Coppola shrugs off Megalopolis cost as film divides Cannes
Francis Ford Coppola shrugged off the vast fortune he personally risked on his highly polarising new film Megalopolis, as Emma Stone and Richard Gere prepared to light up the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday.
From “madly captivating” to “Megaflopolis”, reviews have gone in every direction for Coppola’s decades-in-the-making passion project a day after its world premiere on the French Cote d’Azur.
Coppola has yet to secure a US distributor for the $120 million movie for which he sold a stake in his California vineyard to self-finance. But he appeared relaxed as he faced the press yesterday.
“The money doesn’t matter,” said the 85-year-old director of classic movies such as The Godfather series.
“My children, without exception, have wonderful careers without a fortune. We are fine. It doesn’t matter,” he said.
Adam Driver stars as Caesar Catalina, a cape-twirling and Nobel Prize-winning architect hell-bent on using his seemingly magical powers to rebuild the collapsing urban sprawl into a utopian and futuristic Garden of Eden.
US reviews of the wildly ambitious and experimental movie were largely enthusiastic, while
European outlets were markedly less convinced.
Hollywood magazine Deadline hailed its “sheer audacity”, while Rolling Stone called it “a summation of a lifetime’s worth of dreaming”.
But The Guardian said it was “megabloated and megaboring”, while France's Telerama bluntly dubbed it a “catastrophe”.
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Coppola − who faced similar controversy in 1979 with Apocalypse Now, which went on to win the Cannes top prize Palme d'Or − said it is “the role of the artist, of films, to shine light on what's happening in the world”.
Should his film win, Coppola would become the first ever triple winner of the Cannes festival’s top prize. (AFP)