It’s been almost exactly a year since I first saw Megalopolis, and the last 12 months haven’t been kind to Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating epic. It mostly bewildered critics and audiences, earned back just a fraction of its $120 million budget, and still isn’t easily accessible via streaming or a Blu-ray release. Megalopolis is a film that the Godfather director had been thinking about for decades before the cameras started rolling, and that post-release chaos is nothing compared to what actually went into making the feature a reality. So even if you didn’t really get what Megalopolis was all about, or haven’t seen it at all, the new documentary Megadoc is still an incredible look at a Hollywood legend in over his head.
Megadoc is helmed by Leaving Las Vegas director Michael Figgis, who had plenty of access to just about everything — with the exception of the inside of Coppola’s trailer — during the several months it took to film Megalopolis. The stakes are made very clear from the beginning: Coppola funded the film himself, selling a stake in his family’s winery to get the money. But it’s a movie he’d been working on in some form for nearly 40 years, and needed to get made. “Who cares if you die broke,” he asks at the beginning of the documentary, “if you made something that you think is beautiful?”
From the beginning, it becomes clear that there’s an incompatibility between Coppola’s directing style and the scale and ambitions of the movie he so desperately wants to make, which he admits is the biggest production he’s ever worked on, far surpassing his most notable works Apocalypse Now and the Godfather trilogy. He has an improvisational approach, which involves trying things out to see if they work. The actors mostly seem to enjoy the freedom inherent in this looser style of directing, even if they don’t always understand what’s going on. Some describe shooting scenes as rehearsals that just happen to be taking place in front of a camera. (The one exception seems to be Shia Labeouf, who frequently clashes with the director.) It’s clear that Coppola wants to create a set that encourages creativity. “Toil gives you nothing,” he says. “Play gives you everything.”
You can see it early on in table reads, when the actors play games like being asked to choose what Halloween costume their character would wear. During an early screen test with Aubrey Plaza, Coppola asks her to repeat the same line over and over again but in different scenarios; as if she was a “mad queen,” for example, or a stand-up comedian. Plaza called it “the weirdest Zoom of my life.”
The filmmaker’s improvisational approach runs into issues when combined with the complexities of big-budget movie making. Coppola admits that this is the biggest production he’s ever worked on, and at times he seems overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it all, which slows things down and makes improvisation all that much harder. It’s hard to stay loose when you have to wait hours for costumes or special effects. While he’s full of energy and ideas early on, you can see his frustration growing over the course of filming when, for example, a broken prop necklace holds up production while the crew desperately try to glue it back together. At one point he simply retreats to his trailer to get away from it all.
Making matters worse is that while Coppola is clear on the vision for Megalopolis, it seems most of the cast and crew aren’t. This leads to conflicts, most notably with the visual effects team, who were let go midway through production.
One of the most interesting parts of Megadoc is how it really shows how the $120 million budget was spent, whether it was on the art department, transportation, or even how costly it is to feed hundreds of extras over several days. Early on Coppola buys — and renovates — an entire hotel to house the cast and crew. You also get a good sense of just how long it took to get Megalopolis made, which, because of its complexity and sheer weirdness, was passed over by multiple studios, forcing Coppola to foot the bill himself. Giancarlo Esposito notes that he first read the script nearly 25 years ago, and there’s table read footage from an earlier iteration of the film with big stars like Uma Thurman, Ryan Gosling, and Robert De Niro. You can see their rehearsals contrasted with the final performances of the likes of Adam Driver.
Unfortunately, Megadoc shies away from exploring some of the film’s bigger controversies, like reports of the director’s unprofessional on-set behavior, those weird AI-generated review quotes, or the decision to specifically hire “cancelled” actors like Labeouf. Labeouf does allude to this somewhat, saying that in the years between his casting and actually filming, he “basically fucked up my whole life,” and that he spent much of his time worried he’d be eventually fired. But it’s not something the movie touches on explicitly.
It’s disappointing we don’t get the full picture of Megalopolis in that way, but the documentary is still a rare, raw glimpse into how movies get made, and the clashes that can occur between ambition and creativity. It’s up there with Heart of Darkness and Jodorowsky’s Dune — and like both of those classic docs, it’s both an excellent companion piece and a story that stands on its own.
Megadoc is playing in select theaters on September 19th.
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