The “Megalopolis” that Francis Ford Coppola wanted to create

While he was working on his latest film, MegalopolisFrancis Ford Coppola had an idea: What if viewers interacted with the film itself? At each screening, he had microphones set up throughout the audience so that at a predetermined time, anyone who wanted could ask the characters a question – and someone on the screen would answer. It would bridge the gap between fact and fiction. It would prove that going to the cinema can truly be a unique experience.

And it would have worked, the director told me at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month, if he had found someone to help make the technology work. Coppola had done everything else to create the experience: He had thought up questions he assumed people would ask – like how the characters were feeling or what they wanted to do next – and he had questions for every one wrote different answers. He then filmed his cast reciting the answers he had written. He even began working with the programmers behind Alexa, Amazon’s AI assistant, to develop a mechanism that would process viewers’ questions and play a clip with the best-fitting answer. “If you went to the cinema every day for a week and saw it seven times, every time would be different,” he said. “That was the original intention, and we shot it that way.”

But production of the now-infamous scene, as film festival-goers can attest, didn’t go according to plan – and not much else went according to plan MegalopolisRollout. Lionsgate, which signed on to distribute the film weeks after its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, had to make a trailer that used made-up quotes from critics about Coppola’s best-known work, such as: The Godfather And Apocalypse now. In July, diversity reported allegations of his misconduct on set, including attempting to kiss extras. (Coppola denied the allegations and has since filed a defamation lawsuit against them diversity.) Box office analysts have predicted the film to be a flop. And Amazon walked away from the project mid-production, leaving Coppola no choice but to reduce the interactive theater component to a single, scripted exchange.

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When we spoke, Coppola didn’t sound unsettled by how big the gap had become between his ambitions and their realization. Instead, he believed such obstacles were inevitable for an idiosyncratic filmmaker. “Cinema is something that is constantly changing,” he said. “But when you try to change it, everyone says, ‘Well, it can’t be like that.’ That’s why we have to accept a lot more when we see films that are different from the films we are used to.”

Megalopolisalthough, is a much accept. The film, in theaters today, imagines 21st century New York City. He invented a time-changing material called “Megalon.” The town’s mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), doubts Cesar’s ability to pull this off, but his socialite daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) sees promise in Cesar’s work. Building on ideas Coppola first had in 1977 and began developing into a film in 1983, Megalopolis aims to show how a decadent civilization on the brink of collapse can be saved through ideals. The result is a maximalist mess that deals with too many different themes – like the dangers of technology, the preponderance of wealth, the amorality of celebrity and the importance of preserving artistic heritage. The characters speak in non sequiturs and platitudes. Storylines are introduced and dropped randomly. By the end of my demonstration, my note pages were filled with question marks.

But despite all its flaws Megalopolis is unabashedly open-hearted and earnestly calls to imagine a better future. Perhaps that sounds as trite as the signed dialogue, but Coppola’s intention, he explained, was to inspire his audience to think like his protagonist – to create, innovate and even break the rules of cinema through Cesar directly asked a question. “Every day in the news you see grief that is unnecessary,” he said. “Nothing bad happens these days must “We are capable of solving any problem we face.” That’s why he covered up Megalopolis with homages to “every film I’ve ever loved” – including works by Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa and Alfred Hitchcock – to highlight the value of art. And after having to shelve the script until 2021, when production actually began, Coppola dealt with his own heartache by self-financing the $120 million passion project.

What he has achieved is too scattered to be considered a masterpiece, but also too sincere to be dismissed as self-indulgence. And when the audience doesn’t quite understand what he wants MegalopolisCoppola admitted that at least he thinks they will be entertained. “The film,” he said with a shrug, “isn’t boring.”

About in the middle MegalopolisCesar and Julia meet on a tower overlooking the city. They have fallen in love and when they kiss, Cesar stops time. The bouquet of flowers that Julia had dropped freezes in midair. The scaffolding they are standing on stops swinging. They are locked in an embrace, floating above New Rome. It’s a delicate, physics-defying tableau: two bodies on a motionless platform, supported by wires descending from an unseen place. For the viewer there is simply an endless, golden sky.

MegalopolisThe best moments convey Coppola’s preference for cross-border play. What if, the director wondered, an audience member not only had an audience stand up and talk to Cesar, but also recite the entire soliloquy of Hamlet, as Driver did during rehearsal? What if the tug of war between Driver and Emmanuel continued as a take? “I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that films are the children of theater and how they relate to each other,” Coppola told me. “When we play together, we are at our most creative.”

The film falters as it tries to reconcile this whimsy with its more serious goal: drawing obvious parallels between its setting, a city crumbling under corrupt leadership, and modern America. In the final act, Cesar gives a speech about how building a perfect society requires debate. But the message seems like an easily digestible slogan at best – and Megalopolis struggles to clarify how Cesar will prevent the end of the New Rome or whether Coppola himself has a guide to saving democracy.

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What the director has are theories about human potential, a topic that Coppola enthusiastically touched on several aspects in our conversation. He asked if I remembered Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellarthen he chuckled as he expressed his belief that love itself is a force made up of particles like photons – like an idea about the transcendent nature of our relationships that the space epic spawns. He assumes that every human being has the ability to “sensibly solve the problems that we have to solve in order to live on this planet.” And he explained to me how to do it MegalopolisHe tried to rewrite the events of the 1936s Future thingsa science fiction film written by HG Wells that he considers formative. It’s the story of a group of people building the city of the future, but their efforts take generations. “I never liked it,” Coppola explained. Instead, he saw room for improvement. “I said, ‘Well, my film, if they’re going to build the future, I want them to build it faster.'” After all, “artists control time,” he told me, repeating a line Megalopolis. “They always have.”

However, such control does not extend beyond the boundaries of an artist’s work. At my screening, shortly after the live question-and-answer session, the film froze on Cicero’s face and the colors merged. I wasn’t sure this was supposed to happen, and apparently neither was anyone else. “This could all be part of this?” someone wondered aloud as theater staff scrambled to restart the projector.

That wasn’t the case, but it felt like it could have been. Megalopolis imagines a universe where a man can hold memories in his hand; the “time, stop” command actually works; and characters can hear their viewers from beyond the fourth wall. But none of these experimental swings actually land, because the thing Megalopolis What Coppola needed most was something he couldn’t imagine: enough years for the technology to be capable – and for popular opinion to shift in its favor – to implement his boldest ideas.

Maybe the key to understanding MegalopolisSo it’s to see it as both unsettling and impressive, as the 85-year-old director’s terrible, epic attempt to manipulate time itself at the expense of narrative logic. Coppola had so much to bring to life his so-called fable about America: an illustrious career that allowed him to hire a top-notch cast and crew; Money from independent sources to finance a significant portion of the costs; and enough experience with other problematic productions to master them confidently. But what he ultimately created is not the realization of his desires; It is an unfinished work waiting for our reality to catch up with its imagination.