Francis Ford Coppola’s 40-year battle to film Megalopolis | Megalopolis

Feels like this has all the ingredient to be one of those "biggest flops of all time " movies like Heavens gate.

Several sources also felt that Coppola could be "old-school" in his behavior around women. He allegedly pulled women to sit on his lap, for example. And during one bacchanalian nightclub scene being shot for the film, witnesses say, Coppola came on to the set and tried to kiss some of the topless and scantily clad female extras. He apparently claimed he was "trying to get them in the mood."

Ew.

The climax of this films script in the 90s was Adam Driver having sex with a teen

“A battle” against like himself tho

I’m not caught up with Coppola’s work but I’ve been excited for this movie since I heard the summary. It’s a big, fuck-off film with an artist at the helm and no one to tell him what not to do. Truly, we rarely get these anymore.

It looks insane and over the top and I can’t wait to buy my ticket. Also, Driver is always a draw for me.

I wonder if the secret is that the Megalopolis documentary will be way more successful than Megalopolis....?

Such a cheap character assassination full of unnamed sources.

Adam Driver’s first day on set was particularly memorable, a source suggests. One aspect of the story involves Driver’s character’s body fusing with some futuristic organic material. Rather than using digital techniques, Coppola wanted to achieve the effect through old-school methods, using projectors and mirrors, much as he had done on Dracula, 30 years earlier. “That’s great, except nobody can move,” says the crew member. “So they basically strapped Adam Driver into a chair for six hours, and they literally took a $100 projector and projected an image on the side of his head. I’m all for experimentation, but this is really what you want to do the first day with your $10m actor?” The effect would have been quick and easy to create digitally, they say. “So he [Coppola] spends literally half of a day on what could have been done in 10 minutes.”

I mean, these people are fools, right? It's like there's no other way to make movies for them other than on the level of mainstream blockbuster filmmaking. They'd balk at William Friedkin building a hydraulic bridge for Sorcerer and then having two full-sized trucks drive accross it in a violent storm, even though this is now one of the most celebrated and talked about sequences in film history associated with a film that flopped with critics and audiences on its initial release. Forget Werner Herzog pulling a full size ship over a mountain ("why didn't you just use miniatures or animation.")

A lot of time was, apparently, wasted. A second crew member recalls: “He would often show up in the mornings before these big sequences and because no plan had been put in place, and because he wouldn’t allow his collaborators to put a plan in place, he would often just sit in his trailer for hours on end, wouldn’t talk to anybody, was often smoking marijuana … And hours and hours would go by without anything being filmed. And the crew and the cast would all stand around and wait. And then he’d come out and whip up something that didn’t make sense, and that didn’t follow anything anybody had spoken about or anything that was on the page, and we’d all just go along with it, trying to make the best out of it. But pretty much every day, we’d just walk away shaking our heads wondering what we’d just spent the last 12 hours doing.” As a third crew member puts it: “This sounds crazy to say, but there were times when we were all standing around going: ‘Has this guy ever made a movie before?’”

Oddly enough, there's anecdotes of nearly every great auteur filmmaker directing like this. Fellini, Lang, Godard, Varda, Herzog, Wenders, Kurosawa, the whole idea of the filmmaker as jazz musician, as a sculptor, finding the film as they go, experimenting, correcting, changing the shape of the film intuitively, both on-set and then in the edit.

It just seems like the conflict here is the idea that film is an art vs film as a business and the sense that a filmmaker can use as much of their own time and money as they want with the sole intention of finding something new and different for the sake of it being new and different. I hate these people.