Francis Ford Coppola’s famously elusive dream project seems to be closer than ever, according to the director himself.
As the years have rolled by, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis has begun to look increasingly like one of those passion projects that would never get made. Take a director who hasn’t worked for a decade, a wildly ambitious project and a budget that would make most studio executives balk, especially coming from a filmmaker whose tastes have never been commercially inclined, and you have all the makings of a film that will never see production.
However, Coppola has never given up on making Megalopolis, although he’s never as close to making it as he did back in 2001, when the 9/11 attacks put paid to a project he had already begun shooting second unit work for. Now though, some sales of his sizeable wine estate have left Coppola with the means to self-fund the film if necessary, and he’s been talking about doing just that, saying that he wants to make the movie in the back end of 2022. “I don’t have all my cast approved, but I have enough of them to have confidence that it is going to be a very exciting cast. The picture’s going to cost between $100 million and $120 million. Needless to say, I hope it’s closer to $100 million. I’m prepared to match some outside financing, almost dollar for dollar. In other words, I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is”, he has said.
There are also some pretty exciting casting rumours swirling around, with names such as ‘Oscar Isaac, Forest Whitaker, Cate Blanchett, Jon Voight, Zendaya, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange’ and even The Godfather collaborator James Caan, said to potentially be involved.
Whilst it’s by no means a certainty still, it does seem like Coppola’s Megalopolis is closer to becoming a reality than it has ever been. We’ll bring you more on this one as we hear it.
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