Coppola spent decades and his wine fortune getting Megalopolis made
Francis Ford Coppola first imagined Megalopolis in 1977, near the end of filming Apocalypse Now. Studios turned the project down again and again, so he waited until winemaking had made him rich and then paid 120 million dollars of his own money. The film finally opened in 2024 and took just 14.4 million dollars.
The idea came from Roman history. Reading the historian Sallust, Coppola was drawn to Catiline, a populist whom the consul Cicero accused in 63 BC of plotting to overthrow the Republic, and he wanted to echo that crisis in a modern New York. In early 1983 he produced four hundred pages of notes and script fragments in two months, comparing his plan to how James Joyce set Homer's Odyssey in Dublin. At one point his sound designer described a vision of an opera screened over four nights in a purpose-built outdoor theatre, rather like Wagner's Ring cycle at Bayreuth.
Attempts to shoot it collapsed repeatedly. In 1989 he announced a move to Italy to make a Catiline epic at Rome's Cinecitta studios, but made The Godfather Part III instead, then took on films such as Bram Stoker's Dracula to pay off debts from earlier flops. Another push in 2001 died after the September 11 attacks, and his run of box-office disappointments made studios wary.
The finished story follows Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina, an architect who can stop time and has invented a miracle building material, battling Giancarlo Esposito's Mayor Franklyn Cicero over whether to build a utopian city or a casino in a decaying New Rome. Filming in Georgia from November 2022 to March 2023 was chaotic: Coppola encouraged improvisation and rewrote scenes at the last minute, and members of the art department and visual effects team left or were fired.
It competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes in May 2024, dividing critics. Unable to find a studio willing to repay his costs and fund a major campaign, Coppola paid for the marketing himself, and a trailer was pulled for using invented critics' quotes. Lionsgate released it that September.
Source: Megalopolis (film)
