Francis Ford Coppola had been on hiatus for a while, but there’s no denying his is one of the OG auteur directors with films like The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Now Coppola is ready to make his return to the big screen with the star-studded Megalopolis, and we just got our first look with a clip starring Adam Driver.
Check this out:
The clip simply has Driver’s character Cesar standing on the ledge of what looks to be the Chrysler Building, and it’s revealed that he can freeze time. Here’s the plot according to Vulture:
Adam Driver stars as Cesar, an architect who plans to rebuild the city to a sustainable utopia after an accident destroys most of Megalopolis. Opposing him is Giancarlo Esposito’s Frank Cicero, who is the mayor and doesn’t want to change a thing. In between both of them is Julia Cicero, played by Nathalie Emmanuel, who’s Frank’s daughter and Cesar’s love interest.
The movie also stars Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, D.B. Sweeney, James Remar, Chloe Fineman, Grace VanderWaal, and Jason Schwartzman.
Coppola also posted the video on his IG, and there he wrote a tribute to his wife Eleanor, a filmmaker who had passed earlier this year. Coppola wrote, “Megalopolis has always been a film dedicated to my dear wife Eleanor. I really had hoped to celebrate her birthday together this May 4th. But sadly that was not to be, so let me share with everyone a gift on her behalf.”
Megalopolis was said to have been a longtime passion project for Coppola, having started development in the early 2000s, pre 9-11. Rumors were actually going around that Hollywood studios have been having trouble with the marketing of the movie (which Coppola was said to have funded himself), describing it as too arthouse for mainstream audiences; but anyone who knows Coppola for his work is hopeful that he’ll deliver some kind of masterpiece after all these years.
Megalopolis is expected to release on May 17 at Cannes Film Festival, and it’s likely it will get a worldwide release sometime later in the year.
