Megalopolis director Francis Ford Coppola fights back: ‘Truth is, I respect women a lot’
In a wide-ranging candid interview, Francis Ford Coppola defends his new $US120m epic and dismisses on-set abuse allegations as ‘absurd’.
Yes, believe it, Francis Ford Coppola is back. The man who once transformed a humble crime novel called The Godfather into a worldwide mega-blockbuster and then made the mega-war movie Apocalypse Now, followed by the mega-flop One from the Heart, has returned to the forefront of mainstream movie-making.
And his new one is more mega than ever. The hint is in the title. It’s called Megalopolis and it’s a 40-years-in-the-making, self-financed, star-dotted (not quite studded), sprawling and extraordinarily ambitious epic that marries ancient Rome with futuristic New York in an attempt to grapple with enormous questions about the relationship between politics, democracy and the environmental fate of the planet. It is, in short, mega. And it’s very right now.
What is also right now is that this week Coppola announced he is suing Variety magazine for $US15 million ($22.3m), for telling “knowing and reckless falsehoods” about him, and being “jealous and resentful of genius”.
In July Coppola was accused in a Variety report of “misconduct” on set during the filming of a Megalopolis nightclub sequence. The article alleged that Coppola pulled women on to his lap and kissed female extras “to get them in the mood”.
In a new Sight and Sound magazine interview, the 85-year-old director describes the allegations as “absurd”.
“I made a lot of movies that had beautiful women,” he said. “And never throughout my entire career was there the slightest rumble of any kind. All I can say is, I had a mother who told me that if you make a pass at a woman it means you disrespect her.
“And the truth is, I respect women a lot. And that comes with the fact that I would never make an unwelcome gesture. It’s absurd. And I know, nowadays, that’s an easy thing to say. But I respect women very much. And I’m very excited about the leadership of women. I have nothing but admiration and respect for women.”
Was this a neat segue into Kamala Harris? “It is very prescient that the movie is gonna come out exactly at the same moment that we’re gonna decide what kind of government the world is gonna have for the next era,” Coppola said, referring to the movie’s release mere weeks before the US presidential elections.
Megalopolis stars Adam Driver as Cesar Catalina, a gifted futuristic architect who can control time and has developed a revolutionary new building material called Megalon. Catalina knows Megalon will fix the Earth’s environmental woes, yet standing in his way is Mayor Cicero, a conservative, power-hungry politician.
Cicero’s adherence to corrupt traditions and greed threatens to destroy the last vestiges of democracy in the film’s New Rome (basically futuristic New York) setting.
“Today America is going through how Rome lost its republic,” Coppola told Sight and Sound. “It’s uncanny that we could end up with a dictator or with an emperor.”
The hype and anticipation around Megalopolis has, of course, been mega. Four decades in development, and with stars such as Paul Newman, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio rumoured to have been previously attached, the movie has acquired a level of demented grandeur not seen since classic Tinseltown passion projects Cleopatra, Heaven’s Gate or Titanic.
Stories of extravagance during the film’s intermittent nine-month shoot included Coppola buying a Georgia motel for $US4.35 million to accommodate his extended family and some of the crew. He also sold part of his winery estate to cover the movie’s $US120 million budget.
Throughout the production, there was media excitement that here was a film emerging from the old school of unrestrained creativity and go-for-broke commitment – the same commitment that gave Martin Sheen a heart attack while filming Apocalypse Now, and Coppola an epileptic seizure on the same production.
But when the movie premiered at this year’s Cannes festival, it was met with mostly hoots of derision and dubbed “Megaflopolis”. One critic even claimed the film was so colossally bad it was akin to “observing the actual fall of Rome”.
The movie’s US distributor, Lionsgate, went on the offensive, releasing a trailer filled with negative appraisals from previously reviewed Coppola classics, just to remind prospective audiences that critics, you know, get it wrong! The snag, alas, was that the negative quotes were fake and the trailer had to be pulled.
Instead a more considered derision of critics has remained in the global marketing campaign. Coppola himself has taken swipes at critics, claiming they are more interested in formulaic product than innovative art.
“The companies that finance movies, of course, they want to make it like Coca-Cola,” he told Sight and Sound.
“Those are the rules that they push. And some of those who push them are critics – as if there’s a basic formula of how to make a movie.”
For Megalopolis, Coppola’s formula was simply to ask the movie what it wanted to be. No, really.
“There comes a point where you are making a movie you don’t know how to make, and the wonderful thing … is that the film itself starts to guide you,” he said. “It starts to say, ‘More of this, less of that.’ And before you know it, you’re off.”
Well, yes and no. Megalopolis is, unfortunately, a staggering mess. And what it needed was more precision, more control, more directorial input – not less.
The film is littered with pointless speeches, random party scenes and utterly superfluous characters, such as the, sigh, sexy serial seductress played by Aubrey Plaza and called Wow Platinum. It is telling that when crew members started to blab to the press about life on the Megalopolis set, one consistent complaint was the lack of coherence.
“It was like watching a train wreck unfold day after day, week after week,” one Megalopolis veteran told The Guardian this year. And when a different crew member quizzed Coppola on the look of the movie, the director allegedly replied: “How can you figure out what Megalopolis looks like when I don’t even know what Megalopolis looks like?”
Coppola hopes the audiences who are tempted to see it will take away the message that humanity, when working together creatively, can solve all of the world’s problems. It cannot be left to just one “great man” to do it. Although, in his Sight and Sound interview, he does admit a profound admiration for Elon Musk, calling him “a genius”.
Reflecting on his own talents, Coppola says he has not lost his drive and is always working on several new projects simultaneously. He’s adapting Edith Wharton’s The Glimpses of the Moon and then plans to tackle his other long-gestating epic, Distant Vision, about the development of television as seen through three generations of an Italian American family, based on the Coppolas.
As for Megalopolis, he is seemingly impervious to criticism, and instead claims that the only audience reactions he has heard are of the delightedly baffled kind.
“The reaction to Megalopolis has been pretty much, ‘Wow, what was that? I have to see it again!’” he told Sight and Sound.
“And that’s the best thing, because when you see it again you see a slightly different movie. And it keeps giving. It keeps changing.” But for the better?
The Times
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