Megalopolis is now streaming on MUBI

Movies don’t get more spectacular, more hallucinatory or more wildly bonkers than Megalopolis, the hugely ambitious and uninhibited new film from Hollywood titan Francis Ford Coppola. This is what cinema looks like when a great director gets the chance to make the film they’ve been trying to get produced for more than four decades. By working outside the studio system and financing the film independently, Coppola has created a work that’s bursting at the seams with bold ideas, huge performances and visual invention. 

Coppola's chaotic process during the production of Megalopolis is soon to be laid bare in the fly-on-the-wall documentary Megadoc, directed by Mike Figgis. It's described as "a record of a production on the brink; a personal memoir unfolding in real time:, and has its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. One thing it might explore is how Megalopolis acts very much like a culmination of Coppola's long, topsy-turvy career, given that it blends the epic scale of the masterpieces he became famous for in the 70s (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) with the playfulness of the more idiosyncratic films he made later in his career, like Rumble Fish, Peggy Sue Got Married and Tetro. Megalopolis also shares some of the jaw-dropping visual excess Coppola demonstrated with his two most beautiful films: One From the Heart and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Megalopolis tells the story of Cesar Catilina (played by Adam Driver), an enigmatic genius who dreams of a better world. He’s an inhabitant of New Rome, a sprawling metropolis that looks very much like today’s New York spliced with the Eternal City. It’s a cesspit of greed and corruption, but Cesar, who’s a master architect, has a dream to turn it into an urban utopia through his forward-thinking designs and the incredible new building material he’s invented. But plenty of forces, including a small-minded mayor (Giancarlo Esposito), a sleazy banker (Jon Voight), and Cesar’s hoodlum cousin, Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), are trying to stand in his way. Amid all this betrayal and backstabbing, Cesar also finds time to fall in love with Catilina (Nathalie Emmanuel), the whip-smart party girl who’s the mayor’s daughter. Throw into the mix a scene-stealing Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum, a TV news reporter with her own scurrilous ambitions, and you’ve a pretty heady brew with one of the craziest movie casts in recent memory. 

While watching Megalopolis, there’s a feeling that Coppola, who was 85 when he made it, has let his creativity fully run loose. The Oscar-winner is clearly having lots of fun playing in the toolbox of cinema, blending old-school filmmaking techniques with the latest possibilities of digital technology. At times, Megalopolis resembles a stage-bound Hollywood epic like DW Griffith’s Intolerance or Fritz Lang’s similarly-named Metropolis, while at others it calls to mind the digital vistas of late Tim Burton or the Wachowskis at their most maximalist. The result is a bold and often messy display of unadulterated ambition. 

Many critics have pointed out that Megalopolis's plot is a nifty metaphor for its own tortured making. Much like his protagonist Cesar, Coppola is someone who often lays everything on the line for his art. While making the feverish war epic Apocalypse Now, the director seemed to briefly go insane in the Filipino jungle, as detailed in the documentary Hearts of Darkness. A few years later, Coppola then put his whole studio in jeopardy to make his glorious musical One From the Heart, which was wonderfully excessive but went way over budget and proved financially ruinous.

In this tale of a maverick architect pushing the limits of his art form, it’s hard not to see parallels with Coppola himself. When no Hollywood studio was willing to back this daring sci-fi epic, reports are that the director sold off a huge chunk of his successful winery business to raise the $120 million needed for the budget. Working with his own money, Coppola didn’t play it safe and created a film that’s a total one-off; it breaks all the rules of cinema, plays to its own strange rhythms and at times is completely batshit crazy. Whatever speculation and controversy you’ve heard about Megalopolis, there’s no doubt it’s the work of a true visionary, and it simply has to be seen to be believed. With Megalopolis arriving on streaming, now’s your chance to finally try this one-of-a-kind experience.

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Megalopolis is streaming exclusively on MUBI from 5 Sep
To get 30 days of MUBI free, head to mubi.com/theskinny