s TV personality Wow Platinum and Shia LaBeouf’s Clodio Pulcher. Coppola spent years assembling a scrap book of inspirations for the film, though you could wonder if Cesar isn’t ultimately derived from himself.

“I thought about Francis but I wasn’t thinking I’m going to do a version of Francis,” said Driver. “All movies, I kind of feel, are their directors in a sense.”

Esposito was surprised to find the script hadn’t changed much over the years. Every morning, he would receive a text from Coppola with a different ancient story. On set, Coppola favored theater games, improvisation and going with instinct.

“He takes his time. What we’re used to in this modern age is immediate answers and having to know the answer,” Esposito says. “And I don’t think Francis needs to know the answer. I think the question for him is sometimes more important.”

Reports of disorder on the set led to Driver making a statement that, to the contrary, it was one of the best shooting experiences of his career. Later, just before the film was to premiere in Cannes, a report alleged Coppola behaved inappropriately with extras. Variety later posted a story with a video shot by a crew member showing Coppola, in a nightclub scene, walking through a dancing crowd and then stopping to apparently lean in to several women to hug them, kiss them on the cheek or whisper to them.

Earlier this month, Coppola sued Variety, claiming its report was false and libelous. The trade publication said it stood by its reporters.

Asked about the reports in Toronto, Coppola said “I don’t even want to (discuss it). It’s a waste of time.” Later in the interview, he separately noted: “I’m very respectful of women, I always have been. My mother, she always taught me: ‘Francis, if you ever make a pass at a girl, that means you disrespect her.’ So I never did.”

None of the major studios or streaming services (“Another word for home video,” Coppola says) sought to acquire “Megalopolis” after Cannes. He also first showcased it to executives and friends in Los Angeles before the festival, but found little interest.

“I’m a creation of Hollywood,” says Coppola. “I went there wanting to be part of it, and by hook or crook, they let me be part of it. But that system is dying.”

If Coppola has a lot riding on “Megalopolis,” he doesn’t, in any way, appear worried. Recouping his investment in the film will be virtually impossible; he stands to lose many millions. But speaking with Coppola, it’s clear he’s filled with gratitude. “I couldn’t be more blessed,” he says.

“Everyone’s so worried about money. I say: Give me less money and give me more friends,” Coppola says. “Friends are valuable. Money is very fragile. You could have a million marks in Germany at the end of World War II and you wouldn’t be able to buy a loaf of bread.”

Coppola has lately been watching a lot of films from the 1930s ( “The Awful Truth” is a favorite). But his mind is mostly on the cinema of the future. In recent years, Coppola has experimented with what he calls “live cinema,” trying to imagine a movie form that’s created and seen simultaneously. In festival screenings, “Megalopolis” has included a live moment in which a man walks on stage and addresses a question to a character on the screen.

“The movies your grandchildren will make are not going to be like this formula happening now. We can’t even imagine what it’s going to be, and that’s the wonderful thing about it,” says Coppola. “The notion that there’s a set of rules to make a film — you have to have this, you have to have that — that’s OK if you’re making Coca-Cola because you want to know that you’re going to be able to sell it without risk. But cinema is not Coca-Cola. Cinema is something alive and ever-changing.”

Coppola has hoped to include the live moment in screenings nationwide. As of Tuesday, there weren’t details available on those showings. He’s even come up with a way to “simulate for the home an experience that is somewhat theatrical,” he said. Regardless of whether moviegoers will flock to “Megalopolis,” it’s clearly a passionate late-career statement from a titan of American movies, made without a whiff of an algorithm, that embodies a line heard several times in the film: “When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we are free.”

“There have to be,” Coppola says, “filmmakers who make the film without risk and jump into it and say, ‘Well, it feels right to me but who knows? Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m right, it doesn’t matter. It’s in my heart.’”