Tender 85 years old: Francis Ford Coppola
Photo: dpa/AP/Willy Sanjuan
Visionaries with megalomaniac tendencies have a hard time, even if they have been established in their profession for decades. American director Francis Ford Coppola recently turned 85; Now it has been announced that his giant film “Megalopolis” will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this year. His last work to date, the small but fine horror thriller “Twixt,” was 15 years ago. Few people remember this; Coppola, who is in the lexicon as a prominent representative of the “New Hollywood,” became world famous with “Apocalypse Now” and his “The Godfather” trilogy. He founded his own film production American Zoetrope in 1969 … but as with the popular Corleone mafia family, business didn’t always go well: The film “One with a Heart” (1982) was originally supposed to cost two million dollars – it turned out to be 25, and Coppola was temporarily insolvent.
Filming “Megalopolis” is also a complicated affair: Coppola paid for the film out of his own pocket and even sold his Californian wineries for it. He managed to bring together younger and older stars (Adam Driver, Shia LaBoeuf, Jon Voight); but fired his entire special effects team last December. The film is about a visionary architect who wants to rebuild New York after a catastrophe and set it up as a utopia. To do this, Coppola uses extremely expensive technology to display virtual worlds. An insider reported that there was “absolute madness” on the set. Things were also very bad during the filming of “Apocalypse Now”: The result was a masterpiece against the war.
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