Francis Ford Coppola: ‘Hollywood doesn’t want me any more’

No studio would back the Godfather director’s Megalopolis, so he used his own money, cast ‘cancelled’ stars – and leapt into the unknown

Talking in the cinema – for some, it’s a mild irritant; for others, an absolute no-no. For Francis Ford Coppola, it might be the future.
He had an idea, he explains, for an unconventional scene in the middle of Megalopolis, his decades-in-the-making utopian epic. It would have occurred shortly after a satellite crashes into the city of New Rome: a corrupted, crumbling composite of the ancient imperial capital and ­present-day New York.
After the disaster, the screen would have cut to black and the house lights raised halfway, at which point an usher would scurry in front of the screen with a microphone and address the audience. “And here,” he says, in a fruity ­Italian-American rumble, “was where it got exciting.”
At 85, you might think Coppola would be a serene elder statesman of cinema. He is, after all, the ­director of some of the past half-century’s most celebrated classics, from the Godfather trilogy to ­Apocalypse Now. But to hear him talk about his outlandish latest film only reaffirms him as the maverick he always was: the last of the old Hollywood buccaneers.
He has hopped onto Zoom from the Toronto International Film ­Festival, where Megalopolis had its North American premiere ­earlier this week. (Back in May, its world premiere was held at Cannes, where critics treated it to the most ­varied verdicts of my dozen years covering the festival – from masterpiece to omnishambles, and every shade in between.)
The connection is laptop-to-­laptop; the location, an anonymous hotel room. But his conversational manner – sparkling, serpentine, tack-sharp – makes our exchange feel as if it’s happening over an upturned barrel outside a Sicilian taverna, with a second bottle of Etna Rosso mellowing in the carafe.
Anyway: the exciting bit. While preparing to shoot Megalopolis in 2021, Coppola had asked ­Amazon to develop a custom version of its Alexa voice-recognition software, to be housed in a special unit in select ­cinemas. Midway through the film, the audience would be invited to put a question about the disaster they’d just witnessed to the lead character, a visionary architect played by Adam Driver – and the Alexa unit would instruct the cinema’s projector to screen the most relevant response from a pre-filmed selection.
“Imagine!” Coppola beams. “You could see Megalopolis five times in its opening week and it would be different each time! It would have been the future of the movies and ancient theatre rolled into one!”
Yes, but could it ever have worked? Alas, we shall never know: in 2022, Alexa’s losses became unsustainable, and ­Amazon laid off thousands of employees, the unit that was developing the technology for Megalopolis among them. In despair, Coppola was ready to ditch the stunt entirely, but Driver suggested an alternative: perhaps one of his filmed responses could still be included in the final cut, and a cinema usher, rather than the audience, could address the pre-agreed question to the screen? So, at festival screenings of Megalopolis – and in some cinemas for its UK release later this month – for a few mad, discombobulating moments, the film spills off screen and into the world.
“In its final form, it is such a small thing,” Coppola says. “But everyone who sees it is amazed that it’s actually there.” That amazement should extend to Megalopolis more broadly, which, over the past 40 years, had accrued a mythic status as one of the great never-made films.
Inspiration first struck when ­Coppola was mulling Roman epics in the late 1970s, between the releases of The Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now. He found himself drawn to a political conspiracy of 63 BC, in which the senator Catiline hatched a bloody and ultimately thwarted plot to whip up the empire’s poor and disenfranchised and overthrow the Senate. Then came the twist – not unlike the one that led Coppola and his co-writer John Milius in the late 1960s to relocate Joseph Conrad’s 19th-century novel of colonial Africa, Heart of Darkness, to contemporary war-torn Vietnam. “I suddenly realised: what’s ancient Rome today?” he says. “It’s America.”
As time passed, the notion of the United States as a capsizing empire only became more reso­nant. ­(Coppola points out that his gift as a filmmaker has always been foresight: only months after filming wrapped on his wire-­tapping thriller The Conversation, the Watergate scandal broke in the American press.) But in the intervening years, the project continually stalled – and after the release of his 1997 courtroom thriller The Rainmaker, an increasingly jaded Coppola took a self-imposed “extended sabbatical”, to reflect on his method and style, and purge his frustrations with Hollywood.
The system had happily grown fat on his hits: the first two Godfather films helped save Paramount; the box office for Bram Stoker’s Dracula rivalled Batman Returns. But it had also long resented his breezy rejection of its customs and methods, right from his early defiance of the union rules, which in the 1960s had the studios in a straitjacket.
Today, the same goes. No ­studio would fund Megalopolis, so ­Coppola drummed up its $120 ­million budget himself by selling off much of his thriving Californian wine empire (while retaining the Inglewood estate in the Napa Valley, which he bought in 1975 with the proceeds from The Godfather).
Ergo, the resentment still simmers. Shortly before Megalopolis’s premiere at Cannes, articles appeared in Variety and the Guardian featuring anonymous grumblings about chaos on set – and potentially more damaging claims, also anonymous, that Coppola had made inappropriate physical contact with a number of female extras during the filming of a nightclub scene.
In supposed bombshell video evidence, he could be seen talking to two actresses, cordially embracing a third, and briefly dancing with a fourth – who later posted on social media that Coppola had done “nothing to make me or for that matter anyone on set feel uncomfortable,” and clarified the waltz was at her instigation. “He was nothing but professional, a gentleman, he was like this cute Italian grandfather, running around the set,” she added. 
Yet Variety then found that third actress, who told the magazine she had been “in shock” at Coppola’s conduct, and is now suing him and others for damages. Two days after our interview, it got messier still. Coppola himself (who had already denied he had shown any “disrespect” to the women) is now suing Variety for libel, over alleged “false and defamatory statements” in the article, the accompanying video, and the “malice” the outlet allegedly showed towards him. Strong word – but to an onlooker, the tone of their coverage was odd: between the lines you sensed a flinty determination to make something, anything, stick.
“You know, I always felt like a ­creation of Hollywood,” Coppola ventures. “I went there in pursuit of all these beautiful things they were making. I was in awe of the place. I got to work for Roger Corman; I got to meet Vincent Price. Now, Hollywood doesn’t want me any more. They’re the parents that disown the unruly child – they created me, now they don’t want me. I understand it, but it still hurts my feelings. I accept it, but I also can’t.”
As for the reported chaos during Megalopolis’s production: “In Hollywood, the word chaotic only means ‘not what we’re used to’,” he snorts. “What the studios do today is make Coca-Cola. They know there’s a good chance they’ll make money, providing the flavour stays the same. But art is chaotic. When it’s efficient, something’s going wrong.”
Assembling the film’s cast would probably have been trickier under a studio’s eye. It includes two notably “cancelled” talents, both of whom play veiled Trumpian analogues. There’s New Rome’s golden-coiffed banking mogul Crassus – played by Jon Voight, one of Hollywood’s rare out-and-proud Trump supporters. “Art is above politics – or, at least, it should be,” Coppola shrugs. “My cast are all going to be voting in different directions in the coming election, and I love every last one of them.”
The second, playing sybarite-turned-demagogue Clodio, is the famously volatile Shia LaBeouf, who was either fired from or, as he strongly maintains, quit the recent thriller Don’t Worry Darling over what its director Olivia Wilde described as his “combative energy” on set. (LaBeouf is also due in court next month over domestic abuse claims made by two ex-girlfriends, including the singer FKA Twigs: LaBeouf denies the allegations.)
“Shia has had problems,” Coppola concedes. “He’s so talented, but he’s had a string of problems. And on set, he does create tremendous conflict. His method was so infuriating and illogical, it had me pulling my hair out. But I think he’s getting the set so charged with electricity that his reactions will have the ring of pure truth. Dennis Hopper did something similar on Apocalypse Now. He would be so nutty that even Brando wanted to throw bananas at him.”
Does he ever feel too old to still be weathering this stuff? He exhales. “Let’s say there’s an actor who can only do beautiful work if you hit him on the head with a monkey wrench. Do you do it?” I must look uncertain. “Of course you do it!” he roars. “The process is painful, but the outcome makes it worth it.”
Speaking of worthwhile outcomes, what of his latest film’s effect on his legacy? Megalopolis is transfixingly wild and ambitious – but also deeply divisive, as its festival outings have shown. “Legacy is weather,” he shrugs. “One minute you’re important, the next you’re forgotten, then you’re resurrected half a century after that. The prize I’m after isn’t awards or money. It’s when younger film­makers who made something beautiful say ‘I wanted to make my film because I saw one of yours.’ My God, what a thing to be a part of that continuum.”
He warms to his theme. “Look at Jacques Tati. A brilliant French filmmaker, total genius, who took everything he had and borrowed money on top, so he could make the film no one wanted him to make. And it was a big flop. He lost everything. But that film was Playtime.” (Almost 60 years on, Tati’s comedy regularly features on critics’ lists of the greatest films ever made.) “I mean,” Coppola laughs, “there’s no better movie. When you jump into the unknown, you prove you are free.”
Another such bound lies directly ahead. Though Megalopolis has the air of a closing artistic statement, Coppola already has his next film ready to shoot. Titled Glimpses of the Moon, it’s a loose adaptation of a 1922 Edith Wharton novel, “with strong dance and musical elements”, he explains. “I’ve turned it into a very odd confection.”
He hopes to shoot it in the UK and Europe – “funded the conventional way, with the help of national subsidies, because I’m all borrowed out” – after a planned move to Putney, in southwest London. In April, Coppola lost his wife of 61 years, the documentarian Eleanor Coppola. “And now whenever I’m in Napa, I miss her every day. So I want to live in London now, because it’s the one place I don’t have any memories of ever being with her.”
The thing he’s looking forward to most is figuring out how to make this new film as he goes along: the old buccaneer casting off one more time. “The future of ­cinema is something we can only dream and wonder about,” he says. “And we can’t have the slightest inkling as to what it will be. 
“But I will tell you this,” he adds, a finger raised. “The movies your great-grandchildren are going to make will be extraordinary.”
Megalopolis is out on Sept 27