Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis May Have Some Sci-Fi Amongst Its Many, Many Components

In his huge profession, Francis Ford Coppola has made masterpieces (Apocalypse Now, The Godfather and The Godfather Half II, The Dialog), cult classics (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Outsiders), and curious whatsits (The Godfather Half III, Peggy Sue Acquired Married). Which can Megalopolis be? Whereas the world waits to see the film he’s had on his thoughts for many years, the writer-director is giving followers just a few crumbs to go on.

In an announcement offered to Vainness Honest, together with a first-look picture you’ll be able to see within the journal’s X publish beneath, Coppola—who invested $120 million of his personal cash within the venture, and simply turned 85—gave some hope to sci-fi followers by noting Adam Driver’s character has the “energy to cease time.” That’s Driver, who performs an “idealistic architect and artist planning to rebuild a metropolis that has fallen to ruins” and Sport of Thrones’ Nathalie Emmanuel, who performs the daughter of the town’s corrupt mayor (Giancarlo Esposito) and who falls in love with Driver’s character, within the picture.

So we have now a dystopian metropolis, and a personality who can “cease time” (actually or metaphorically?), in addition to a forged that additionally consists of Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Jason Schwartzman, and others. In his assertion to Vainness Honest, Coppola outlined the influences he drew on within the 40-something years he was dreaming of creating Megalopolis, together with 1936 sci-fi traditional Issues to Come, tailored by H.G. Wells himself from his guide The Form of Issues to Come. “[It’s about building the world of tomorrow, and has always been with me, first as the ‘boy scientist’ I was and later as a filmmaker,” Coppola told the magazine.

He also refers to his movie as “a Roman epic set in modern America,” tying in both ancient history and more recent New York City moments, as wide-ranging as September 11 and “the antics of Studio 54.” He did that “so that everything in my story would be true and did happen either in modern New York or in ancient Rome. To that I added everything I had ever read or learned about.”

While we wonder what Megalopolis will be, here’s what Coppola said he hopes audiences will take away from it: “It’s my dream that Megalopolis will become a New Year’s Eve perennial favorite, with audiences discussing afterwards not their new diets or resolutions not to smoke, but rather this simple question: ‘Is the society in which we live the only one available to us?’”

Megalopolis will debut at the Cannes Film Festival next month; hopefully it’ll then make its way stateside for theaters and streaming.

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