Francis Ford Coppola has shared a first look image at his highly-anticipated film Megalopolis, and it comes in the form of a title card. It’s not much, but it’s enough to tease what the tone of the film will be.
The film tells the story of an architect dreaming of a utopian version of New York City in the near future and his battle with the conservative mayor, who has other ideas about the city. Contained within the epic is a myriad of storylines and characters. “The fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems in this epic story of political ambition.”
Coppola described the film as “a love story. A woman is divided between loyalties to two men. But not only two men. Each man comes with a philosophical principle. One is her father who raised her, who taught her Latin on his lap and is devoted to a much more classical view of society, the Marcus Aurelius kind of view. The other one, who is the lover, is the enemy of the father but is dedicated to a much more progressive ‘Let’s leap into the future, let’s leap over all of this garbage that has contaminated humanity for 10,000 years. Let’s find what we really are, which are an enlightened, friendly, joyous species.’”
Coppola also previously said of the film: “What would make me really happy? It’s not winning a lot of Oscars because I already have a lot and maybe more than I deserve. And it’s not that I make a lot of money, although I think over time it will make a lot of money because anything that the people keep looking at and finding new things, that makes money. So somewhere down the line, way after I’m gone, all I want is for them to discuss [Megalopolis] and, is the society we’re living in the only one available to us? How can we make it better? Education, mental health? What the movie really is proposing is that utopia is not a place. It’s how can we make everything better? Every year, come up with two, three or four ideas that make it better.”
“I would be smiling in my grave if I thought something like that happened, because people talk about what movies really mean if you give them something. If you encouraged people to discuss marriage and education and health and justice and opportunities and freedom and all these wonderful things that human beings have conceived of. And ask the question, how can we make it even better? That would be great. Because I bet you they would make it better if they had that conversation.”
The cast for the film includes Adam Driver, Shia LaBeouf, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Aubrey Plaza, Jason Schwartzman, Laurence Fishburne, Grace VanderWaal, Kathryn Hunter, James Remar, Talia Shire. Dustin Hoffman, Chloe Fineman (Saturday Night Live), Isabelle Kusman (Licorice Pizza), D.B. Sweeney (Fire in the Sky), Bailey Ives, and Giancarlo Esposito.
Driver previously talked about the film saying: “The movie is wild. It’s so imaginative and big and epic, and it’s bold. It takes a risk, and I couldn’t be more excited by it.”
