Francis Ford Coppola "Not Interested" In Streaming For 'Megalopolis'

It’s been a very long road for Francis Ford Coppola with Megalopolis, the movie he’s wanted to make for 40 years. And finally, at Cannes on Thursday night, he got his premiere, with a standing ovation both before and after the film, the latter lasting some seven-and-a-half minutes.

“It’s a little surreal,” Coppola said. “Finding yourself in that situation and also understanding that, OK, after whatever it was, this is the moment of truth where I’m going to find out if this all jelled or didn’t jell. So you can imagine, it was a little dream-like. Of course I hope that it would go well. And from my standpoint, it went very well, so I was very appreciative.”

Much talk has surrounded the film, with Coppola’s decision to self-finance to the tune of $120 million, and the film’s current lack of U.S. distribution deal. Mixed, but mostly positive-leaning reviews have emerged from the film’s festival debut, but they also came on the heels of much gossip.

In an interview on Friday for Deadlines’ Cannes Studio, Coppola was asked what he made of all that talk.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m aware that we’re living in times post-internet where many things are changing. One of the things that are changing is journalism. It’s going through a trauma of, how will journalism survive? Many things, how will that survive?”

He also expounded on the state of the film industry. “What will happen to cinema? Will it stay the way it is, or will it evermore turn into basically making sequels and the same movie over and over again? If the people who are the gatekeepers being that a movie has to have certain commercial elements or it can’t be made. Will that mean that certain movies can’t be made anymore.”

Coppola said that given the experience of meeting many roadblocks throughout his career, he had “tried not to adhere to the rules, and tried to live by my own rules.”

“When I was young, I remember I wanted to make a musical and I was told, ‘Well you know, musicals are not being made now.’ And I said, ‘Well why not? Is it because they’ve decided musicals are not a good… and then later on, I wanted to make a Western, and I was told, ‘Well Westerns are not really being made now. I developed a whole Western that I thought was a really wonderful script with the writer who had written it, and no one – they said they’re not doing Westerns and so I lost it, but fortunately, Clint Eastwood bought the script and made it into Unforgiven. It was the script that nobody would let me make. So I don’t understand this idea that certain movies can be made, and certain movies can’t be made. Why can’t whatever is alive be made? And so, I tried to live my life in a way that, for me at least, that would be possible.”

Megalopolis is set in Coppola’s imagining of a New Rome-esque Manhattan, with Adam Driver as Catalina, the future-minded Chairman of the Design Authority. Catalina clashes with the city’s Mayor, Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) who is against Catalina’s utopian plan to rebuild the city with a renewable material that will potentially elevate the underclasses, while Cicero wants to keep to tradition and concrete.

Driver called making Megalopolis “one of the best shooting experiences I’ve ever had.” This was not his first time seeing the film, he said, “but I hadn’t seen it with an audience and I hadn’t seen it with, in this instance, D.B. Sweeney walking on in the interactive press conference part”—referring to a moment in which Coppola breaks the fourth wall in the film.

“Whenever I saw it, it was the same aspect ratio,” Driver continued, “so, I was really moved by it in ways that I hadn’t been before, which I think is a testament to the movies that Francis makes. He’s very principled in making scenes and dialogue and have characters show and not tell. And that’s why his movies, in part, why they have longevity, because there’s always something to discover about them. And with this one too, I was moved in times that I hadn’t been before.”

As the mayor’s daughter, Julia, who falls in love with Catalina, Nathalie Emmanuel said making the film was a “once in a lifetime experience.”

“It’s been really special, and a very unique experience and like nothing I’d ever experienced before,” she said. “And to be trusted to play a character in a movie that has been an idea for 40 years, it was a huge responsibility and it’s been really special. The cast and Francis and everybody was so collaborative and supportive. The thing that I’ll take away from it is just how dedicated everybody was, and that sense of service to this vision of Francis’s. Just that real commitment and everyone really threw themselves in and really surrendered to the process.”

Aubrey Plaza stars as Wow Platinum, an ambitious journalist first romantically involved with Catalina, then married to Jon Voight’s uber-rich Hamilton Crassus III. She fondly recalled the games the cast played on set. “So many games,” she said. “I’ll never forget Francis made Jon Voight and I play a game where we had to entwine our bodies.” Gesturing to Driver, Plaza told him, “I think we did it too, right before we did our scene. Where we had to become one organism and talk the same and say the same thing at the same time and move our limbs and become some kind of creature. And I like things like that.”

The premiere was Plaza’s first time seeing the film. Were there any surprises? “The whole thing was a surprise,” she said, “it was amazing. It was very emotional, very overstimulating, but beautiful. It was very, very amazing to see it like that the first time. I’m happy that’s the way I saw it.”

Deadline understands that in his recent European distribution deals, Coppola has notably withheld the television and VOD rights from buyers. Is a streaming deal something he would ever consider? “Since I took the risk,” he said, “I want to own that, which I do, so I’m not interested in selling that to someone else. I want to be able to control it.”

“Streaming is a funny word,” he said. “Back with The Godfather, I was sent by Paramount, who made The Godfather at that time, to go on a tour to introduce to audiences the idea of home video. I went all around and showed, ‘Here is The Godfather on a disc.’ And then later it became DVDs, and streaming is just home video. I don’t know why they call it streaming, it’s home video. Everyone knows what that is. And of course people have now, in their home, beautiful television sets with good sound. Of course there’ll be a life for that. But that’s where the long-term money is for movies. It’s the 40 years of people buying the same movie over and over again, which happened to Apocalypse Now.”

The Deadline Studio is presented by Neom.