Francis Ford Coppola Wants to Self-Finance a $120M Utopian Film Called 'Megalopolis' (gq.com) 63
He produced the science fiction film THX 1138 — George Lucas's first movie — in 1971. 28 years later he supervised the re-editing of the science fiction film Supernova.
But now 82-year-old Francis Ford Coppola — who has also made a second fortune in the wine business — has an even grander vision. GQ reports: It is a film called Megalopolis, and Coppola has been trying to make it, intermittently, for more than 40 years. If I could summarize the plot for you in a concise way, I would, but I can't, because Coppola can't either. Ask him. "It's very simple," he'll say. "The premise of Megalopolis? Well, it's basically... I would ask you a question, first of all: Do you know much about utopia?"
The best I can do, after literally hours talking about it with him, is this: It's a love story that is also a philosophical investigation of the nature of man; it's set in New York, but a New York steeped in echoes of ancient Rome; its scale and ambition are vast enough that Coppola has estimated that it will cost $120 million to make. What he dreams about, he said, is creating something like It's a Wonderful Life — a movie everyone goes to see, once a year, forever. "On New Year's, instead of talking about the fact that you're going to give up carbohydrates, I'd like this one question to be discussed, which is: Is the society we live in the only one available to us? And discuss it."
Somehow, Megalopolis will provoke exactly this discussion, Coppola hopes. Annually....
[T]his is Coppola's plan. He is going to take $120 million of his own fortune, at 82 years of age, and make the damn movie himself.
The article describes it as the kind of "personal" movie that Coppola had wanted to make back when his studio had insisted he instead direct The Godfather. This, of course, is the paradox of Coppola's career: that for all his success, he has, to some extent, been waiting to make his own films, rather than someone else's, for practically his entire life.... "If you're going to make art, let it be personal. Let it be very personal to you."
Megalopolis "remains in development for now," reports Variety. "Coppola has not yet announced a production start date."
But now 82-year-old Francis Ford Coppola — who has also made a second fortune in the wine business — has an even grander vision. GQ reports: It is a film called Megalopolis, and Coppola has been trying to make it, intermittently, for more than 40 years. If I could summarize the plot for you in a concise way, I would, but I can't, because Coppola can't either. Ask him. "It's very simple," he'll say. "The premise of Megalopolis? Well, it's basically... I would ask you a question, first of all: Do you know much about utopia?"
The best I can do, after literally hours talking about it with him, is this: It's a love story that is also a philosophical investigation of the nature of man; it's set in New York, but a New York steeped in echoes of ancient Rome; its scale and ambition are vast enough that Coppola has estimated that it will cost $120 million to make. What he dreams about, he said, is creating something like It's a Wonderful Life — a movie everyone goes to see, once a year, forever. "On New Year's, instead of talking about the fact that you're going to give up carbohydrates, I'd like this one question to be discussed, which is: Is the society we live in the only one available to us? And discuss it."
Somehow, Megalopolis will provoke exactly this discussion, Coppola hopes. Annually....
[T]his is Coppola's plan. He is going to take $120 million of his own fortune, at 82 years of age, and make the damn movie himself.
The article describes it as the kind of "personal" movie that Coppola had wanted to make back when his studio had insisted he instead direct The Godfather. This, of course, is the paradox of Coppola's career: that for all his success, he has, to some extent, been waiting to make his own films, rather than someone else's, for practically his entire life.... "If you're going to make art, let it be personal. Let it be very personal to you."
Megalopolis "remains in development for now," reports Variety. "Coppola has not yet announced a production start date."
Metropolis (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Metropolis (Score:3)
Yes but in the future we will have robots. Machines that stamp out the products we need. Machines to build a home for everyone. Solar or nuclear powered machines to mine, grow, and produce all the food we need. Autonomous vehicles to deliver and transport it. In theory a megalopolis is possible. Practically, too many humans are too stupid to allow it.
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"Machines to build a home for everyone."
Too many 'everyones', the herd has to be culled.
The antivaxxers are volunteering, we should let them.
Re: Metropolis (Score:2)
Too many everyones by what measure? There are easily enough resources for everyone to have food and housing â" at least in the US if not every country. The problem is some of the everyones have mental illness, and I am not just talking about the homeless ones.
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"Too many everyones by what measure? "
When I'm able to get in 5th gear a 5pm, it will be enough.
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That's easy. Get yourself a job in the 'burbs and live in the city.
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"That's easy. Get yourself a job in the 'burbs and live in the city."
Lincoln tunnel is crowded either way.
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utopia likely means an existence with meaningful contribution to your community. i think the chasers of the utopian dreams like the playboy mansion or marrying several children against their will, just to give a couple of examples are doing a great job culling themselves....
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If the future was 20 years ago, does that mean we're now we're living in the past? I'm confused!
Re: Metropolis (Score:4, Funny)
Sandurz: Now. Whatever you’re looking at now, is happening now.
Dark Helmet: Well, what happened to then?
Sandurz: We just passed it.
Dark Helmet: When?
Sandurz: Just now.
Dark Helmet: Well, go back to then.
Sandurz: We can’t.
Dark Jelmet: Why not?
Sandurz: We already passed it.
Dark Helmet: When will then be now?
Sandurz: Soon.
(From the movie "Spaceballs"
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We have robots now, and mechanization, and considerable wealth. Distributing it evenly does not work, and we continue to expand population to exceed available resources as a matter of course. In theory, everyone could be polite and generous. In practice, the "tragedy of the commons" requires considerable vigilance and a potent society to defend against.
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Yes but in the future we will have robots.
Your masters might; you will not.
Dummy.
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Your robotically produced house costs $1000 to buy. Unfortunately your job is gone because the robots can do it cheaper,so you have $0 to spend. Every economic model that we have available today has an assumption that most people will have some sort of work to do that earns the an income, even if only enough to barely survive at poverty level.
When I picture that future, I picture a fence: One one side of the fence are starving masses of people. On the other side if a pile of food from the automated farms, b
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That makes no sense whatsoever. First off, robots can be taxed, there's already welfare and food stamps even though food is manually farmed and expensive. Second, it is stupid to assume that people won't figure out how to get themselves solar panels and robot farms. I mean, you can buy or build a small lower-middle-class affordable farmbot today, now.
Re: Metropolis (Score:2)
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A story about the Utopia we live in today. Of course, what we have learned over the past few hundred years is that only certain people get to live in a utopia. Everyone else has to work to make it run.
In the far distant future, we will learn that certain people get to live in a utopia while everyone else has to work underground to make the utopia run and have to eat the utopians.
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This view rather depends on what you call a Utopia. Do you really want to live in a world where you don't have to lift a finger in order to have your every need fulfilled? That could be considered the central theme of The Matrix. I am not suggesting that a life of mere drudgery and back-breaking toil make one more noble than a privileged socialite, but it does strike me that Doing Useful Things is rather good for you in general. When I was stuck in hospital for a couple of months for cancer treatment, I was
Kickstarter (Score:2)
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Sounds great, conceptually. (Score:5, Insightful)
Still, Coppola is not the guy for his own idea though. He spent his creative energy making Apocalypse Now, and everything since then has been half-assed. I would be skeptical even if he weren't 82.
Not sure who would be the best choice for it. Maybe the guy who did Gattaca? But for the love of God, not Christopher Nolan. Sick of that guy and being told by Hollywood that his mediocrities are brilliant.
Re: Sounds great, conceptually. (Score:3)
I agree, sci fi has become extremely pessimistic over the years. Then people ask why there are flat earthers and anti-vaxxer fools.
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Another thing I've been missing is episodic sci fi, i.e., with the exception of the occassional 2 parter, a show where each episode tells a complete story.
Before they canned it I was hoping that the tack that Amazon would take with the The Culture series would be rather than adapting the novels, just creating new stories in the universe and it could have been an awesome candidate for the more optimistic/more episodic type sci fi we used to get with Star Trek from the original up until The Next Generation.
What's so great about episodic sci-fi? (Score:2)
Other than you can watch episodes in any order, I don't get it.
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They have unresolved issues at the end of each episode which is mentally taxing, not really satisfying.
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I guess it's just cheaper to film in a junkyard than to make things look good, and easier to play a starving rat than a philosopher.
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I think the lesson from pessimistic science fiction is that life is actually shit mostly, which is pretty realistic, based on personal experience. However, that does not mean you live in misery until you finally croak your last breath. I have a theory, that hope is always better than despair, in the absence of really solid evidence to the contrary. Basically, if life is shit, don't make it worse by being miserable about it. I suspect that this is why God invented mind-altering drugs.
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Gattaca was not a good movie. Yes, the underlying theme about putting people into boxes based on their genetics had potential, but the implementation wasn't that good. Only the scene near the end where the main characters race to put on a front with Jude Law dragging himself up the stairs was halfway decent. You knew how it was going to end, but how it was displayed was the good part.
Let's put it this way, if the doctor could change the results of the piss test so easily, what was the point of having the
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The reason I think that sort of thing might work well for a utopian story is precisely that: Despite what is essentially a story about prejudice and oppression, it's treated as a flaw in human perfection rather than some mustache-twirling conspiracy. If that guy can tell
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Can't remember the last time I agreed with anyone so much on here.
Gattaca is also about our childhood dreams, and being paranoid as to why we feel less free as an adult. Impostor syndrome is a major theme.
To an adult, space is a way to escape. But it was part of most boys' childhoods too.
So Gattaca has this combination of transcendence and nostalgia.
Vincent is flawed like we all are. Yet, after undergoing major trials, his faith is redeemed by the doctor and he is allowed to ascend.
This isn't Christianity
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I don't know what Coppola's idealistic world will look like, but I hope he has seen Gattaca.
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"Transcendence and nostalgia" are great ways to describe it. It's hard to express the substantiveness, the wholesomeness and positivity of Gattaca's vision.
The struggle is real! Like the best sci-fi, it's more real than TV dramas.
But it's also dressed up in the 40s thing and these beautiful young actors... partly for the caucasian market but also part of the idealism.
And they set white, cis- Vincent in a oppressed role, so the unfairness of inequality message just goes in LOL
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Vincent was the good guy? I thought he was the person who committed fraud to secure a place on a space mission after being disqualified on medical grounds due to a high risk of heart failure.
The movie needs a post-credits scene where Vincent is floating happily in the spaceship, then cries out and clutches at his chest.
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Haha, yes, that's Vincent. Would have made a good Robot Chicken scene.
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We could use a utopian film today. Not some bullshit "There's a dark secret lurking the shadows of paradise" Hollywood cliche, but an actual exploration of human idealism.
are you kidding? discovering some dark, malevolent, ancient secret just to unleash it on the rest of the civilization, with no sense of responsibility? with a hot woman/man waiting in bed for you to tell them all about it? every utopian society describes this as a dream job....
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Re: Sounds great, conceptually. (Score:1)
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Coppola could hire his daughter.
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It takes kind of an egomaniac nut to do a movie with such a grandiose premise (which FFC was definitely that, once upon a time), while his daughter's movies always struck me as humble and grounded.
But who knows? Sometimes greatness emerges from goodness.
utopian film? (Score:2)
So,a complete fantasy? (Score:1)
t'll be nothing like the real NYC?
Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Good for him. It's his money, he can do with it what he wants. If this has been a near lifelong project, why not do it? Howard Hughes spent who knows how much of his own money making Hell's Angels. Let's see what Coppola can do doing the same thing.
Dystopian film would be much cheaper (Score:2, Insightful)
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If, instead, he's looking for a beautiful, futuristic looking city, is there one outside of east Asia?
An optimistic future? Burn the witch! (Score:3)
I visited recently. I found it to be a much happier place than has been painted by the media of all ideologcal persuasions. Full of energetic people obsessing about real estate. All those bad NYC neighborhoods you have seen in movies (Flatbush, Five Points, etc.) are now filled with millennials walking poodles. The worst section right now appears to be Tremont, but you can bet that the real estate moguls are already quietly buying up the tenements in time for the next economic cycle.
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Yup, for dystopia you have to visit Dallas.
Sounds like.... (Score:2)
A woulda, Coulda, Shoulda story.
I think it's too late, he's lost it. (Score:2)
With all due respect, I love many of his movies and he was a master, but just today I read one of his quotes that tells me it's too late for him, he's lost it.
Even the talented people – you could take Dune made by Denis Villeneuve, an extremely talented, gifted artist, and you could take No Time to Die directed by Cary Fukunaga – extremely gifted, talented, beautiful artists, and you could take both those movies, and you and I could go and pull the same sequence out of both of them and put them together.
I mean a blind man would not say something like that. You might find quite a few faults in Dune, but its cinematography and overall visual design was definitely unique (brilliant IMHO). To mistake even one sequence with that of the cardboard shit that was No time to die?
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I think he's talking about the action sequences. Marvel movies are basically about gigantic improbable fights against some villain, interspersed with super-bro's hanging out in various ways that attempt to make them seem a little bit relatable. Almost no plot other than that. The Dune movie had quite a bit of the same sort of thing.
Maybe remake or restore 1927's Metropolis (Score:3)
Maybe remake or restore 1927's Metropolis by Fritz Lang instead. It's still missing some crucial scenes that we can find by searching through private film archives around the world.
He can't explain what it's about (Score:2)
If you can't give a pretty good summary of what your film would be about in 5 minutes or less I would have a pretty low expectation of success. You don't want to be off exploring what it ultimately means to be human while filming, that's for sure. You gotta tell a story, and you better know what it is.
society we live in the only one available to us? (Score:2)
Supernova! (Score:2)
http://brunching.com/supernova... [brunching.com]
SLAP!
Write the script, but let someone else budget it (Score:2)
The greatness of the project won't be determined by its deleted scenes that account for half the budget, or Coppola's obsessiveness for authenticity which could triple costs.
By the time filming got wrapped spending 10 or 20 million dollars worth of CGI from his buddy George Lucas could flesh out Coppola's vision to a satisfactory degree.
Iain M. Banks The Player of Games (Score:2)
I could see that being done for around 40 million bucks while looking amazing, and it's a deep dive into post scarcity societies, both human and alien, and how our (both human and alien) drives can have trouble reconciling with such Utopias. Yes, the Alien society wasn't as post scarcity as the Culture one, but its troubles weren't because of not being at that level yet.
Given how much money the Western world has spent on technology, including that for gaming, to keep us occupied during the pandemic, that no
And now I remember Wim Wenders film (Score:3)
Until the End of the World, and that one of these days I need to watch the Director's cut, not that we can pin down exactly what that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]