Francis Ford Coppola is going to finance his new movie with $120 million of his own money, and “couldn’t care less” if the movie flops.
Fifty years on from The Godfather, the legendary director sat down with GQ. Now 82, Coppola’s life has largely been defined by that most iconic of trilogies, a fact he acknowledges. “That film ruined me,” he said, “in the sense that it was so successful that everything I did was compared to it.”
This will still hold true for his next film, a project Coppola has been working on since the 1980s, and that he is investing vast sums of his own personal fortune into. Its name is Megalopolis. When asked what the film was about, Coppola said, “It’s very simple. The premise of Megalopolis? Well, it’s basically… I would ask you a question, first of all: Do you know much about utopia?”
Yes. It’s sitting down, uninterrupted, in a dark room with a big screen, in front of the first two instalments of The Godfather. That would be my dreamland, at least. For Coppola, however, Megalopolis is a pleasure project that he believes can usurp even the popularity of his earlier work.
Films like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now are cultural treasures that have already cemented his legacy as a great. With Megalopolis, it sounds as if Coppola is hoping to move into a transcendent new realm that few storytellers have ever reached, creating an artwork that inspires incessant conversation and debate long after he’s gone.
“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.” Megalopolis is the vessel through which Coppola aims to bring this question into households across the world. In order to achieve this, he is investing a staggering amount of his own money – all $120 million of it – and creating the movie his way.
“I know that Megalopolis, the more personal I make it, and the more like a dream in me that I do it, the harder it will be to finance. And the longer it will earn money because people will be spending the next 50 years trying to think: What’s really in Megalopolis? What is he saying? My God, what does that mean when that happens?”
To help fund it, Coppola has sold a share of his own wine empire. This made up a substantial chunk of the line of credit needed to produce Megalopolis, and Coppola is determined the film will have a positive effect. “If I’m going to invest $120 million of my own money – which I’ve already done basically, I have it there, waiting to be written to make it – I want it to have a good result for humanity.”
It is this moral motivation that drives Coppola, over any monetary considerations. “I couldn’t care less about the financial impact whatsoever. It means nothing to me…I have bequeathed much to all my children. And then they themselves, the greatest thing I bequeathed to my children is their know-how and their talent. Sofia is not going to have a problem. Roman’s not going to have a problem. They’re all very capable. And they have Inglenook, where we are. There’s no debt on this place. None.”
