Apocalypse Now, the sequel: inside Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘chaotic’ $120m sci-fi gamble

In the music industry there's something known as the “Bono chat” – the infamous pep talk that the U2 frontman is said to give up-and-coming music stars, warning them of the difficulties that they will face along with their success. For the film industry equivalent, young aspirant directors should simply be shown the career of Francis Ford Coppola and told to take heed of the lessons that can be learnt from it. 

They should be gravely warned that Coppola’s extraordinarily varied life, which has included everything from winning five Oscars to financial near-ruin – to say nothing of a filmmaking style so chaotic that it has spawned its own acclaimed documentaries – is what can happen when a combination of undeniable talent, hubris and a refusal to listen to anyone come together. The consequences can be every bit as dramatic as anything that can be found in Coppola’s distinguished filmography. 

Perhaps inevitably, disaster has been said to befall him once again, this time on a project that the director has intended as his career-capping magnum opus. Megalopolis, as it is called, is said to be a hugely ambitious drama, with elements of sci-fi and fantasy, that revolves around New York in a parallel universe. Yet its production is said to have descended into chaos amidst reports of key crew members walking out and others describing the atmosphere on set as “absolute madness”. With rumours circulating that the film will never be completed, has one of Hollywood’s greatest visionaries and gamblers finally, at the age of 83, made his Waterloo? 

For Coppola, Megalopolis is not just a much-cherished dream project, but the culmination of years of thinking, preparation and investment. He described it as “a Roman epic with the story of an architect who wants to rebuild a utopian New York City after a devastating disaster”, and has been working on the project for four decades: the actor Rob Lowe, who worked with Coppola on his 1983 film The Outsiders, discussed it with him back then, as the director worked on a screenplay. 

Over the intervening years, Coppola has been open about taking on films that seemed beneath his talents – most notably the Robin Williams vehicle Jack – in order to raise the money to fund both the development and production of Megalopolis. Yet after 9/11, he seemed to lose interest in the project, later saying that “it made it really pretty tough… a movie about the aspiration of utopia with New York as a main character and then all of a sudden you couldn’t write about New York without just dealing with what happened and the implications of what happened. The world was attacked and I didn’t know how to try to do with that.” 

He devoted himself to low-budget personal projects, the most recent of which, the Val Kilmer-starring Twixt, was barely released and made virtually no money. Coppola seemed to have retired from mainstream filmmaking, instead busying himself with apparently endless edits of the Godfather pictures and being a passionate advocate, along with his friend and occasional rival Martin Scorsese, for the primacy of the cinematic experience. 

It seemed unlikely, if not impossible, that he would ever be making a film again that was likely to appear in cinemas; unlike Scorsese, who continues to make high-profile films, Coppola seemed to have settled into his other career as a Californian winemaker of note.

It therefore came as something of a surprise to an industry that thought Coppola had left it behind – or vice versa – that he announced in 2019 he had resumed development on Megalopolis. Similar rumours had been heard over the years, and it was treated with appropriate caution, but, by 2021, he had a cast assembled – which at one stage was to have included his Godfather star James Caan, but his death last year made that impossible – and was intent on making the picture with a budget of around $120 million dollars. It would, Coppola told an understandably sceptical media, be funded from him having sold “a significant piece of his wine empire”, making it probably the most expensive self-funded picture ever made. 

For many, this would seem like the pinnacle of self-indulgence, but for Coppola, it’s business as usual. As he said in an interview with GQ, “I know that Megalopolis, the more personal I make it, and the more like a dream in me that I do it, the harder it will be to finance. And the longer it will earn money because people will be spending the next 50 years trying to think: What's really in Megalopolis? What is he saying? My God, what does that mean when that happens.” 

He began his career making micro-budgeted films like Dementia 13 and You’re A Big Boy Now, honing his craft on pictures where he had total control over the finished product, and he has continued to display this single-minded determination much later in life, ensuring that his vision cannot be compromised by paying for his films himself. 

In the case of Megalopolis, which began filming in November last year, the $120 million has paid for a cast including the likes of Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel and Forest Whitaker – respected actors but not the A-list stars who might drive curious audiences to the cinema – and cutting-edge special effects techniques that are said to be similar to those used on the hit show The Mandalorian. Unfortunately, Coppola has not worked with special effects of this magnitude in his career before, and has reportedly clashed with veteran visual effects supervisor Mark Russell, firing him before production designer Beth Mickle and supervising art director David Scott left, too. 

At the time of writing, the industry title The Hollywood Reporter observes that Megalopolis has no art department, and is frantically casting about to replace Russell. It remains uncertain as to whether the picture will ever be finished, or whether the footage that Coppola has already shot will end up being little more than a curiosity, a “what might have been” that has cost the director an unimaginable fortune, and will go on to cost even more. 

As one production executive quoted by the Hollywood Reporter says, “[Coppola] is going to spend a lot more money than he intended. You can imagine how much he’s already got invested. It would be a very bitter pill not to finish it.” 

The filmmaker, predictably, has denied that the film is in chaos, commenting to the industry title Deadline that “These reports never say who these sources are. To them, I say, ha, ha, just wait and see. Because this is a beautiful film and primarily so because the cast is so great…It is a thrill to work with these actors and the photography is everything I could hope for. The dailies are great. So if we’re on schedule, and I love the actors and the look is great, I don’t know what anyone’s talking about here.” 

His lead actor Driver acknowledged the departure of key crew – “not all departments find cohesion on films” – but claims that rumours of the project’s imminent demise are greatly exaggerated, saying “No one signed up for this movie expecting the process to be conventional. We were expecting the opposite in the pursuit of making something unique. The only madness I’ve observed is that more productions aren’t allowed to be as creatively wild and experimentally focused.” 

Any cineaste must hope that Driver and Coppola are correct, and that Megalopolis proves a stunning triumph. But those who have been watching the director’s career closely may be unsurprised by the confusion. Although the making of his first major hit The Godfather was certainly far from uneventful – and has inspired the recent miniseries The Offer, with Dan Fogler playing Coppola – the film’s success, and that of its sequel led to his being given an unusual amount of creative leeway to make Apocalypse Now, a loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness set in the Vietnam War. 

During the course of a notoriously troubled production that was beset by everything from tropical storms, its lead actor Martin Sheen having a heart attack and the gradual mental disintegration of its cast and crew, Coppola retained a certain crazed vigour, even as his wife Eleanor documented the entire process for her acclaimed film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. (Director Mike Figgis is reportedly working on a similar documentary on the making of Megalopolis.)

As he later said, “We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment and little by little, we went insane.” The film was a masterpiece, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was vastly profitable, apparently justifying Coppola’s extreme methods. But anyone thinking of funding his future pictures should have listened to his statement at the Cannes Film Festival that “My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like.” 

If the director sold his soul to the devil to ensure success throughout the Seventies, Satan soon came calling. Coppola ran of luck ran out with his 1982 musical drama One From The Heart, a Tom Waits-scored fantasy set in Las Vegas. It lost around $25 million and heralded a miserable decade in which Coppola made flop after flop, including the gangster drama The Cotton Club and the downbeat Gardens of Stone. 

The only two successes that he had were the wildly atypical romantic comedy Peggy Sue Got Married and the low-budget youth picture The Outsiders: the latter remains most notable today for its ensemble cast of future stars including Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze and Matt Dillon, showing that Coppola’s ability to spot talent. He then had two big hits with The Godfather Part III – even if that film attracted unnecessary controversy because of his casting his daughter Sofia in a key role – and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, another picture with a chaotic and troubled production that nonetheless turned out rather well in the end. 

Yet that was 30 years ago, and since then Coppola has been almost entirely absent from most cinemagoers’ horizons, save his accomplished but anonymous 1997 John Grisham adaptation The Rainmaker. He has made films for himself, such as Youth Without Youth and Tetro, which remain unseen by general audiences, and, by 2015, seemed to consider himself retired, an anachronism in the age of superhero pictures and franchise films. 

As he said then, “That's why I ended my career: I decided I didn't want to make what you could call 'factory movies' anymore. I would rather just experiment with the form, and see what I could do, and [make things] that came out of my own. And little by little, the commercial film industry went into the superhero business, and everything was on such a scale. The budgets were so big, because they wanted to make the big series of films where they could make two or three parts. I felt I was no longer interested enough to put in the extraordinary effort a film takes.” 

 By the sound of things, he should have heeded his own advice. If Megalopolis somehow does turn out to be a career-defining masterpiece, then it will be a final triumph for Coppola the gambler, and a vindication of his bloody-minded, uncompromising approach. But if it transpires that he has fallen foul of the most basic rule of cinematic economics – do not spend your own money on your passion project, because that presupposes audiences will be as interested in it as you are – then, alas, his last chapter will be added to the annals of cautionary tales and a reminder that, sometimes, it’s easier just to let things go.