I do wonder why Francis Ford Coppola has only decided now, at almost 83 years of age, to finally make his passion project, “Megalopolis.”
In a recent interview, Coppola is quoted as saying that he’s going to put down close to $120 million of his own money to make “Megalopolis” because no film studio wants to touch it otherwise. Coppola “sold a significant piece of his wine empire so that he could use a percentage of the sale as collateral for the line of credit to finally make the film.”
Is there another example of such madness? It’s unprecedented. Coppola says he’s not even concerned if the film tanks at the box-office.
Coppola wrote “Megalopolis” in the early 1980s and is said to have already secretly cast Oscar Isaac, Forest Whitaker and Cate Blanchett to finally get the film off the ground. The issue Coppola has faced is that the movie is such an ambitious and expensive original idea that no major studio would ever touch it.
The plot of the film still remains a mystery, but GQ describes the gist of “Megalopolis” as “a love story that is also a philosophical investigation of the nature of man.”
A rumored fall shooting date has been circulating for a few months now.