After over 40 years of development and nearly $120 million in self-financing, Francis Ford Coppola’s hugely ambitious Megalopolis has unveiled a tantalizing first look ahead of its impending world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The image reveals stars Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel at the center of the legendary director’s original modern-day Roman epic, which envisions the clashing ideologies behind the reconstruction of a fallen American metropolis.
In the striking first-look photo from Vanity Fair, Driver portrays an idealistic architect named Cesar Catilina who dreams of rebuilding the crumbling New York City-inspired locale into a grander utopian society known as New Rome. Flanking him is Emmanuel as Julia Cicero, the socialite daughter of the city’s corrupt mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), whose own sinister ambitions threaten Catilina’s noble vision.
“Megalopolis is structured as a Roman epic fable set in an imagined modern America,” describes the publication. “To rebuild New Rome, Julia Cicero ultimately comes between a Cesar Catilina she falls in love with and Frank Cicero whom she remains loyal to as her father, as the two men battle with competing visions.”
This decades-spanning creative odyssey represents Coppola’s most painstakingly crafted, self-financed passion project to date. The 83-year-old auteur revealed to Vanity Fair that the story’s origins date back to 1983, when he began curating a “scrapbook of things I found interesting for some future screenplay.”
After years of developing the premise piecemeal alongside his other filmmaking efforts, Coppola finally committed to writing what would become Megalopolis over the last 12 years. “I must have rewritten it 300 times, hoping each rewrite would improve it, if only a half percent better,” he confessed.
With no studio willing to gamble on his wildly ambitious $120 million vision, Coppola took the audacious step of partially self-funding Megalopolis by selling off a massive chunk of his successful wine business and estate. This uncompromising commitment is evident in the epic’s staggering cast and scope.
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In addition to Driver, Emmanuel and Esposito’s leading roles, the starry ensemble includes Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire and Jason Schwartzman among many others.
While plot specifics remain tightly under wraps, the Cannes-bound film seems to parallel Coppola’s own battles to realize his singular artistic ambition. Just as Catilina and Cicero grapple over radically divergent philosophies for New Rome’s future, so too did the director wrestle between commercial realities and an uncompromising creative vision that consumed over half his life.
After screening for potential buyers in March, including heads of major studios, Megalopolis remains on the hunt for distribution. But the film’s star-studded Cannes debut on May 17 virtually guarantees audiences will finally get an enthralling look at one of cinema’s greatest visionary crowning achievements – a literal and figurative civilizational epic over 40 years in the making.
