Megalopolis flopping and collecting Razzies isn’t deterring Francis Ford Coppola from moving on from his latest dystopian epic. Coppola has a tendency to revisit and recut his films, much like his friend George Lucas. The director famously re-released his nightmarish Vietnam film with the new title Apocalypse Now Redux and he recently re-edited his maligned sequel, The Godfather Part III, into a more manageable cut, which he calls Mario Puzo’s The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. Now Coppola is planning to revise Megalopolis, but says his new edit will be “more weird.”
According to IndieWire, Coppola said, “It was [originally] more weird. I own the picture, I can do anything I want with it.” He explained that he had cut these sequences out of the film “because already people were saying this film was so weird.”
Coppola is touring with the film with Live Nation for an event called, “An Evening With Francis Ford Coppola and Megalopolis.” The event not only features the film but also a post-screening Q&A with the director himself under the theme of “Bow to Change Our Future.” As for locations, the six-city tour kicked off in Red Bank, New Jersey, before heading off to Port Chester, New York, Chicago, Denver, Dallas, and San Francisco.
As per Coppola in a statement, “This is the way Megalopolis was meant to be seen, in a large venue, with a crowd and followed by intense interactive discussions about the future.” Coppola himself has not been keen on Megalopolis hitting streaming simply because that’s what’s in right now but has instead been rather adamant that the film be seen as intended: on the big screen.
Much like Hearts of Darkness, a documentary about the making of Megalopolis was made called Megadoc. Mike Figgis directs and will debut it at Venice this year. A theatrical release will follow sometime in September. Figgis said in a statement, “Francis gave me access to everything, including the amazing archive material he’s accumulated of the many readings of the script as it went from one version to another. I was more or less free to go where I wanted. The cast were open about the working situation and how they were dealing with the idiosyncrasies of Francis and his very individual working methods. What a privilege to be a witness to such a moment in film history.”
Megadoc has the following synopsis: A raw, fly-on-the-wall documentary about Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-long journey in creating his self-financed passion project, Megalopolis. The bold and unrelenting epic returns in Mike Figgis’ portrait of Coppola’s creative process – weaving together archival material, unfiltered cast interviews, and a close-up view of how the legendary filmmaker drew from Roman history, political allegory, and his own singular vision to shape the world of Megalopolis. This isn’t a record of a production on the brink, it’s a personal memoir unfolding in real time. The running time is 107 minutes.
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