With Megalopolis having cost $120m of Francis Ford Coppola’s own money it’s safe to say that having only earned $12m to date at the box office the film has bombed badly. SO we take a look at the story behind the making of Coppola’s Megalopolis.
Francis Ford Coppola began developing Megalopolis in the early 1980s. The lengthy trajectory of the project’s history is part of the story and lore of behind the making of Coppola’s Megalopolis. The story was very loosely inspired by his reading about the Catilinarian Conspiracy which took place in 63 BC. At the heart of the event was a popular Roman aristocrat, Lucius Sergius Catiline, who was attempting to overthrow the Roman Republic. Had Catiline’s coup succeeded, he would have ousted the reigning upper class and released himself and the lower classes from debt.
“I had cooked up this idea,” Coppola remembered. “I very much wanted to write this story. I just started filling notebooks with ideas or things I found while reading. I thought, you know, everyone knows America is a reincarnation of Republican Rome because our founders didn’t want a king but wanted it to be like Rome’s republic. You can’t go to New York without realizing it is covered with Roman buildings. So, my intent was to write a Roman epic set in a contemporary New York that’s copied Ancient Rome.”
In the summer of 2001, he held table reads in New York. Robert De Niro, Paul Newman, Leo DiCaprio, Uma Thurman, James Gandolfini, and Russell Crowe were some of the actors who participated. That year, he also shot 30 hours of 2nd unit footage in and around the city. Shortly after beginning pre-production, the tragedy of September 11th took place and work came to a halt. Coppola said he could barely consider making a film about the possibility of utopia in New York when everything had become so tragic and uncertain. In the ensuing years, several of the actors that appear in the film had participated in workshops or table readings.
Jon Voight read the script in one of its earlier ideations, as did Laurence Fishburne and Giancarlo Esposito. “I read the script 23 years ago, maybe 25 years ago,” said Esposito. “I thought, as with scripts that are so steeped in philosophy and in mythology and in history, that I’ve got to read it once more. Now I can look at the era and all the surrounding history and I get it. It’s a story to tell.”
Coppola considered abandoning the project completely in 2007 when he couldn’t get any support developing it, but just couldn’t leave the story behind. “In my mind, it was still incubating,” he said. “You know, I had made so many different pictures in so many different styles, because I like to make movies I don’t know how to make. Because if you don’t know how to make them, the movie starts telling you how to make it. And that’s very exciting when you listen.”
The years passed with more script readings and workshops, but it was a combination of Coppola turning 80 followed by the pandemic that provided the impetus for him to fully develop the project. By August 2021, he was in formal discussions with actors and beginning casting. Many actors were considered. Some had participated in previous script readings, such as Shia LaBeouf and Jon Voight. Others such as Laurence Fishburne, Giancarlo Esposito, Talia Shire, James Remar, and D.B. Sweeney had been featured in previous Coppola films. For the role of WOW PLATINUM, Coppola wanted an actress with a comedic aspect, as well as intelligence and beauty, who could give the role a 1930s screwball-comedy flavor ala Jean Harlow or Myra Loy, and so Aubrey Plaza was a possible choice. Coppola’s old friend and frequent collaborator James Caan requested a cameo part in what might be his last picture, and Coppola created NUSH ‘The Fixer’ BERMAN for him. Caan died suddenly, and the great Dustin Hoffman offered to take over this small cameo role.
Coppola met Adam Driver (CESAR CATILINA) in New York, and they had many lengthy conversations, at first resulting in Driver’s decision not to commit. Coppola says, “After thinking through his side of those discussions, some ideas came to me, and while accepting his ‘no,’ I wanted to thank him and for the hell of it mentioned these new ideas. I was very surprised when he wrote back that he liked them and had reconsidered his decision and would do it.” As Nathalie Emmanuel (JULIA CICERO) was in Europe, Coppola ‘met’ her remotely. “I did one of my improvisation sessions with her in which she astonished me with her willingness to just jump in and demonstrate the many ‘colors’ she was capable of, on just one line [from The Color Purple], over and over in different ways: ‘I loves Harpo, but I’ll kill him dead if I let him beat me.'”
To make Megalopolis entirely on his own terms, Coppola self-financed, selling a piece of his wine business to finance the film’s production. He decided to film in Atlanta, Georgia, because of the state’s generous tax benefit, state-of-the-art studio facilities, well-trained local crews, and the abundance of classical buildings to serve as sets. On location in Atlanta, he purchased and renovated a former Days Inn motel to house himself and his essential crew, creating facilities for rehearsal and post-production including editing rooms, ADR recording studio, and an ATMOS sound mixing theater.
Principal photography began at Trilith Studios in Fayetteville, Georgia on November 7, 2022, and was completed on March 11, 2023
…and that is the story behind the making of Megalopolis!
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