Francis Ford Coppola‘s big return with this year’s Megalopolis may not have had the reception that he was hoping for. Then again, the renowned filmmaker says he’s never had a project praised right out of the gate. Coppola never felt blindsided by the criticisms as he’s accustomed to butting heads with the studios as he stays true to his visions. He states, “I was almost fired on all of them.” Coppola, then continues, “The lesson is that the same things that they fire you for are the same things that later they give you lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.”
The Washington Post catches up with the Godfather and Apocalypse Now director as he gets honored at the Kennedy Center for his career. Although Megalopolis was a gamble that ended up flopping, Coppola still believes the film will eventually find its audience and that it will “play for 40 years.” He dreams that people will watch the movie on New Year’s Eve and ponder over the question, “Is the society we’re living in the only one available to us?” Whether or not his dream comes to fruition, Coppola is now moving on to his next project in London, which is said to be a “30s-style strange musical” that is based on the 1922 Edith Wharton novel Glimpses of the Moon.
Additionally, even at Coppola’s age, he still wants to make another epic, this time, a movie titled Distant Vision, which would be based on Thomas Mann’s 1901 novel Buddenbrooks. That story will follow three generations of an Italian family and be centered on the invention of television. Reportedly, to prepare for the project, he’s been doing experimental workshops on the concept since 2015.
The iconic filmmaker aims to keep busy by also revisiting some of his past smaller films, like 2007’s Youth Without Youth and 2009’s Tetro and re-editing them. He got the itch to go back and fix his films when he had to make some forced corrected cuts to his 1984 movie The Cotton Club back in 2019, “I mean, who would suggest to cut 30 minutes of Black people tap-dancing out of a movie about Black people tap-dancing? Now it’s balanced. It’s beautiful.”
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