Francis Ford Coppola’s self-funded $100m passion project Megalopolis is finally happening, and casting has been announced.
As the years have passed, Megalopolis – the long-gestating passion project of Francis Ford Coppola – has begun to look increasingly like one of those movies that would never actually make it into production. You’ve got a director who hasn’t worked for many a year, a wildly ambitious script and perhaps most problematically, a hefty budget that will be entrusted to a filmmaker whose tastes have never been that interested in mainstream crowd pleasing.
Those factors mean Megalopolis has all the makings of a film that will never see production, but Coppola has never given up on making the film. Around a year ago he was offering to match outside funding “dollar for dollar” before eventually deciding to sell some of his valuable real estate and finance the bulk of the project himself, all $100m of it.
With that kind of budget, some pretty exciting casting rumours have been floated, with names such as Oscar Isaac, Forest Whitaker, Cate Blanchett, Zendaya, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange’ and even The Godfather collaborator James Caan. Whilst at the moment, it looks like none of those rumoured names will appear in the film, we do now know that Adam Driver, Game of Thrones’ Nathalie Emmanuel, Forest Whitaker, Laurence Fishburne and Jon Voight will lead the ensemble.
That’s a mightily impressive cast and it looks like there’ll be some dramatic material for them to get their teeth into too. The film is based on on the fall of a civilisation, with the film’s logline stating: ‘The fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems in this epic story of political ambition, genius, and conflicted love.’
Coppola, in his usual bold fashion has stated that his project represents what’s “coming in the future” of cinema, and with the film being set up as it is, it will undoubtedly be his film, for better or for worse. The project is certainly off to a good start with a cast of that calibre though. We’ll bring you more on Megalopolis as we hear it.
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