Since the 1970s, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola has dreamed of a project called Megalopolis. Almost 50 years later, the legendary director has made the film, with Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel and Aubrey Plaza in front of the camera.
Megalopolis premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival to mixed reviews. Here at Moviepilot you can read an enthusiastic reaction to the unusual future epic. With a budget of over 100 million dollars, Megalopolis is one of the most expensive films of the festivalalthough its creation is anything but the norm for a Marvel or Star Wars blockbuster.
Coppola realized his sci-fi dream with the help of wine
Normally, films with budgets in the hundreds of millions are produced by major studios such as Disney, Sony or Paramount. Independent cinema of this magnitude remains a rarity. Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is the exception that proves the rule, so how did he get the budget?
Coppola financed Megalopolis thanks to his second career alongside filmmaking. In 1975, he and his wife Eleanor bought a winery in the Napa Valley in California and expanded it over the years with other wineries. Long before it became fashionable for film stars like Ryan Reynolds to invest in spirits, The Coppolas built a medium-sized wine empireIn 2021, Coppola sold one of his wineries (via Wine Spectator ).
Constantine
Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in Megalopolis
The price was not shared with the public, but now Coppola had capital at his disposal for Megalopolis. According to GQ, he invested about 120 million dollars of his own assets in the science fiction film. It is questionable whether he will ever see the money again. In the run-up to the Cannes premiere, further deals for the worldwide distribution of the film were concluded, as Deadline reported. Megalopolis will therefore be shown in cinemas in Germany and other countries. However, the director has not yet found a US distributor – and thus a springboard into the potentially largest market for his film.
Coppola: “I made every film I wanted to make.”
Based on the press conference in Cannes, Coppola (via AP ) remains calm:
I have no problem with finances. My children have wonderful careers […]. You don’t need a fortune. I still own Inglenook, we’re doing well. Money doesn’t matter. What matters is friends. They will never let you down. Money evaporates.
At the press conference, Coppola took aim at the major studios and streamers in Hollywood (“The task is not so much to make good films, but to ensure that they fulfil their obligations”) and concluded with a passionate defense of his self-financed work:
There are so many people who, when they die, say, ‘I wish I had done this, I wish I had done that.’ When I die, I will say, ‘I could have done that.’ I saw my daughter [Sofia Coppola] won an Oscar, I made wine and I made every film I wanted to make. I’ll be so busy thinking about all the things I had to do that I won’t notice when I die.
Coppola says he is already working on the script for his next film.