"Freedom can only be taken, at a price, and, for Francis Ford Coppola, the price of freedom to make the grand-scale political fantasy " Megalopolis " was a hundred and twenty million dollars, which he raised by selling off part of his winery. He'd been trying to make the movie for about thirty years. He finally got to shoot it in 2022 and 2023, when he was eighty-three."
"With "Megalopolis," the first freedom that Coppola seized was the freedom to fail. "Megadoc" opens with Coppola admitting that he's scared, which he calls "a really good thing": "I'm doing something I don't know how to do." He's investing his own money-but he's not scared of losing it; if commercial failure is what it takes for him to succeed, by his own lights, artistically, so be it."
Even benevolent producers who give directors total freedom cannot fully neutralize the power imbalance created by their generosity. Francis Ford Coppola financed his grand-scale political fantasy Megalopolis by selling part of his winery and spending about $120 million after three decades of effort. He finally shot the film in 2022–2023 at age eighty-three and invited Mike Figgis to document the production. Coppola embraced the freedom to fail, welcomed fear as a productive force, invested his own money without fearing commercial loss, cited Jacques Tati's Playtime as precedent, and prioritized working in ways that delight him and let him have fun with actors.
Read at The New Yorker
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