Megalopolis is a Roman epic set in an imagined modern America. The City of New Rome must change, causing conflict between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare. Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.
In celebration of Megalopolis and the illustrious career of Francis Ford Coppola, The Koalition spoke to the director to learn more about the many themes of the movie, the inspiration behind Megalopolis, the forty-year journey of the movie, and more.
“First of all, I want to say you’re my cousin; we’re one family, and we’re all cousins, and we go back to the same two grandparents a long time ago, and not only are we one family, but we’re also a family of geniuses. [Therefore], there is no problem; the human being is not capable of coming up with a solution, for that is something I believe with all my heart.”
Megalopolis has been in the making for four decades, a subject of rumor and awe-inspirating fascination among movie enthusiasts. There wasn’t a corner in Hollywood where you wouldn’t hear someone mention a Coppola was working on a secret project about the classical Roman empire. Those rumors have finally become facts, and it is worthy; it is Coppola’s boldest and most gloriously beautiful to date. It blends the spectacle with tragedy and today’s turbulent political issues. A movie that audacious had to take years; he had to grow with the script, and the script had to find the right audience and time to be released.
“After I made the film John Grisham’s The Rainmaker, I decided to take four months—well, it was not four months, 14 years off—and just learn about being a student, experiment, and I wanted to learn more about how to work with actors because movies don’t give you a chance to rehearse. With actors, you have to steal it, and their idea of rehearsal is doing something that makes the film go faster, so it’ll cost less money. We know that if you could have your actors for even a week without the script, there’s a lot of work you can do, like improvisations or theater games or fun that’s basically playing together.”
“I believe the human being is most creative when they’re playing; that’s why they call it a play, especially with children. If you have children and you’re playing with children, that’s where you get all the creative ideas. So basically, I learned a lot about that and wanted to make Megalopolis 18 years ago, whenever it was. But then there was the September 11th tragedy, and I felt, ‘How am I going to make a movie about utopia and this joy of human beings being together in an environment where they had just knocked down [the towers], all those people are dying in Manhattan, and the beginning of Islamic terrorism?’ I tried to write my way out of it, and I couldn’t. Then I abandon it. Then years later I decided maybe enough time had gone by.”
“I have this one talent. My movies sometimes tell the future. When I made The Conversation, it was about eavesdropping, but seven, eight years later it was Watergate. I even made a film once about a woman who left her husband, whom she loved. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him; she didn’t want to be a wife. That was 12 years before the idea of women not wanting to be in domestic servitude. So many of my films sometimes tell the future.”
“I began to realize America was heading, just like Megalopolis, towards losing its republic because the senators like in Rome were making all the money and were more concerned with their own power than they were with taking care of the people. That was happening today in America—the same exact thing. I’m a grandfather; I’m a great-grandfather, and I really want there to be a world of hope afterwards. I have a great grandson, and I want us all as human beings to use our genius and make a paradise out of the earth that is so beautiful. I wanted to make a film filled with hope and joy that we were going to do that, and that’s what Megalopolis is.”
Adam Driver stars as an architect named Cesar Catilina who envisions a utopia. However, Franklyn Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito, is determined to keep the status quo as the mayor of “New Rome,” believing it’s better to help people now instead of building for a future that doesn’t exist. Just like the Roman Republic, society is plagued with greed, a crumbling city, and political division. The fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of another is a cautionary tale for our times.
“There’s a historian named Ibn Khaldun; he’s a Tunisian historian, and he’s the one who really wrote the classic cyclical thing that society goes in cycles but only for a certain time.” According to historian Ibn Khaldun, the rise and fall of sovereign powers is a cyclical process in which sovereign powers come into existence, get stronger, lose their strengths, and are conquered by other sovereign powers over time. More precisely, every community is uncivilized at the beginning and tries to acquire power around its own territory.
“We have to go before the patriarchal era, which was only about 300,000 years old. It’s only been run by men for 10,000 years, and before that, we used to live in matriarchies. Matriarchies were much better because women don’t give orders the same way men do. Women are more life givers, so they think, ‘We got to have water for the children; we’ve got to have this.’ Women are good leaders because they are conservers of resources. They understand life because they can give life. The Earth is a life giver, but about 10,000 years ago with the advent of the horse, men came down saying, ‘You are my slave,’ and basically 10,000 years ago we entered what they call civilization because it brought writing with it; but the bottom line was it was a male-dominated patriarch and all the women were enslaved, including in Greece.”
“When you talk about Greece, Aristotle, and Sophocles, the women were all slaves in Greece, and they were enslaved for obvious reasons. Women were the sexual chooser, and so they lost that, and they just became concubines, but before that, we lived 290,000 years before that, and we lived in very civilized egalitarian societies, which were matriarchies and were very effective. There was no ‘I am king; you are my slave’ or ‘I am queen;’ there was none of that. It was all, ‘Let’s make this work.”
“There’s a beautiful book called The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber” that describes the diversity of early human societies and critiques traditional narratives of history’s linear development from primitivism to civilization. Instead, The Dawn of Everything posits that humans lived in large, complex, but decentralized polities for millennia. My attitude is that ultimately there’s no accident. We might very well have a woman president because she’ll do a good job. Women are good leaders. Look at the lady in Finland, in New Zealand, or in Denmark. Women are good leaders; they’re good at it, and I think we’re going to have a woman president.”
Megalopolis will release in theaters on September 27th. To learn more about the movie and the Coppola’s process, check out the full interview in the video above.
