Now that Francis Ford Coppola has unveiled his long-in-the-works epic Megalopolis to buyers and the industry, we’re just a few weeks away from its official premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. As he hopefully secures U.S. distribution soon, the first look has finally arrived.
Featuring Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel towering above the metropolis, the first image comes courtesy from Vanity Fair, who also share a few new quotes from Coppola himself. “My first goal always is to make a film with all my heart, so I began to realize it would be about love and loyalty in every aspect of human life,” said the director. “Megalopolis echoed these sentiments, in which love was expressed in almost crystalline complexity, our planet in danger and our human family almost in an act of suicide, until becoming a very optimistic film that has faith in the human being to possess the genius to heal any problem put before us.”
“I believe in America,” he adds, nodding to The Godfather. “Our founders borrowed a constitution, Roman law, and senate for their revolutionary government without a king. American history could neither have taken place nor succeeded without classical learning to guide it.”
He continues, “I wouldn’t have been able to make it without standing as I do on the shoulders of G.B. Shaw, Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham, Mill, Dickens, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Fournier, Morris, Carlyle, Ruskin, Butler, and Wells all rolled into one; with Euripides, Thomas More, Moliere, Pirandello, Shakespeare, Beaumarchais, Swift, Kubrick, Murnau, Goethe, Plato, Aeschylus, Spinoza, Durrell, Ibsen, Abel Gance, Fellini, Visconti, Bergman, Bergson, Hesse, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Cao Xueqin, Mizoguchi, Tolstoy, McCullough, Moses, and the prophets all thrown in.”
Also starring Giancarlo Esposito, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, and more, here’s the synopsis: “The destruction of a New York City-like metropolis after an accident brings clashing visions of the future. On one side is an ambitious architectural idealist Cesar (Adam Driver). On the other is his sworn enemy, city Mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). The debate becomes whether to embrace the future and build a utopia with renewable materials, or take a business-as-usual rebuild strategy, replete with corruption and power brokering. In between their struggle is the mayor’s socialite daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), a restless young woman who grew up around power and is looking for meaning in her life.”
See the first look below.
