He has been revered as a heavyweight as the director behind the legendary Godfather trilogy and a beacon of ’70s cinema.
It also features the talent of a cast that includes the likes of Shia LeBouf, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza and Laurence Fishburne.
In addition to directing the film, Coppola wrote the script and is one of the producers on the project. The filmmaker reportedly spent $120 million of his own funds to finance the film.
Early screenings of the upcoming film have generated mixed reviews from critics, with some even giving it a measly one star rating out of five.
But the latest work by infamous Hollywood screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola, 85, is being branded “bloated”, “boring” and dubbed by critics as a “devastating abomination”.
The problems don’t end there: Team members who work with Coppola have also come out to accuse him of “wasting time,” smoking marijuana in his trailer, and “pulling women to sit on his lap.”
The crew even claimed that at times on the disastrous set they asked themselves, ‘Has this guy made a movie before?’
speaking to The Guardianone insider said Coppola unsettled tech-savvy production workers by insisting on old-school methods that took hours.
They chronicled actor Adam Driver’s first day, capturing a scene where his body merges with futuristic material.
The director reportedly insisted on using mirrors and projectors to achieve the effect, as he did with his film Dracula 30 years earlier, rather than letting the crew do it digitally, which would have taken ten minutes.
“So they basically tied Adam Driver to a chair for six hours, and literally took a $100 projector and projected an image onto the side of his head,” they said. “I’m all for experimentation, but is this really what you want to do on day one with your $10 million actor?”
They also discovered that Coppola had the staff exhausted by his indecision over designs and kept changing his mind and mind about the vision for the film.
Another source told the outlet that the filmmaker would supposedly show up without a plan on how to film a big sequence.
Speaking to The Guardian, a source said Coppola unsettled tech-savvy production workers by insisting on old-school methods that took hours.
Coppola would then “set up something that made no sense”, leaving the team “trying to make the best of it”.
“He would often sit in his trailer for hours on end, not speaking to anyone and often smoking marijuana,” they stated. And hours and hours passed without anything being filmed. And the crew and the cast would stay there and wait.”
Coppola would then “set up something that made no sense”, leaving the team “trying to make the best of it”.
“It sounds crazy to say, but there were times when we were all standing around wondering, ‘Has this guy ever made a movie?'” a third commented. They also called him “disgusting.”
Insiders also commented on Coppola’s “old school” behavior toward women, claiming that he would pull women to sit on his lap.
Elsewhere, it was alleged that while filming a “nightclub bacchanal scene” for the film, he attempted to “kiss some of the topless and scantily clad female extras”, in an attempt to “get them in the mood”.
However, co-executive producer Darren Demetre told the guardian that Coppola “successfully produced and directed a huge independent film.”
Referring to his behavior while filming the club celebration scene, Demetre said that Coppola “walked around the set to establish the spirit of the scene by giving friendly hugs and kisses on the cheek to the cast and background actors.”
Megalopolis, which premiered last night at the Cannes Film Festival, centers on a super-powered architect who attempts to rebuild New York City into a modernist utopia. In the photo, from left to right: Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Francis Ford Coppola, his granddaughter Romy Coppola and Adam Driver.
This was supposedly intended to “help inspire and establish the atmosphere of the club.” Demetre insisted that he was not aware of any complaints during filming.
During the filming of the film, Coppola was also dealing with the illness of his wife Eleanor Coppola, who died at the age of 87 last month.
Eleanor had been present on the film’s set “until her illness prevented her from being there,” a spokesperson told the outlet.
In addition to the turbulent behind-the-scenes, Coppola’s film failed to impress critics, despite receiving a ten-minute ovation at Cannes on Thursday.
Giving it just one star, Kevin Maher of The times criticized it as “all mumbo-jumbo and verbiage held together, barely, by filmmaking at its most threadbare.”
Meanwhile, rating it two stars, Peter Bradshaw, for The GuardianHe said the film seemed like “a passion project without passion: a bloated, boring, disconcertingly superficial movie filled with truths from top high school students about the future of humanity.”
However, not everyone was quick to trash the film. The Telegraph gave it a respectable four stars.
Robbie Collin said it was a “full-body sensory bath film following a power struggle between the elites of New Rome.”
Here, FEMAIL looks at the mix of criticism Megalopolis has been attracting…
THE TIMES
Kevin Maher of The times reviewed the film, calling it “138 brutalizing minutes of ill-conceived themes” and “half-finished scenes.”
He also trashed the actors’ “nail-on-blackboard performances.”
The critic then took issue with the film’s “strange” exposition and said that it also “isn’t a great film” for women, men or “human beings in general.”
GUARDIAN
Peter Bradshaw said that while the film was “ambitious and serious in intent” – and “has some flashes of humor and enthusiasm” – it was ultimately “a Coppola failure”.
writing for The GuardianHe was also unimpressed with the cast’s acting and the “cheap-looking visual effects work.”
However, Peter added that the film “raises a valid question” about the sustainability of the “American empire.”
Critics only gave it two stars out of five.
THE TELEGRAPH
Rating it four stars, Robbie Collin of the The Telegraph was filled with praise for Aubrey Plaza’s “fantastic” performance in the film.
However, he considered that it was clear that the film had undergone several metamorphoses.
“The end result feels like something that has been stretched, wrung, and kneaded to a point where straightening it out again would be impossible, and is also largely beside the point,” the reviewer wrote.
DAILY MAIL
Awarding the film only one star, Brian Viner of the Daily Mail praised the vision, but not the execution, of Megalopolis.
‘The 85-year-old director was rightly honored this week on the Riviera. “He is an industry colossus, whose 1970s output alone – The Godfather, The Godfather: Part II, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now – elevates him to the highest level of filmmakers,” he wrote.
But with that great talent comes a big ego and a clear expectation that “Francis Ford Coppola’s The Megalopolis: A Fable,” to give it its full, vainglorious title, will make us marvel anew at his genius.
‘Instead, let’s cry for their arrogance.
“Not that there isn’t a powerful springboard to its story: the notion that America in the near future, and New York City in particular, could be comparable to Ancient Rome as its decline and decay set in. .He calls his metropolis New Rome, a place undermined by greed, and men only try to get rich.’
However, he found the plot “wildly confusing” and called it a “megaflopolis”.
THE INDEPENDENT
Writing for him IndependentGeoffrey Macnab said that Megalopolis, despite its mixed reviews, “is not a car crash.”
“Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed $120m (£94m) epic is certainly not another Godfather or Apocalypse Now, but at least it’s packed with ideas,” he wrote.
But the critic, who gave the film three stars, found that despite a stellar cast, most of the big names deliver “polite and occasionally throwaway performances” that do not fit well with the director’s narrative.
FINANCIAL TIMES
He Financial timesRaphael Abraham awarded the film one star, stating that viewers have witnessed a “spectacular fall from grace of another great cinema of the ’70s.”
He noted that Coppola’s “painful labor of love” was riddled with “aggressively theatrical lines delivered with raised eyebrows and histrionic gestures.”
