Adam Driver has played a city-dwelling seducer before — think: “Girls” at the very least — but this time, the actor has transformed into a slick harbinger of chaos for Francis Ford Coppola‘s epic “Megalopolis.”
Driver stars as artist and city planner Cesar Catilina, once again adjacent to faux Italian-ness for the screen. Cesar’s biggest opponent is Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare per the official synopsis. Yet when Cesar begins an affair with Franklyn’s socialite daughter Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), Cesar’s determined path to forge a new city begins to falter.
Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, D.B. Sweeney, and Dustin Hoffman also star.
Coppola writes, directs, and produces the epic feature which had an estimated budget of $120 million-plus. Coppola self-financed the film, which will debut at Cannes. The feature will be Coppola’s return to Cannes following his respective Palme d’Or wins for “The Conversation” and “Apocalypse Now.” His other Cannes film was “Tetro,” which screened in Directors Fortnight.
Additional producers include Fred Roos, Barry Hirsch, and Michael Bederman, with Anahid Nazarian, Barrie Osborne, and Darren Demetre executive producing.
Coppola told Vanity Fair that he rewrote the script more than “300 times” across decades.
“Early on, I remember once I took 130 blank pages and put on a title page boldly announcing Francis ‘Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis,’ and under that, ‘All Roads Lead to Rome,’” Coppola said. “I pretended it wasn’t totally blank, weighing it in my hands so I could imagine what one day it would feel like, and believe one day it could exist. Then later, once I had a draft, I must have rewritten it 300 times, hoping each rewrite would improve it, if only a half percent better.”
And despite the concept for the film gestating for almost half a century, Coppola assured that he wasn’t actually writing it for that long.
“I wasn’t really working on this screenplay for 40 years as I often see written, but rather I was collecting notes and clippings for a scrapbook of things I found interesting for some future screenplay, or examples of political cartoons or different historical subjects,” Coppola said. “Ultimately, after a lot of time, I settled on the idea of a Roman epic. And then later, a Roman epic set in modern America, so I really only began writing this script, on and off, in the last dozen years or so. Also, as I have made many films of many different subjects and in many different styles, I hoped for a project later in life when I might better understand what my personal style was.”
“Megalopolis” premieres in competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and is looking for distribution. Check out the teaser trailer below.
