Sometimes megalomania is understandable. Fifty years ago, Francis Ford Coppola was pretty much master of all he surveyed. “I was, like, the king of the world for a moment,” he ruefully reflected in 2010.
The Godfather opened in March 1972 and within six months had overtaken Gone with the Wind as the biggest-grossing film of all time. Soon Coppola was getting million-dollar cheques from Paramount and papering the walls with photocopies of them, according to Peter Biskind’s history of Seventies cinema, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. “I can fail for ten years now,” Coppola told his fellow filmmaker Paul Schrader after making it. Wrong, thought Schrader: he can fail for 50 years now.
But Coppola did not fail, not then. In June 1972 he signed up to make The Godfather Part II for an unprecedented million dollars up front, plus a percentage of the gross. The film was released in 1974 and won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. That year The Conversation, Coppola’s dark premonition of surveillance society – conceived before Watergate but all the more significant in its aftermath – was also released. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Coppola was at his zenith. At 36, he had won five Oscars. He owned his own independent film company, Zoetrope, several buildings, a theatre, a magazine, a jet and soon the Inglenook wine estate in Napa Valley. Coppola, who hated the grip of the big studios on the business and always wanted to work outside the system, had become a mogul himself. As he admitted later, he began to think he could do anything.
Yet he had never wanted to make The Godfather, seeing it as no more than a pulp novel adaptation: “I was into the New Wave and [Federico] Fellini and, like all the kids of my age, we wanted to make those kinds of films. So the book represented the whole kind of idea I was trying to avoid in my life.” But, in debt to Warners for $300,000 for financing Zoetrope, he had little choice – fortunately for us. He fought to make the film his way, insisting on casting Marlon Brando, and an epic at nearly three hours long. Above all, he made it into a family story, identifying deeply with Michael Corleone.
Despite this phenomenal success, Coppola felt the film had ruined him as the kind of original writer-director he had wanted to be: a proper auteur, no less. “The Godfather made me violate a lot of the hopes I had for myself at that age,” he later said – strange as that may sound, given it seems his most brilliantly authorial work.
Then came Apocalypse Now. Despite Coppola’s eminence, none of the studios would back such an overweening project, so Coppola decided to finance and direct it himself, inventively pre-selling the distribution rights. The story of its making is no less astonishing than the film itself, intimately told in Notes, the diary of Coppola’s long-suffering wife, Eleanor, and the documentary Hearts of Darkness that was made from footage she shot. Difficulties included replacing Harvey Keitel with Martin Sheen as the lead three weeks into shooting, the destruction of the sets in the Philippines by storms, and coping with an overweight Brando. But the true problem was that Coppola was making the film to discover himself. As Eleanor observed, all his scripts were “about themes he is in the process of working out within himself, rather than from things he has resolved”.
She also realised that his swings between mania and depression were alarming. She believed him to be a visionary but that, as she put it, “a certain discrimination was missing, that fine discrimination that draws the line between what is visionary and what is madness. I am terrified.” Coppola was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium. He later said the man who made The Godfather films had died in the jungle.
Despite Coppola’s irresolution about how best to end the film, Apocalypse Now was premiered at Cannes in 1979 as a work in progress, winning Coppola his second Palme d’Or. Had the film not succeeded at the box office, Coppola would have personally been liable for debts of some $18m, the original budget having been hugely overrun. But, against the odds, his winning streak continued. He also retained full ownership of the film and has continued to revise it, releasing a much longer version, Apocalypse Now Redux, in 2001. The film still appears to be a succession of astonishing but disconnected scenes, finishing in confusion and portenteousness, but its stature is undeniable.
It was Coppola’s next film that failed completely. One from the Heart, a fantasy musical love story released in 1982, cost $26m but took less than $1m at the US box office. Coppola’s career dived, and the banks foreclosed on Zoetrope. He spent the next decades as a director for hire, filing multiple times for bankruptcy.
It was in these circumstances, in December 1982, that Coppola began writing the remarkable film he releases this week, Megalopolis. As his enthusiastic biographer Sam Wasson describes it in The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story, published last year in anticipation of this resurrection: “He opened a new notebook and wrote under ‘Central Idea’, ‘Energy Art Death Rebirth’; and under ‘The Times’, ‘A world on the brink of destruction and rebirth’.”
Over the following months, Coppola developed a story about a great builder, Catilina, who is brought low by debt but still plans utopia: “He sees it now almost with a wrath or an anger at the city, at the society that he would redesign or die in the trying. Of course, he’s sort of disturbed and has this obsessive, manic personality…” From the start, Coppola saw parallels with the Catilinarian conspiracy, put down by Cicero in 63BC. America’s republic remains closely modelled on that of Rome, he maintains. What had begun as a Roman epic became set in futuristic America.
Coppola completed his first draft of Megalopolis in 1984, and he has been developing the project for the 40 years since, rewriting it at least 300 times. He cites no fewer than 43 writers and artists he is indebted to for the film, from Shakespeare and Aeschylus to Bergman and Bergson, “and the prophets all thrown in”.
In 1988, he planned to make the film at Cinecittà studios in Rome. It didn’t happen. In 2001, he tried again in New York, holding “table reads” with Robert De Niro, Paul Newman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Uma Thurman, James Gandolfini and Russell Crowe. Second unit background footage was already being shot around the city when 9/11 happened and development stopped. Only after the pandemic – and his 80th birthday – did Coppola decide to go ahead, financing it himself to the tune of $120m by selling part of his wine business.
This film is Coppola’s first major feature since his John Grisham adaptation The Rainmaker, 27 years ago. It’s also his first film of any kind for 13 years, since his small-scale horror Twixt. Coppola has said he hopes it will be seen over and over again: “It’s my dream that Megalopolis will become a New Year’s Eve perennial favourite, with audiences discussing afterwards not their new diets or resolutions not to smoke, but rather this simple question: ‘Is the society in which we live the only one available to us?’” So perhaps it is not fair to judge on just one viewing. But unless it becomes a cult classic, treasured for its junkiness, that’s all most will be able to endure.
For Megalopolis is a very silly story indeed, almost as dull as it is preposterous. In a very sketchily Romanized and updated New York, Adam Driver (looking ever more like Leonard Nimoy’s Spock) plays tormented genius, artist, architect, scientist, inventor, aristocrat and megalomaniac, Cesar Catilina, who runs the “Design Authority” and wants to turn the city into a futuristic utopia, using a miraculous material he invented called “Megalon”, for which he won the Nobel Prize. Cesar also has a superpower of being able to stop time at will, a transcendent privilege of artists, we learn.
Ranged against him is the crusty old conservative mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who’d just like to build a new casino. Franklyn’s pretty daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) is fascinated by Cesar, though, and they become lovers, kissing in suspended time, balancing on girders dangling high above the city.
Also vying for Cesar’s favours is the sexpot newscaster Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) and she’s fed up: “F*** your stupid megalopolis! I’m bored being your mistress, I need to be part of a power couple.” So she inveigles his uncle, the richest man in the city, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight, 85, channelling I, Claudius) into marriage and starts plotting to take over his bank, in alliance with his evil nephew, Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf, despite his reputational difficulties). Leering, capering, cross-dressing, provoking a populist rebellion in full Trumpian mode, LaBeouf brings a manic energy to the film. “Revenge tastes best wearing a dress!” he proclaims. And: “I want to f*** you so bad, Auntie Wow!”
It soon becomes clear that, despite the grandiose pretext, the film is a cross-generational family drama after all – in that way, almost a parody of The Godfather. But whereas that was so powerfully enacted, nothing works here. The script is unspeakable, alternately banal and pretentious, full of lofty abstractions (art, love, death) that fast become meaningless. You actually feel sorry for the actors trying to deliver their lines. Many scenes are set pieces (bacchanalian celebrations, chariot races, vestal virgins, a fashion show, rioting) that do not advance the plot. The crowd scenes are embarrassingly thinly peopled. Nothing about Megalon ever makes any sense. The film’s tone is baffling, apparently often deliberately absurd, yet deadly serious at the same time.
Megalopolis ends in sentimental optimism, the family celebrating Cesar and Julia’s new baby, Sunny Hope, Cesar promising he will build nobly for her sake. “That’s what I dedicate this movie to, hope and the children. Make the world for the children,” Coppola said when the film premiered at Cannes. In a postscript, he dedicates it to his “beloved wife Eleanor”, who died in April. At 85, he has, ever the megalomaniac, made the film he wanted so long to make. We still have the great movies he did not believe were worthy of him.
“Megalopolis” is in cinemas now
[See also: The Substance isn’t subtle or subversive, but it is entertaining]
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This article appears in the 25 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, All-out war