Illustration by Ashley Floréal
What good is money if you’re not going to spend it on something you love?
That seems to be the driving philosophy of legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, who self-financed his US$120-million passion project Megalopolis, partly by taking out a line of credit against his famed winery. The new film, an epic blend of cerebral sci-fi and Shakespearean drama, focuses on a visionary architect, played by Adam Driver, who is intent on rebuilding the near-future city of New Rome. But now that the movie has finally arrived, will Megalopolis prove to be a career-capping triumph or a calamitous act of financial folly?
While at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month for the film’s North American premiere, Coppola sat down with The Globe and Mail to discuss a career built on betting big outside the studio system.
Adam Driver’s character in Megalopolis is intent on creating something he knows he will never be able to fully enjoy – he’s building something for generations to come. How much time do you spend thinking about what your own legacy might look like decades from now?
There are a lot of ways that you’re awarded in cinema. Sometimes, money is the greatest reward. But when a filmmaker who has made a beautiful film comes up to me and says, “I saw your film when I was younger, and that’s what made me want to make films,” that’s being part of a continuum. In Megalopolis, there is a little piece of every movie that I’ve ever loved. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants, and we are all waiting for there to be new giants after us. The experience goes from one generation to the next.
When those younger filmmakers approach you, what advice do you offer them? You’ve been part of the great days of the studio system, and forged your own path completely outside the system.
I made a film once that was a big failure, Rumble Fish, which was an art film for kids. It was a big flop, and I was always depressed about it. But then I heard that it played one theatre in Chile, and became a thing that a lot of young South Americans went to see, and ultimately a filmmaker from there named Alberto Fuguet made a film, Looking for Rusty James, where he goes to Tulsa to see where Rumble Fish was made. To think that the film inspired the careers of a bunch of young filmmakers, that’s the greatest thrill you could have. I met director Edward Berger here the other day, he made All Quiet on the Western Front, and he told me what made him want to be a filmmaker was that he saw Apocalypse Now as a kid. That’s the most precious reward.
Are you optimistic that today’s young filmmakers will be able to get their own visions funded?
That worries me. I don’t have a lot of regrets in my life, but one of them is that filmmakers of my generation didn’t leave the business better than it was when we got it. It’s not easy today for young people to find funding for their movies. But the talent is abundant. The trouble is they’re going to have a tough time getting money to do the work they wish that they could do.
Megalopolis has been aggressively covered by the trade press. Do you feel that there are those in the industry rooting for the film to fail?
In my opinion we’re witnessing the great institutions dying: One of them is journalism and one is the studio production of movies. Journalism has a history in humanity that is great, and even the studio system has existed going back to the beginning of cinema. But the death moan is happening. Yet when something dies, something new is born. I’m not happy about it, and it’s making some media more desperate – we hear more things about unknown sources saying this and that. We know that saying something terrible about someone gets clicks, so you’re encouraged to be the first one to say something terrible.
You’ve been working on Megalopolis for decades. How much has the film evolved over that time?
There are a couple misunderstandings about this – the idea of me working on this 40 years ago isn’t true. What I did 40 years ago is that I knew every one of my films had a different style. I thought that I should start to keep notebooks and clippings of my work that would eventually lead me to where I might be going as an older filmmaker. At one point I read about ancient Rome and the Catilinarian conspiracy, which intrigued me because it happened in Rome but it could just as easily happen in modern America.
Did you revisit it during your longer stretches between films?
I got so desperate at one point. After I made The Rainmaker, I took 14 years off when I didn’t work any more. I thought, I’m just going to be a student of film, and experiment to see if I can learn more about cinema. Who was I, what am I going to become? Then finally, at a time when I was overweight and I went to a place to lose a lot of weight, I was on exercise machines and listening to old recordings of cast readings for earlier versions of Megalopolis and I thought, gee I could do that. It’s not as awful as I thought. And then I launched myself into it. Everyone said that I’ll lose my shirt. But I was in a position to take part of my wine business, borrow some money, and made it anyway. And that’s how we got here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Megalopolis opens in theatres Sept. 27.