I, Coppola

“Beware of the cliché, the predictable”: that’s one of the notes about storytelling that Francis Ford Coppola keeps posted where he works, as he reports in his book Live Cinema and Its Techniques.¹ Watching Megalopolis—Coppola’s first film in thirteen years, funded with over $100 million of his own money—I realized that it should be two rules, not one. Cliché and predictable are not, in fact, synonyms.

Megalopolis is one of the least predictable films ever made, a disorienting jumble of sci-fi, romance, political drama, historical epic, body horror, musical, satire, surrealism, magical realism, filmed theater, illustrated lecture, and inspirational after-school special. Scenes veer from stagy speeches to slapstick violence, hallucinatory dance numbers to raunchy sex to flashy special effects. Baffling details flicker by—a tree stump in the shape of a swastika, a sudden murder with a tiny bow and arrow, repeated incest jokes—not only without explanation but often without acknowledgment. A character might set off on a crucial mission only to disappear, and then be summarily killed in a flashback. A ludicrous plot twist might be interrupted by a moment of startling beauty. The protagonist, Cesar, played by Adam Driver, can stop time—an ability given increasing symbolic weight but no elaboration, and which he never puts to any use at all.

And yet, somehow, amid or perhaps beneath the chaos, the film is constructed almost entirely from clichés. Its hero is a wild playboy who is also a moody genius with a tragic, secret past; he has fabulous wealth, a loyal majordomo/father figure, a confusing amount of political power (it makes more sense if you have read the back of The Power Broker, less if you have read the book), a mother who is never satisfied, and a Nobel Prize. He wants to remake his city—how is never exactly clear, though it involves more parks, and perhaps a new form of moving sidewalk—but is resisted by the elite, who are corrupt or depraved or both: the depraved ones do cocaine in spacious, well-lit nightclubs, and the corrupt skulk around in dark fedoras. The mayor, Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), is corrupt not in any particular actions but as a basic feature, the way some people are tall or left-handed. He has a pragmatic fixer named, the credits tell us, “Nush ‘the Fixer’ Berman,” as well as a beautiful, pure-hearted daughter, who falls in love with the hero and, slowly but surely, wins her father over to the hero’s cause.

America is a decadent empire—like Rome, which is why the film’s version of New York is renamed New Rome, and why some (but not all) of the characters have Roman names and occasionally take part in Roman-ish activities. Here we encounter a strange phenomenon: a set of symbols so obvious they obscure the things they symbolize. The high and the low of New Rome gather in a coliseum to watch gladiators wrestle: What does this tell us about life in the nonfictional America, where actors, pop stars, and Donald Trump can be found cageside at UFC fights, while millions watch from home? (In case we’d forgotten the phrase “bread and circuses,” New Rome’s fights and chariot races are followed by a literal circus.) The festivities also include a set of “Vestal Virgins,” led by a singer named Vesta who is celebrated simultaneously for her sex appeal and her ostentatious chastity, and who later pivots to a bad-girl image after a scandal—which would all be quite illuminating, perhaps, if Britney Spears or Miley Cyrus had never existed.

The film’s setting, too, is a chaotic rearrangement of the deeply familiar: not just ancient Rome added onto New York, but a version of New York that seems to exist simultaneously in the 1950s, 1980s, and 2020s. It’s a city of overcoats and flash drives, deep fakes and dusty municipal archives—all, one assumes, to indicate the timelessness of this “fable,” as the opening credits declare it. It is a confounding thing to watch.

In his notes about Fountain City—the 1,500-page novel, also about a visionary attempting to create a new urban utopia, that he worked on for years before finally abandoning—Michael Chabon uses the term draftitis to explain some of the book’s deficiencies. It “is a condition seen in manuscripts that have been rewritten several times,” he explains, especially “in passages where the writer has changed his or her mind,” a problem that “plagued me most often in my work as a screenwriter.” The problems might seem superficial, but they are “often a symptom of a more serious condition, namely authorial alienation.”

That alienation seems to afflict much of Megalopolis. Coppola has, by his own account, been gathering material for the project for over forty years, and “must have rewritten it 300 times.” Much of the original research and conception was done in the 1980s, but Coppola’s first serious attempt to make it wasn’t until 2001; the film was well into preproduction when the September 11 attacks happened, putting it on hold again. (One plot point, strangely rushed past despite its importance, involves an old Soviet satellite plummeting from space and destroying a chunk of lower Manhattan.) It is hard not to think of this span of time while you watch, as characters, tones, and themes drift in and out erratically, like several different movies superimposed on one another. Even the grandest moments of spectacle and drama—a love scene on girders suspended above a glowing city, a political conspiracy breaking out into mob violence—come through as thin and muffled, as if we were watching them from far away.

Part of this is stylistic. In the decades since Coppola’s run of masterpieces in the 1970s—The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now—he has been looking for a way to make an entirely different sort of movie. “There are any number of styles one is able to choose in the movie business,” he complains in Live Cinema, “as long as it’s realism.” He means that word quite broadly, it seems, to include any film based around naturalistic lighting, lifelike sets, or location shooting. (There are plenty of definitions, after all, that would exclude all four of his most famous films: a pair of romanticized gangster epics, a paranoid thriller, and a surreal war movie.) Some of the work-for-hire he produced after he went bankrupt in the 1980s was necessarily in the traditional Hollywood mode, but the films on which he has had the most freedom have been marked by flamboyant artificiality: the glowing soundstage pseudo-Vegas of One from the Heart (1981), the anachronistic in-camera special effects of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), the fairytale dreamscapes of Twixt (2011).

In his recent book The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story—a partial biography, mainly focused on the shooting of Apocalypse Now and One from the Heart, with the production of Megalopolis acting as a frame—Sam Wasson explains this shift as a reaction to the chaos of Apocalypse Now.² In that film, Wasson writes, Coppola “had had a hard time getting real life to look the way he wanted it to look.” (A droll understatement, for a location shoot that went months over schedule and millions over budget, killed a crew member and hospitalized its lead actor, and drove Coppola into near-breakdown and marital estrangement.) “Shooting at a studio,” as he did for One from the Heart, “it was easier to control all the elements of moviemaking—color, light, scenery, actors—the way a painter has to control every brushstroke on his canvas.” Or, perhaps, the way Cesar yearns to control his city. Megalopolis, likewise, was shot primarily on soundstages, and makes extensive use of digital backdrops. Any hint of the real world is carefully excluded, in favor of a glowing, golden-hued artificiality, otherworldly and airless in equal measure. Its backgrounds are never more than that, flat and distant from the actors no matter how many inventive flourishes are packed into them.

Among other things, Wasson’s book offers a reminder of how intertwined Coppola’s career has been with that of George Lucas. Lucas’s very first job in Hollywood was as an assistant on Coppola’s 1968 musical, Finian’s Rainbow, and Coppola produced Lucas’s first two feature films, THX 1138 (1971) and American Graffiti (1973). They shared collaborators, most notably the editor and sound designer Walter Murch, and scripts (Lucas was at one point meant to direct Apocalypse Now). And both, as they became successful, attempted to change how movies were made: not just “pursuing similar if not identical goals in the advancement of post-production technology”—Coppola was a pioneer of electronic editing and quadrophonic sound mixing, as Lucas was of special effects—but creating their own alternatives to the studio system. Lucasfilm was a more staid, less artistically radical (and less financially reckless) endeavor than Coppola’s American Zoetrope, yet “we both have the same goals,” Lucas declared. “We both have the same ideas and we both have the same ambitions.”

In fact, the closest thing there is to a precedent for Megalopolis is Lucas’s own high-budget passion project: the Star Wars prequels. They share with Coppola’s film a stultifying reliance on digital backgrounds. They share, too, a discordant mix of acting styles, as each performer struggles in their own way to deliver wooden, ridiculous dialogue—alongside Hayden Christensen’s “I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere,” we now have Driver’s “Go back to the cluuub.” In both, the filmmaker was insulated, through sheer monetary abundance, from any and all interference, untethered from corporate dictates and collaborative compromise. But the Star Wars prequels are still grounded in a familiar fictional setting and guided by Lucas’s instincts as a showman—they are meant above all to entertain. Megalopolis is after something else, something more ambitious and inward.

Wasson describes Coppola approaching filmmaking from the beginning of his career as a personal “rite of passage…each [project] lived by Coppola in tandem with his creation.” But most of his earlier works started with other people’s ideas: the Godfather films with Mario Puzo’s novel, Apocalypse Now and One from the Heart with preexisting scripts, not to mention the various hired-gun projects that followed. Someone else’s vision was always there for Coppola to struggle with and build on, however much he eventually made it his own.

His films this century—three small-scale features, which he has said “were meant to teach me what making movies really was,” and now Megalopolis—are more directly personal. Each contains at least some aspect drawn straight from his own life. The very first line of 2007’s Youth Without Youth (based on a novel by Mircea Eliade, his only recent film not a wholly original script) speaks to its director’s fears: “Sometimes,” the elderly protagonist declares, “I admit to myself that it’s possible I will never be able to finish my life’s work.” Much of the dramatic situation of Tetro (2009)—a younger brother estranged, as Coppola was, from the older brother he reveres, both siblings oppressed by an arrogant composer father much like the Coppolas’—matches his biography, right down to the father’s declaration that the family has room for only one genius, him. The climax of Twixt comes with a flashback to the death of the protagonist’s child in a boating accident, which is how Coppola’s eldest son was killed.

In Megalopolis, Cesar’s airy penthouse office, where he dreams up his vision for a new city, seems modeled after the one on top of the Sentinel Building in San Francisco that Coppola had renovated after the success of The Godfather—a room “so beautiful…Coppola would tell [the designer] he wouldn’t let anyone photograph it,” Wasson reports. And Cesar’s Renaissance man workshop full of excited young people expresses Coppola’s dreams for American Zoetrope, a place where “everybody—all the filmmakers—could do whatever they wanted,” and where schoolchildren were brought in to learn film production firsthand. Even minor details turn out to be plucked from autobiography, like a brief appearance by two young reporters from The Dingbat News—which is the name of the schoolgirl newsletter Sofia Coppola and her friends wrote on the Zoetrope lot in the early 1980s.

And yet, perversely, as his work has become more personal, at times nakedly autobiographical, it has also become less affecting. These moments, which should be moving or even heartbreaking, are instead melodramatic, campy, or just confusing. It is as if the deeper he has gone into his own experiences and emotions, the further he has left the rest of us behind. He’s down there somewhere; we can hear his voice, drifting up in fragments.

One word that comes through quite clearly is “ideas.” That, we have repeatedly been told, is what Megalopolis is really about. Coppola has spoken about all the books he drew from while working on it—Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, David Graeber’s Debt, Bullshit Jobs, and The Dawn of Everything, along with “everything I had ever read or learned about.” Mayor Cicero and Cesar are self-evidently meant to represent ideas of how to approach urban life, and life in general: the worldly and cynical (“People don’t need dreams, people need help now”) versus the idealistic (“Don’t let the now destroy the forever”), with the deck stacked heavily in favor of the latter. 

The ideas stop there. There is little discussion about how cities actually work, or could work; about how societies change, or might be changed; about history or government or anything else. Cesar’s utopian vision seems to consist of a few stray quotes from Shakespeare and Marcus Aurelius, a vague notion that rooms could change along with their inhabitants, and an affection for parks. His grand Megalopolis project, revealed at the end of the film, looks like a slightly vegetal remix of the Vessel, from New York’s Hudson Yards—a hideous tourist trap that has been repeatedly shut down after people killed themselves by jumping off it.

If you stay for the credits, you might notice one for an “architectural and scientific advisor”: Neri Oxman, the designer and former MIT professor who, after Business Insider accused her of plagiarism this past January, was vigorously defended by her husband, the billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. Her “Man-Nahāta” project—a set of studies of the possible future of New York City, including a group of circular models exhibited at SFMOMA in 2022, commissioned by Coppola though essentially absent from the film—imagines the city overrun, in the coming centuries, not just by climate change but by great waves of jargon: “the city undergoes time-based decomposition, its organic substances breaking down into megalithic architectural elements.” Perusing the website of Oxman, the design firm she launched this fall, is almost as baffling as watching Megalopolis, as genuine environmental concerns disappear into the fog of sentences like “a generative design process that unites human-centric cultural typologies with Nature-centric needs to maximize ecological thriving.”

One of the most discussed scenes in the film is a brief press conference Cesar holds, around the midpoint. At a few screenings, this moment involved a sudden outbreak of live performance: someone would emerge from the audience and ask a prewritten question into a microphone, to which Cesar would respond onscreen. Coppola’s original plan was to use a version of Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant to allow the actual audience to shout out questions, with the most relevant of several clips of Cesar answering then played in response—a plan that was abandoned after a wave of Amazon layoffs included the engineers who were working with Coppola.

It’s an audacious idea, but the most shocking thing about this scene is how Cesar actually responds, no matter his questioner. “Is this society,” he asks, “is this way we’re living, the only one that’s available to us? And when we ask these questions, when there’s a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.” That, basically, is the level of thought this film provides. We get repeated gestures in the direction of ideas, or rather Ideas, restatements of the need for discussion, but no actual discussion—no details, no complications, no development. At some point over the years, Coppola seems to have lost touch not only with who these characters are and what kind of world they exist in, but with why any of this mattered in the first place.

This is one of the most peculiar things about Megalopolis: it is so unusual, so packed with incident, and so clearly of such vast importance to its creator, yet it feels so empty. Sometime later, Cesar repeats himself: “We are in need of a great debate about the future!” he announces in the film’s finale, and it is never clearer that Coppola is speaking through him to us. But all he’s saying is that someone should say something.

Megalopolis might, in the end, be most intelligible not as an analysis but as a symptom. In the story of Cesar the misunderstood genius, the dictatorial apostle of dialogue, we can see glimpses of a very particular understanding of the world. This is what it looks like to a self-confident man of a certain sort: someone who has been rich and famous for over half his life, someone who is convinced of his own benevolence, who still sees himself as an outsider, who says things like “What I do is create chaos and then try to control it.” (It is true that Coppola went bankrupt in the middle of his career, but there are bankruptcies and there are bankruptcies, as Trump has taught us. Coppola’s was not the kind where you lose your health care or end up homeless, but the kind where you have to direct The Rainmaker.) This is evidently what he worries about and how he thinks things work. This is the world—this is us—seen from the top of the tower.

It is a world, for instance, in which a few chosen people—artists, who are the same as scientists—can achieve almost anything, as long as they have a beautiful woman by their side to inspire them, and to run home and make dinner. (She may still be a professional subordinate, if it’s early in the relationship.) It’s a world in which true change is decided by a couple of men—rich, powerful, and probably related to each other—arguing across a very expensive table. A world in which democracy is, on those rare occasions when one is forced to acknowledge it, never anything more than a mob of idiots, manipulated by a few degenerates. A world in which powerful oratory—powerful enough, on one occasion, to completely subdue that mob—involves reciting Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy in its entirety, and asking questions like “What is time?”

There are times when Megalopolis feels like it should be set not in New York, or New Rome, but in Silicon Valley. Cesar’s gleaming vision of the future has a distinct air of the tech campus. His vague, unbounded genius seems an emanation from the ego of a very well-funded founder, the kind of man who employs so many scientists and engineers he starts to think he is both. At other times, the movie feels set in a hazy memory of New York, a storybook city of animate statues and sneering villains, waiting for a caring father to set things right.

It is also a world in which there is nothing more dangerous than a sexy second wife. This is a subject on which the film becomes unusually coherent: the subplot in which the financial reporter Wow Platinum seduces and manipulates the rich, elderly banker Crassus and uses his wealth for her own spiteful ends is the most forceful and sustained section of the story. That Aubrey Plaza’s writhing, maniacal performance as Wow is delightful does not change what a tired, misogynistic caricature she is, a barely human creature of lust and viciousness. She is also the only major character who is killed, and quite brutally.

One might notice, as well, that this is a world in which sex scandals turn out to be bullshit—just another speed bump thrown up by the haters. When Cesar’s enemies accuse him of statutory rape, the charges are doubly dismissed: not only was the sex tape a deep fake, but the girl was lying about her age and was actually in her twenties all along.

Here we might remember a few things: that the index to Wasson’s book has entries under “Coppola, Francis Ford, infidelity of,” including an account of a long-term relationship in the 1970s with an assistant; that he has declared that he intentionally cast “canceled” actors in Megalopolis, such as Jon Voight and Shia LaBeouf, to avoid it being “deemed some woke Hollywood production”; and that he has been accused by an extra of sexual harassment on the set of the film—which he has vigorously denied, and over which he has since sued Variety, which reported the allegations, for $15 million. Or perhaps a few of us might remember something he said back in 2006, when asked about Victor Salva, a filmmaker he supported professionally both before and after Salva was convicted of molesting a child actor while filming his first feature, Clownhouse (1989). “You have to remember,” Coppola told a reporter, “while this was a tragedy, that the difference in age between Victor and the boy was very small—Victor was practically a child himself.” Salva was twenty-nine years old at the time of the crime, his victim twelve.

There may, in the end, be a benefit to Megalopolis’s chronic draftitis. With its long and messy gestation, it unintentionally tracks some of the most destructive changes of the past half-century: the smooth slide of countercultural idealism into technocratic arrogance, the ascent of the very rich into a cuckooland of mushy pseudo-thought and thin-skinned vindictiveness, the decay of Great Man hero worship into misogynistic backlash. Watching this film is a very effective—and very useful—reminder of how inimical extreme wealth is to democratic thinking, to clear thinking in general, and to basic human sympathy.

“If I could leave you with one thought after you see my new film,” Coppola wrote in a statement that accompanied early screenings of Megalopolis, “it would be this: Our founders borrowed a Constitution, Roman Law, and Senate for their revolutionary government without a king, so American History could neither have taken place nor succeed as it did without classical learning to guide it.” For better or for worse, I doubt a single member of its audience has left the theater with that in mind. The more sympathetic might be thinking of the pathos of an octogenarian director devoting his millions to a story about a man who can stop time. Others might be laughing at the headline, briefly glimpsed in a montage, declaring “TEEN PREGNANCY SKYROCKETS!” or wondering at the genuinely astonishing shot, late in the film, of a pregnant woman underwater who turns out to be an image painted onto human bodies, and changes when they move. Or they might be thinking of Wow, and wondering who the real Cesars will vote for on Tuesday.