The Big Picture
- Acclaimed director Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project
Megalopolis
features a star-studded cast and explores themes of ambition and resilience. - The futuristic sci-fi film delves into the clash between an architect’s utopian vision and the political turmoil in a dystopian New York setting.
- Coppola’s long-anticipated film showcases a blend of ancient Roman conflict and modern day influences, offering a unique and intriguing storyline.
Among the highly anticipated films coming out this year is Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, the movie has been a passion project for the acclaimed director and is made on a significant personal cost without any studio backing and is looking for a distribution deal. The sci-fi movie is set to make its Cannes Film Festival debut soon and fans finally have a look at the first images from the film.
Revealed by Vanity Fair, the image sees Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in a distant future, with a dystopian New York behind them. While Driver looks engrossed in his work, Emmanuel standing behind him looks sad, giving us a hint of their relationship. The image is fascinating and sets an intriguing tone for the film as the city is as much plays a character in this movie as its stars.
‘Megalopolis’ Blends Ancient Roman Conflict with a Dystopian New York
The movie follows Ceaser (Driver) as a New York-based architect who wants to rebuild the city as a utopia following a devastating disaster. However, to manage the feat, he must go through the city’s mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Coppola tells, in a statement that the story is set in a stylized New York portrayed as the world. “Cicero would be the mayor during a time of great financial upheaval, such as the financial crisis under former Mayor Dinkins [who led the city from 1990 to 1993.] Cesar, in turn, would be a master builder, a great architect, designer, and scientist combining elements of Robert Moses, as portrayed in the brilliant biography ‘The Power Broker’, with architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, or Walter Gropius.”
The feature has been a long time in making, though Coppola started writing it in the “last dozen years or so.” He cites a long bibliography of the people, artists, and events that inspired him. So, fans can expect to see the influence of New York’s most interesting cases such as the Claus von Bülow murder case, the Mary Cunningham–William Agee Bendix scandal, the emergence of financial reporter Maria Bartiromo, as well as the city’s financial crisis itself. The director added the influences, “So that everything in my story would be true and did happen either in modern New York or in ancient Rome. To that, I added everything I had ever read or learned about.”
Though the theme of the movie revolves around love and loyalty, “Megalopolis echoed these sentiments, in which love was expressed in almost crystalline complexity, our planet in danger and our human family almost in an act of suicide, until becoming a very optimistic film that has faith in the human being to possess the genius to heal any problem put before us.”
Currently, Megalopolis has no release date or window. You can check out the new images above.
Megalopolis (2024)
An architect wants to rebuild New York City as a utopia following a devastating disaster.
- Director
- Francis Ford Coppola
- Cast
- Adam Driver , Forest Whitaker , Nathalie Emmanuel , Jon Voight , Laurence Fishburne , Aubrey Plaza , Jason Schwartzman , Shia LaBeouf , Talia Shire , Grace VanderWaal , Kathryn Hunter , James Remar , Chloe Fineman , D.B. Sweeney , Dustin Hoffman , Giancarlo Esposito
- Main Genre
- Sci-Fi
- Writers
- Francis Ford Coppola
- Studio(s)
- American Zoetrope
