“Happy New Year. For me, this is a dream come true,” said Frances Ford Coppola, surveying the audience that had come to see his passion project, “Megalopolis,” at an American Cinematheque conversation-and-screening event to kick off 2025. The dream part of it, for him, was the chance to spend 100 minutes talking not very much about his passion project itself, but rather using it as a springboard for an infinitely widespread discussion about about political, economic and social ideals.
“Megalopolis,” as anyone who’s seen it will know, is largely about lending credibility to utopian ideals that politicians and numbers-crunchers would view as cynical. And Coppola’s own personal vision of a utopia involves Q&As in which film fans aren’t asking questions about budgets or box office or critics or even filmmaking minutiae (a few were asked, and answered glancingly) but, rather, engaging him on the subjects he said he’d rather be talking about, in this “interactive” discussion. Which included: remaking government from the bottom up; a universal basic income; undoing the patriarchy; aligning urban architecture with the lessons of nature; and making “work” a thing of the past in favor of “play.”
In other words, the discussion was as heady as the movie — or maybe 10 times headier, if you can imagine that. In engaging a sold-out house that not only didn’t reject these questions and ideas as entertainment but was eager for a whole four-hour “interactive” experience with them, Coppola made it clear he was in heaven.
It wasn’t meant to be a memoir-type discussion, but the veteran filmmaker did occasionally dive into his own history, at one point saying, “My life is interesting. I either have been totally broke and bankrupt or I’m rich. Very strange.” Following up on that thought at the close of the event, the veteran filmmaker offered a thumbnail summary of his relationship with capital over the years.
“I took over my company just by the fact that I had a different vision for the company, and all the other people’s vision was, they didn’t want get fired. They didn’t want me to go bankrupt. They were protecting themselves. And I was saying, I don’t protect myself. I never protected myself. On ‘Apocalypse Now,’ (I had) 21% interest on that (investment), and I owed $30 million. I didn’t come from money. When I went to UCLA, I lived on a dollar a day. That’s when I got so fat. I would have 19-cent Kraft macaroni and cheese dinners; that’s all I had every night. But if you tell me now, ‘I’ll write you a check for a hundred million dollars’ — I’d rather have a hundred million friends.”
Coppola had 425 old or new friends who had eagerly snapped up $45 tickets for the Aero Theatre event as soon as they went on sale, willing to show up at 11 a.m. on New Year’s Day for four hours of film and discourse (and to subsist on a lunch not of mac-and-cheese but of theater popcorn). He offered occasional memoir-style asides like those above, but mostly remained in the realm of philosophy and socioeconomic thought, with an intellectual assist from two panelists he brought along, Juliet Shor, an economist and socialist who wrote the book “Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth,” and Jim Augustine, an entrpreneur who works with tech companies interested in adopting the methodologies of creatives.
Coppola had a lot on his mind, speaking for eight minutes before the screening and then energetically launching into another 25-minute monologue as the credits began to roll, before turning over more of the floor to his panelists and the audience for the remaining 65 minutes. Without stating it outright, he made it clear he identifies with the protagonist of “Megalopolis,” high-minded architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), as at various points he repeated verbatim a question that Cesar asks in the movie: “Is the society we’re living in the only one available to us?” (At one point midway through the otherwise straightforward film screening, the house lights brightened and a person approached the screen, silently playing the role of interrogating journalist, as the image of Driver looked down on him and uttered that same, overarching question about the big picture.)
In his proper introduction to the film, Coppola asked the audience to pretend they were watching “Megalopolis” a few years in the future — specifically “New Year’s Day 2027,” because “seven’s my lucky number.” Looking at the film with an imagined few years of hindsight also allowed Coppola the chance to imagine that the discussion over “Megalopolis” (which was widely polarizing, to say the least, and has $18 million in worldwide gross) might change, as it has with some other films. “With ‘Apocalypse Now,’ the reaction I got was ‘the worst movie ever made’ — someone said that — but when you have such divisiveness, that’s ultimately ingredients for further discussion. That means there’s something about it that you can talk about it later on,” he noted, adding that “’Apocalypse Now’ still makes money. I mean, it’s, what is it, 50 years later?”