Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ was a 40 year passion project, ’Has this guy ever made a movie before?’

Francis Ford Coppola returns to cinema with a three hour long epic, 'Megalopolis'. (Image via X)

‘Megalopolis’ is the highly anticipated film which marks the return of one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, Francis Ford Coppola.

The first trailer for the film released a few days ago and it oozes with decadence and passion and innovation and everything nice.

The film has a diverse and studded ensemble cast with Adam Driver as the lead, joined with Shia Labeouf, Grace VanderWaal, Aubrey Plaza, Nathalie Emmanuel, Chloe Fineman, etc.

The film is set to make its debut at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival in just two days (17 May).

Coppola has been trying to make this sci-fi epic since 4 decades, during which the film has lived multiple lives through a lot of rewrites and delays. He has given the film his all. Coppola sold part of his winery estate to fund the movie when everyone else had given up on it.

Richard Biggs, a sound designer, said, “In the early 80s he talked about it a lot. At one point it was going to be staged, sort of like Wagner’s Ring cycle in Bayreuth: the film was going to be screened over four nights. And audiences would come and they would book themselves into a hotel and see this thing in a gigantic outdoor purpose-built theatre.”

As exciting as the film is, the set stories are a lot of fun too.

There are reports of Coppola smoking marijuana for hours without any structured shoot plan.

A crew member anonymously spoke to the Guardian, “He would often show up in the mornings before these big sequences and because no plan had been put in place, and because he wouldn’t allow his collaborators to put a plan in place, he would often just sit in his trailer for hours on end, wouldn’t talk to anybody, was often smoking marijuana … And hours and hours would go by without anything being filmed.”

Another crew member said, “This sounds crazy to say, but there were times when we were all standing around going, ‘Has this guy ever made a movie before?’”