A year after Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis opened and flopped, a postmortem arrives: Megadoc, by British director Mike Figgis, who was granted permission by Coppola to follow the $120 million production. Figgis, best known for his own Stormy Monday, Internal Affairs, and Leaving Las Vegas, also observes the folly of contemporary filmmaking. This makes Megadoc a significant report on the self-destructive tendencies of Millennial cinema.
Coppola can’t repeat the success of the Godfather movies, and neither have any contemporary film directors — they don’t understand the nature of emotionally rich popular art. Megalopolis was a uniquely unappealing failure, but perhaps a close-up look holds some clue to the self-destruction endemic to Millennial movies.
Megalopolis repeats the same megalomania remembered from Apocalypse Now and One from the Heart, except that here Coppola wanted to enlighten the world. He conceived Megalopolis as an American parable that echoes the decline of the Roman Empire. It was to be another technological stretch for Coppola. (“Francis is very interested in advancing the medium,” George Lucas dutifully testifies.) Figgis reports on the six-month production that began in 2021, sympathizing with Coppola, yet never criticizing his methods. Figgis sought to rival Eleanor Coppola’s Apocalypse doc Hearts of Darkness.
Megalopolis was doomed to fail given Coppola’s tunnel vision. The analogy to imperial Rome was facile, and his semi-improvisational approach to visionary revelation was felled by a lack of political exactitude. Viewers could not relate Millennial calamity to Coppola’s historical comparisons; his misbegotten misconception was all too typical of Hollywood’s social blindness, tone deafness, and reckless spending.
After selling interest in his wine company, Coppola (at age 82) purchased a hotel in Atlanta, Ga. — a right-to-work state — to build his own studio. He proceeded on a path that his son Roman (assistant director of Megalopolis) called “an experimental mode,” as if they were doing live theater. Figgis includes early rehearsal tapes of Robert De Niro, Uma Thurman, and Billy Crudup and deleted scenes with Virginia Madsen and Ryan Gosling.
Production montages give budget tallies: art department $27M; wardrobe $7M; hair and makeup $3M; location $16M; camera $3.5M; catering $1.65M; transportation $9.4M. Yet, Figgis omits nuts and bolts of the financial set-up — how employees actually got paid — which might demystify the moviemaking process. Evidently, Megalopolis did not benefit from being made outside the studio system. Coppola, the capo, the Svengali, is not a good COO.
“Moviemaking is not work, it’s play,” he says. “Toil gives you nothing. Play gives you everything.” Figgis adds, “He’s building all the time, kind of like a jazz musician.” What we see is Big Papa filmmaking: easy-going, benevolent but demanding fealty and obedience.
“Maybe it is worth it,” Coppola instructs. “It’s industrial filmmaking. What do I get paid in? Fun. I want to have fun.” It’s a way to explain what Figgis calls his “kind of weird, experimental theater ensemble.”
When Coppola’s cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. complains — “We always have too many people, too much stuff, too much equipment, too many everything, everything becomes hard” — the problem becomes clear. Coppola’s idea of independence goes backward, to what the French New Wave had liberated cinema from.
Megalopolis alludes to Millennial madness, to social and cultural decadence without accurately conveying modern politics. But Coppola defeats himself: On a location shoot, he tells his cast and crew, “Donald Trump is coming to Atlanta to have a mini rally. I want that kind of excitement.” (If Coppola really conceived this project 30 years ago, he shouldn’t express TDS.) It seems that no one on set helped Coppola. No Mario Puzo was there to help craft his political and moral vision and steer clear of idiocy.
Coppola’s self-indulgence is matched only by his indulgence of actors — especially Shia LaBeouf, whose narcissism is so amusingly, childishly annoying that he drives Big Papa to wit’s end and pushes further. At his most humble, Coppola thinks of Richard Strauss measuring himself by Mozart, and Coppola confesses, “I’m a first-rate, second-rate director.”
One sassy cast member flatters Figgis: “That’s very Werner Herzog of you: ‘I don’t think; I just observe.’” Megadoc is Figgis’s act of homage to a respectable, even legendary, director who has made a poor film.