How Coppola Pulled off ‘Megalopolis’

This Review was original published on August 27, 2025 out of the Venice Film Festival. We are recirculating it now timeed to Megadoc‘S Theatrical Release.

Regardless of Whether You Think Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is a great movie, a terrible movie, or some mad hybrid of bot, we can all probably aggree that the Most fascinating THING ABOUT THE FILM WAS ITS CREATION. A Dream Project that Coppola Spent Decades Trying to Realize, Megalopolis felt for many years like a defining absence in the director’s Career: the masterpiece he never got to make, the one that to be and together. And thatn he made it – with about $ 120 million of His Own Money, after 13 years away from the director’s chair. Megalopolis Came Out Last Year, Got Wildly DiviWs, and Made About $ 10 at the Box Office. But it also might have been the Most-Talked-About Picture of the Year. Is that failure or success? “He Likes Going Through Brick Walls,” George Lucas, Once Coppola’s Protégé, Says About Him in MegadocMike Figgis’s Documentary About The Making of Megalopolis, Which is premiering this week at the Venice International Film Festival of a september Theatrical Release. “SO we and head on his head, i’m not surprised.”

Coppola WOULD PROBABLY SAY SYING SIMILAR. For a filmmaker once renown for his grandiosity, the director has always been surprisisly self-deployment and conflicted in His Own Assessments of His Work. “I’m Not JUST WOING Something I know how to do,” he says of Megalopolis In Figgis’s Documentary, Speaking to His Late Wife, Eleanor. “I’m doing something to know how to do, and i do’t know how that you work out.” Elsewhere, he calls Himself “A first-Rate Second-Rate Director.” This Strain of Vital Self-Dubt was also widly evident in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmaker’s Apocalypsse (1991) – The Immortal Documentary About The Insane Production of Apocalypse Now – Directed by Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper, and Eleanor Herself. This is a man who thrives on chaos and disquits, it seames.

He use that as a creation strength, too. Figgis Pretty Much Had Total Access During This Period, and HIS Demystification of Coppola’s Process is Valuable. He’s there for the auditions and the Experimental Acting Exercises that Coppola has Always Love to Do, Activities Designed to Build Community. There’s A Real “Let’s Put on a Show” Energy to Coppola’s Approach to FilmMaking, Which Recalls Something and Has About His Life and Career – That He was in Many Ways Happesting Was and theater Back in College. (This is Also Why He Continue to Be Obseed With The Idea of ​​”Live Cinema,” A Small Element of Who We Got to Witness During Megalopolis‘S Theatrical Run, wen an actual person in the audience would ADAM DRIVER’S ONSCREEN Character a Question.) Megadoc ALSO provides glimps of coppola’s fraught Meetings with his art and effects departments, which Wound up being replace partway through the shoot. There’s the good chaos and bad chaos, and the people of the director doesn’t seem entirery sura of which is whic.

Take, for example, His Constant Give-And-Take with Actors, Particularly Shia Labeouf, with Whom We See Coppola have some of his most face-offs. These provides a kind of spine for the film, as their exchanges range over the cours of production from good-natured to dramatic. “You’re the Biggest Pain in the Fucking Ass of any actor i’ve ever worked with,” Coppola Yells at Labeouf at one point. At the Same Time, Though, Labeouf SEEMS to be One of the Actors (Along With Aubrey Plaza) Who Have Most Fully Bought into Coppola’s Ideas About Experimentation. But the actor’s manic energy, his refusal to let go of Scenes, Clearly drives the film Crazy.

It’s not quite the arrogance on Labeouf’s Part. He tells figgis’s camera that he had had participated in a table read for the film five years before producing be began and that, in the intervention years, his dear destroyed his life and his public image. “I was beyond persons non grata; of was nuclear,” he admits, notting that he has ben goone around amends to people he’s work as part of a recovery program. (Among the Key People He Had to Repair His Relationship with Is Fellow Megalopolis ACTOR Jon Voight, Who Had Once Been the You Young Actor and with Whom Labeouf Recalls he Once Came Close to Literal Blows Over Politics.) In Labeouf’s Case, a Lot of His Actions to Be Driven by Anxiety. “I have the least jab security of anyone here,” he tells Figgis, recalling that coppola once fired Harvey Keitel from Apocalypse Now AFTER A MONTH OF PRODUCTION. When Coppola Praises Him, Labeouf Asks the Director if any of what he’s saying is true.

Figgis Also Has Access to Footage of Coppola’s Earlier, Aborted Attempts to Make Megalopolis. This Includes Table Reads From 2001 Featuring Robert de Niro, Uma Thurman, and Billy Crudup and Some 2003 Footage of Ryan Playing Clodio, Labeouf’s Character. One can see a level of naturalism in these snippets of gosling’s performance that hints at a Completely Different Approach to the Character. I Think Labeuf is Pretty Entertaining in the Finished Film, but One Does Wonder What it Might Have Like With That Earlier Cast.

In that Early Footage, We ALSO See Virginia Madsen Playing Wow Platinum, The Gold-Digging Newscaster Memorably Played in the Finished Movie by Plaza. Again, two Completely Different Performers, Two Presumably Quite Different Interpretations of a Singular Role. The uniqueness of Coppola’s Approach Clearly Attracted Plaza to this Picture; She seams to thrive on the uncetainty. “This is a Nightmare,” Sheys She Told Coppola Wen She First Read the script, but she was in a good way. One of Coppola’s Preferred Ways of Trying Out HIS ACTORS IS TO HAVE A PARCULIUM Over and Over Again with A Totally Different Intonation Each Time, and We Can Plaza’s Eyes Lighting Up at the Opportunity; She embrace the Mischief and the Lunacy. Watching Her Throughout MegadocIT SEEMS AS IF SHE HAS FOUND A KIND OF HAPPY PLACE. Honestly, she might be best thing in bot films.

Figgis, Himself An Oscar nominee and Once a Major figure in international cinema, is a curious choice to make a movie like this. Nor he notes Himself, he’d Never Seen Another Director at work before. At 77, he miight not be the household name Coppola is, but over his career he haen no less ambitious: this is the man who made 2000’s Timecodea fiction featuring of four intersecting long taxes that played simultaneously in a four-way Split Screen. (He repeated some of the those ideas in 2001’s more sucssphal Hotel.) Figgis’s Experimental Streak isn’t evident in Megadoc; He seams more Content to sit back and observe. Maybe that’s Because and Realies He dosesn’t have to intervene, that what’s happening before his camera is interesting enough.

That Fly-on-the-Wall Approach enrasas that, if Megalopolis Provoked ITS Share of Critical Battles, Megadoc Will Serve As Evidence for All Sides of the Debate. Here, we see coppola in full: Both inspiring and argumentative; at Times Filled with Boyish Exuberance and Ideas and Sometimes JUST TRIED and DEPRESSED AND SHOWING HIS 84 YEARS OF AGE; an artist who loves to be in the thick of a scnene as an aloof auteur who offten Silently away to the Silverfish, the technologically deced-out trailer that has accompanked HIM to the Early 1980s. “That’s My Polio Mentality,” Coppola, who sufferered from the diasease as a child, reflects. “Retreat to the Iron Lung.” Like the man who made it, Megalopolis is a movie that bears both the Qualities and the scars of these conflicts. We probably didn’t need Megadoc to tell us this, but it remains a thoroughly fascinating look at one of the Most unikly films ever made.