‘Megalopolis’ First Footage Debuts Online
First look at “Megalopolis” via Vanity Fair.
Francis Ford Coppola and his team are trying to pull up all the stops as they attempt to entice a buyer for the maestro’s latest, Megalopolis, an ambitious post-apocalyptic film about the construction of an American utopia and heavily inspired by Ancient Rome. The film is headed to the Cannes Film Festival, where it will not only play in competition but it also hopes to find a distributor that will put the film in front of audiences around the world.
To try to bring more attention to it, the first clip from the film has been released. Check it out below:
Here is the description for the film that was posted on Coppola’s YouTube channel:
“A man balances precariously on a ledge high above a once-grand city in the opening scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s MEGALOPOLIS, and the movie that follows is – at least in part – about an entire civilization teetering on a similarly precarious ledge, devouring itself in a whirl of unchecked greed, self-absorption, and political propaganda, while a few bold dreamers push against the tide, striving to usher in a new dawn.
The man is called Caesar (Adam Driver), like the Roman general who gave rise to the Roman Empire, Cesar the labor leader who organized California’s farm workers in the 1960s, and a few other notably great men of history. But he is also clearly an avatar of Coppola himself – a grand visionary witnessing a once-great thing (call it cinema if you must) withering before his very eyes and determined to revivify it.
And, after decades of planning, MEGALOPOLIS the movie is the powerful elixir he has produced: a sweeping, big-canvas movie of provocative ideas and relentless cinematic invention that belies its maker’s 84 years of age. Coppola seems to have been born-again by a strike of filmic lightning, and the movie – no, the experience (complete with in-theater “live cinema”) – that has emerged feels at once the work of a film-school wunderkind unbowed by notions of convention, but also the work of a wizened master who knows much about life and the ways of the world. To paraphrase Coppola himself speaking decades ago about his APOCALYPSE NOW, MEGALOPOLIS isn’t a movie about the end of the world as we know it, it is the end of the world as we know it. Only, where APOCALYPSE left us in a napalm-bombed fever-dream haze, MEGALOPOLIS, surprisingly and movingly, bestows on us a final image glowing with hope for the future.”
The pic has landed a French distributor but has struggled to find enthusiasm elsewhere. This was mostly caused by a screening in Los Angeles that went poorly — not necessarily because of the quality fo the film, but because of how hard it will be to market it for any interested buyer.
This will surely be an evolving situation. Stay tuned!
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
