As for Megalopolis… Well, it looks good. I mean, we made the offer now to several actors. I can’t say they’ve accepted, but they were very enthusiastic. One of them is Jude Law and another Shia LaBeouf. I may shortly have my lead actress. The whole world of casting is so different today—when you invite an actor to read a script, right away they want an offer to go with it, when sometimes you just want to get together with them and see if they’re the right choice. Right now I have several enthusiastic people.
I don’t have any official backers. I have a sort of philosophy of how to do it, and it’s not dissimilar to how I did Apocalypse Now, where I line up a whole bunch of territories and I put it together with the bank. In one case, one of these technology companies… I can’t say which one. But as you know, in the next five years the whole film industry is going to be owned by Apple, Facebook, Amazon. One of those newly emerged media giants is intrigued by the idea.
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Clint is great and his performance in The Mule was so good. I’d give anything to work with him, and I proposed that. It’s hard, because Clint can just do what he wants. He can make any movie he wants and just direct it if he wishes. He hasn’t really gotten back to me yet, but I can wish.
So we went to all the territories and each says, “I’ll give you $2m,” or whatever. You take those pledge letters to the bank and come up with a completion guarantee and you’ve created the financing for a picture. You have partners, but most of the final cash is a bank loan. I have a pretty big company and we’re possibly able to be a partner, and I’m totally willing to do it, so that would be my ace in the whole.
I’ve been saying for 10 years that, basically, social media, despite what you think, is not content. Anyone who’s ever really explored social media—it hasn’t been around that long—knows that you get really bored quickly and you realize, “Why am I wasting my time? What do I care?” Now it’s grandparents who go on it because they see the children, little kids. When the big media companies understand that social media is not perpetual content, well what’s important is that those companies are the movie industry. And one of those companies has expressed some interest in being sort of a home for it for U.S. and then helping me gather commitments from Australia, from France, Germany, Japan. But I have my own company, which can finance too.
You’ve been through this before, gambling on Apocalypse Now and One From The Heart. You are much better off financially now. Would you put yourself at stake again to see through your dream project?
It depends on the ratio. Say we’re taking about a $120m movie, or it could be $80m. It’s a big hunk of dough. My company is worth much more than that. Also, I went bankrupt once, so I have always been very frightened of debt. Debt’s scary when they come and they tell your wife she can’t have an account at the grocery store any more. We’ll see.
How best to describe the ambition behind the new movie? I’ve heard you had hundreds of pages written, and shot second unit.
Basically, what it does is it takes a Roman epic based on real things that happened 2,000 years ago, because really America is like the modern historical counterpart of Rome. We’re just like Rome. We’re practical. We’re good engineers. We have project power. That’s what Rome had, so I sort of thought America was the modern Rome and therefore, if I set this particular story that’s a famous Roman thing in modern Manhattan, it sort of worked a little bit.
There is an accident, and you have an architect trying to rebuild the city as a utopia. And a mayor trying to stop him…
Utopia in Greek means the place that doesn’t exist. Personally, and I say this with great sincerity, I believe it can exist. I believe in the genius of the human species in its ability to come up with solutions to all of the problems that plague us. But the biggest problem of all is to get those people out of the way who like it the way it is, because they’re already in a perfect situation. In other words, there’s already a whole group that control petroleum so they’re never going to get rid of petroleum.
Self-interested, wealthy people…
But we have the genius to make a society. The script talks about what that society is like. My movie was about utopia. You know, like so many films today, Mad Max and everything, the future—even in some of the gorgeous films—is always a terrible place. To me, when I was a kid and saw The Shape of Things to Come, the future was a great thing. It’s what we all wish it could be. When I went to Disneyland I remember the thing that just knocked me out was the Monsanto Home of the Future. I wanted to live in that house. People get scared and worried about A.I. and that’s how certain people gain power. Now, that’s with self-driving trucks that supposedly will put people out of work. But they don’t say the other half, which is that maybe more people will become paid citizens who’ll get out of employment. You’ll get a check not as a worker but as a shareholder of the country. Why shouldn’t you get $70,000 a year as a dividend from the great wealth of our beautiful country? You could if some people don’t gobble it all up for themselves. So in other words, the fear of losing work isn’t the issue, because you’ll be able to do the work you love. That’s what my script explores.
I was shooting the second unit in New York, and we get attacked by Islamic terrorists. My movie is all about New York as the center of the world, but how do you make a movie about the center of the world without it dealing with the fact that, right in the heart of it, it was attacked and thousands of people were killed? How do you make a movie of utopia with that history?
So I tried. I wrote, I wrote and finally I abandoned it and then later on I went into a new way of thinking, and worked on that. I wasn’t fully confident, but then I lost weight and it felt like time.
I looked at some of the tests and some of the readings of actors for Megalopolis and I said that same fatal thing; it wasn’t as bad as I thought. There was something here. So I began to become excited about it again. I think I have a very viable script but I also had all the second unit shot already, and I began to have some interest from some actors. It’s a big, ambitious project. It has a big cast.
I think if the film could be fortunate enough to be taken by the industry not so much as, “Here’s another wacky Coppola thing, he’ll never do it,” or, “Where is he going to get the money?” But instead, “This is exciting. We want him to do this.” There are 12 big parts and now it becomes about, how do you get all these actors working together, and pay them?
Is Megalopolis the fulfillment of a dream at the end of a great career, or the start of things to come, where you return to large canvas filmmaking?
I think I will only play on the large canvas because I’ve made all the little experimental films that I wanted to experiment with, and now I’m ready to try out what I think I’ve learned. I’m 80, but I have a 102-year-old uncle who just wrote a new opera that has been well received. Genetically, I could have 20 years and I will need that long to do everything I’m excited about wanting to do.
