Megalopolis and Megadoc
Francis Ford Coppola's ambition
By now, the finer details of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis – stuck in development hell for 40 years, its production derailed by a revolving door of actors and art departments, finally released in 2024 to bewildered reviews, failing to recoup even a tenth of its $170 million budget – have hardened into the stuff of legend, a megaflop. Mike Figgis’ making-of documentary Megadoc, which TANK hosted the premiere of last night for friends and family at Regent’s Street Cinema, looks to cut through the headlines to reveal something more intimate: a portrait of the artist at the centre of the storm.
Contrary to what the media reports have suggested, the image of Coppola that emerges is less his generation’s greatest filmmaker lost to delusion than a fiercely committed artist chasing a singular vision, at admittedly hilarious expense and extravagance. Shot on digital video with a team of two, Figgis’ film provides a fascinating, fly-on-the-wall view into the artist’s process. The documentary closed to rapturous applause, a level of positive consensus the original Megalopolis certainly evaded.
Megalopolis was completed when Coppola was 85, and just before his wife of 60 years Eleanor died, and the film pulses with the dual energies of anticipated elegy and naive optimism. Its time-stopping architect protagonist Cesar Catilina is a man whose grand ambitions for the future are forever being curtailed by ladder-climbing media vultures, envious family members and the stifling forces of bureaucracy. Yet by the end of Megalopolis, the citizenry has rallied behind Cesar and his dream of a better world. That the film’s wild ambition was met with bafflement rather than appreciation only heightens its metatextual pathos. It is a portrait of an artist in the wrong era, holding fast to his faith in cinema’s purity – from its grand scale to the tactility of practical effects – even as that belief is being engulfed by a colder, more cynical cultural landscape.
In an era of formulaic live-action reheats of public domain stories, there is something heroic about Coppola’s patrician’s belief in cinema as tabula rasa – a space where anything can and should happen. Compare Megalopolis to a more recent fiasco, Disney’s retelling of Snow White, released today, and the disparities couldn’t be clearer. Both films burned through eye-watering nine-figure budgets and politically headlocked actors. But Snow White was a product of hedge betting: marketed as a “contemporary” reinvention, yet somehow more offensive in its blandness. In attempting to please everyone, it has pleased no one: from the apparently insufficient whiteness of lead actress Rachel Zegler, the backlash surrounding the casting of pro-Israel actress Gal Gadot and a never-ending discourse regarding its depiction of dwarf actors, the film has arrived to screens with a colossal thud. Where Disney’s disaster is a masterclass in creative cowardice, a mediocre film engineered by committee, Coppola reaches for transcendence and lands somewhere in beautiful, bizarre ruin.
Matteo Pini
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