Does Francis Ford Coppola thrive on chaos? Not exactly, the director claims in the new trailer for Megadoc, Mike Figgis’ behind-the-scenes documentary on the tumultuous making of Coppola’s 2024 film Megalopolis: “I’m confronting chaos.”
Coppola spent $120 million of his own money on Megalopolis, a script he’d been working on for decades, and recruited stars including Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Nathalie Emmanuel, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, and Dustin Hoffman for the project. Figgis had extensive access to the making of the film and interviewed most of the stars. Coppola’s clashes with LaBeouf are a running theme in the movie — in the trailer, we see him yelling, “I’ve done this for 50 years.”
“You know why I’m doing this movie?” Coppola says elsewhere in the trailer. ”I have money. I already have fame. I already have Oscars. What do I get that I want? Some fun. I wanna have fun… No one I’m working with realizes how weird a movie this really is.”
Plaza is a standout in the trailer, sipping a drink from a goblet as she drops wildly quotable lines. “ I read it and then I emailed him back and I said, ‘this is a nightmare,’” she says, before calling Coppola “a romantic” and “very repressed.”
Coppola’s old friend George Lucas, gave a rare interview for the documentary, describing his fellow director as “the opposite of me. I’m a plan-it-out, plodding along… And he’s the jump-off-the-cliff guy.”
At the end of the trailer, Coppola sums up his philosophy: “Who cares if you die broke, if you’ve made something you think is beautiful?”
Figgis, whose past films include 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas, recently told The Hollywood Reporter that the documentary began spontaneously, after he sent Coppola an email that noted, “‘If you want someone to document the process as a fly on the wall, you know how to find me.’ And then I heard nothing back,” Figgis said. “A long time later, out of the blue, I got an email saying, ‘Hey, sounds good. Could you be here in three weeks for the start of pre-production?’ There was nothing remotely formal about the offer…. It was all very Francis’s style. I cleared my schedule and jumped on a plane.”
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Last year, Coppola told Rolling Stone that Megalopolis’ vision of the United States as akin to ancient Rome was one of the main reasons he wanted to make the movie. “This movie won’t cure our ills,” he said. “But I honestly believe that what will save us is the fact that we’ve got to talk about the future. We want to be able to ask any questions we have to ask in order to really look at why this country is divided right now, and that’s going to provide an energy that will defeat those people who want to destroy our republic. I made this film to contribute to that. And all I want is for this movie to start a conversation. You can’t have a utopia without a conversation.”
Megadoc hits select theaters Sept. 19, and Megalopolis itself is also returning to some theaters around that time.
