By Garry Maddox
In the fevered atmosphere of the Cannes Film Festival this week, one of the hottest topics has been whether legendary director Francis Ford Coppola could pull off the monumentally ambitious sci-fi drama Megalopolis that he made with $180 million of his own money.
One of American cinema’s great mavericks, Coppola triumphed with The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now in the 1970s and went on to make such warmly remembered smaller films as Peggy Sue Got Married, Rumble Fish and The Outsiders. He sold off part of his wine empire to make Megalopolis, his first film for more than a decade.
Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in Megalopolis.
Now 85, Coppola wanted to tell a story about greed and idealism, set in a futuristic America, that he had been mulling over since the 1980s. It follows a visionary architect (Adam Driver), who works to rebuild a damaged New York-style metropolis as a sustainable utopia, with a corrupt mayor (Giancarlo Esposito) standing in his way.
“When you do go into the great unknown, you don’t want to say, ‘Oh, I wish I had done this or that’,” Coppola has said about putting up his own money. “You want to say, ‘I got to do it’.”
When Megalopolis debuted in Cannes on Thursday, it inspired a mix of praise, awe, bafflement and disappointment. Noting that it featured shocking scenes including a doctored sex tape featuring Driver, Shia LaBeouf in drag as a Trumpian figure and Aubrey Plaza dominating her way through a slew of men, Variety reported that Coppola received a four-minute standing ovation as he entered the theatre then another seven minutes when the credits rolled.
There was warm praise from Deadline Hollywood (“a modern masterwork that reinvents the possibilities of cinema”), Vulture (“the craziest movie I have ever seen”), the Los Angeles Times (“I thrilled to Megalopolis in all its overstuffed, crazy ambition”) and Rolling Stone (“truly epic”).
There were savage critiques from The Guardian (“a bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow film, full of high-school-valedictorian verities about humanity’s future”) and Screen Daily (“a disaster”).
But there was widespread admiration – as there should be – for Coppola’s ambition, risk and the depth of ideas he explores about America as a declining empire that make questions over its box office potential secondary to its contribution to contemporary cinema.
Adam Driver and Francis Ford Coppola on Megalopolis red carpet in Cannes.Credit: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)
Movie lovers will be cautiously encouraged by thoughtful reviews in Time (“I’ll take a messy, imaginative sprawl over a waxen, tasteful enterprise any day”), IndieWire (“crams 85 years worth of artistic reverence and romantic love into a clunky, garish and transcendently sincere manifesto”) and The Hollywood Reporter (“windy and overstuffed, frequently baffling and way too talky” and “also often amusing, playful, visually dazzling and illuminated by a touching hope for humanity”).
The coming days will tell whether Coppola can win his third Palme d’Or, after The Conversation and Apocalypse Now (shared with The Tin Drum), and who will distribute Megalopolis in Australia.
But proving that mavericks still have a place in American cinema, Kevin Costner also has a self-funded passion project premiering out of competition in Cannes: the western Horizon: An American Saga. It is the first of four planned instalments costing more than $US100 million that he made after mortgaging a four-hectare block of waterfront land in California.
The next few days will also tell whether Costner’s gamble has a chance of paying off. Horizon, a saga set on the western frontier during the American Civil War, stars Costner and, in an ensemble cast, Sienna Miller, Giovanni Ribisi, Sam Worthington and fellow Australian Abbey Lee.
The actor-director, whose partly self-funded Dances With Wolves was a hit that won seven Oscars including best picture, has been trying to make Horizon since 1988. It’s the Yellowstone star’s first film as director since Open Range more than 20 years ago.
Mortgaged four hectares: Kevin Costner in Horizon: An American Saga.Credit: New Line Cinema
“I’ve mortgaged 10 acres on the water in Santa Barbara where I was going to build my last house,” Costner has said. “But I did it without a thought. It has thrown my accountant into a f--king conniption fit. But it’s my life, and I believe in the idea and the story.”
Mavericks have long risked their own money to make passion projects, either because it’s the only way to get them into production or because they don’t want a studio interfering with their vision.
There is no shortage of cautionary tales, including Coppola’s own musical fantasy One From The Heart, which was such a box office failure in 1982 that he had to sell the nine-hectare Zoetrope Studios and work for the rest of the decade paying off his debts.
But there are many success stories where the risks have paid off spectacularly.
After becoming a Hollywood pariah, Mel Gibson put up $US30 million of his own money to make The Passion of the Christ. While it seemed to have little going for it commercially - as a controversial subtitled film in ancient Aramaic and Latin about the last days of Jesus - the religious drama was phenomenally successful in 2004.
It single-handedly turned around a box-office slump and took more than $US610 million worldwide. Within weeks of it opening, The Hollywood Reporter estimated that Gibson and his company Icon Films could earn $US100 million from its North American cinema release plus more than $US200 million from the rest of the world.
In Australia, George Miller worked as a locum doctor while shooting an ultra-low budget first film, Mad Max, that was inspired by seeing the damage caused by Australia’s car culture. After doubting during editing that he even had a releasable film, it became one of most profitable releases in cinema history and launched a seminal action series. The fifth instalment, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, also screened in Cannes and opens in cinemas next week.