Megalopolis is an upcoming American epic science fiction drama film written, directed and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. The film features an ensemble cast, including Adam Driver, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jason Schwartzman, Grace VanderWaal, Kathryn Hunter, Talia Shire, Dustin Hoffman, D. B. Sweeney, and Giancarlo Esposito.
Premise
In New York, a woman (Emmanuel) is divided between loyalties to her father (Whitaker), who has a classical view of society, and her lover (Driver), who is more progressive and ready for the future.
Cast
Production
Development
Francis Ford Coppola started writing Megalopolis in the 1980s, as a passion project. Actor Rob Lowe said that Coppola was talking about the project when they were shooting The Outsiders in 1982. In a May 2007 interview with Ain't It Cool News, Coppola stated his agreements to direct Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), Jack (1996), and The Rainmaker (1997) were done to get out of debt and fund Megalopolis. Jim Steranko, who previously created production illustrations for Bram Stoker's Dracula, produced a dozen color works for Megalopolis in the mid-1990s at the director's behest to create stark "architectonic panoramas of content and imagery."
By 2001, Coppola began holding table reads with actors including Russell Crowe, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Nicolas Cage, Paul Newman, Kevin Spacey, James Gandolfini, Edie Falco and Uma Thurman, and recorded roughly 30 hours of second-unit footage of New York City with Ron Fricke, all of which he discarded after 9/11. In response to this, Coppola stated "It made it really pretty tough... a movie about the aspiration of utopia with New York as a main character and then all of a sudden you couldn't write about New York without just dealing with what happened and the implications of what happened. The world was attacked and I didn't know how to try to do with that. I tried". In 2007, Coppola stated he had abandoned the project.
In a series of Instagram posts in July 2023, Coppola stated that the film had been heavily influenced by the following books:
Bullshit Jobs, Debt: The First 5000 Years, and The Dawn of Everything, all works of the anthropologist David Graeber; The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse; The Chalice and the Blade by sociologist Riane Eisler; The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama; The War Lovers by Evan Thomas; and The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt.
Pre-production
Coppola returned to the project 12 years later when in May 2019 he announced he would resume development, and had approached Jude Law and Shia LaBeouf for lead roles. In August 2021, it was confirmed that discussions with actors to star in the film had begun; James Caan was set to star while Oscar Isaac, Forest Whitaker, Cate Blanchett, Jon Voight, Zendaya, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Jessica Lange were in various stages of negotiations. By March 2022, Coppola's sister, Talia Shire, expressed her interest in joining the cast, and Isaac was reported to have passed on the project. The previous month, Coppola said he spent $120 million of his own money and sold a "significant piece of his wine empire" to produce the film. By May, the budget was reported to be under $100 million, while Whitaker and Voight were confirmed for the cast, with Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, and Laurence Fishburne added. On July 6, Caan, who was still in negotiations for the film, died. Pre-production had begun by mid-July 2022, with Mihai Mălaimare Jr. serving as cinematographer. In August, Aubrey Plaza, Jason Schwartzman, Grace VanderWaal, Kathryn Hunter and James Remar joined the cast, with Shire and LaBeouf also confirmed to be part of the cast. Chloe Fineman, Madeleine Gardella, Isabelle Kusman, D. B. Sweeney, Bailey Ives and Dustin Hoffman would be added in October. In January 2023, Giancarlo Esposito was added to the cast.
Filming
Principal photography began at Trilith Studios in Georgia on November 1, 2022, with set photos of LaBeouf and Emmanuel filming in Atlanta being published on November 8 and was due to finish in March 2023. The film was originally shooting using OSVP technology at Prysm Stage, Trilith Studios, but "as the challenges and costs of that approach have mounted, the production is attempting to pivot to a less costly, more traditional greenscreen approach".