Megadoc

Cinema is the only art that kills what it is trying to preserve. — Francis Ford Coppola 

This documentary is so good it made me retroactively give Megalopolis more stars. 

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is a work of genius that fails as a compelling story and was meant for an audience of one person — Coppola himself. Of course, that’s just my opinion.

Megadoc Director Mike Figgis, has an opinion on the film too because a documentary is just a fiction giving you someone’s opinion. 

His opinion is that If Megalopolis has problems it’s the result of hardheaded actor Shia LeBeouf. The doc delights in showing us Coppola and LeBeouf at odds. 

But watching it I just wondered if LeBeouf was the only one with enough riding on the film that he was willing to point out that the emperor had no clothes. 

Also, maybe you can fix Godfather III by handing Robert Duvall the money he wants to come back as Tom Hagen but there is no acting change that’s going to “fix” Megalopolis.

Hearing Coppola himself describe his opus gives you every reason why it failed: This movie will heal the world.

I love movies, folks, and I love dreamers, but I don’t think that particular goal is within the grasp of any filmmaker. 

Famously, Coppola, then in his 80s, took 150 million of his own fortune and funded his vision. This movie did not make its money back. 

I doubt Coppola will die in the poor house but this was a spectacular gamble that did not financially pay off. 

The documentary makes it clear that Coppola wouldn’t have it any other way. This is a man who has been to the mountaintop and blown it all up more than once. 

Coppola’s peers include some of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived and none of them have a similar hit to disaster ratio. George Lucas is the only one who does an interview and he rightly points out that, you know, he figured out a way to make movies for a long time and also become a billionaire. 

He never (at least after the 70s) made anything as wild or as artful as Coppola though. Make of that what you will. 

Figgis doesn’t completely let Coppola off the hook. Keying in on more than one moment of self reflection. 

“My opinion on this movie we always have too may people, too much stuff, to many equipment, to many everything. Everything becomes hard. This is simple.”

In another telling moment Coppola says this: I’m a second rate director. But I’m a first rate second rate director. 

Honestly, he’s far too harsh on himself he’s a first rate first rate director but he also probably needs someone he trusts to tell him when he’s driving the corvette off the cliff. 

And yet … no one else ever made anything like Megalopolis and I doubt anyone ever will. 

“You look at it and you are like, ‘I don’t know how that’s going to work.’ Well he doesn’t know how it’s going to work either. But he’s brave enough to risk it,” Laurence Fishburne says. 

If I ran a studio this is what I would do. I’d go to Francis and I’d say, here’s $20 million, go find an actor, an actress and get a gun from the prop department. Then make whatever you want. 

I doubt he’d take me up on it. But if he did you can bet he would make something brilliant that you have never seen before.