‘Do you know why I’m doing this movie? What do I get out of it?” an exasperated Francis Ford Coppola asks Shia LaBeouf on the set of Megalopolis. “I don’t get money. I don’t get fame; I already have fame. I don’t get Oscars, I already have Oscars. What do I get that I want?” LaBeouf eventually gives up. “Fun!” Coppola says. “I wanna have fun!”
Making Megalopolis doesn’t look like most people’s idea of fun as Coppola attempts to corral actors, crew, costumes, locations, lavish sets and special effects all in service of a sprawling sci-fi-meets-ancient-Rome story that no one fully understands. Throw in the fact that the film-maker spent $120m of his own money on the passion project by selling off part of his winemaking business to raise funds, having spent nearly 50 years trying to get it made, and that the production was beset with delays, technical headaches and bust-ups, and you feel this is more than most 83-year-olds should have to go through.
But watching Coppola making Megalopolis often is rather fun – perhaps more fun than the end product, to be honest. Just as the documentary Hearts of Darkness captured the chaos and strife behind the making of Coppola’s legendary Apocalypse Now back in 1976, so Mike Figgis’s new film Megadoc takes us on to the set of Coppola’s latest, grandest adventure. If we don’t quite get heart attacks and typhoons this time round, we do get as raw and intimate a portrait of an auteur at work as we’ve had for some time.
That’s partly down to the nature of the project and the personalities behind it – but it is also a testament to Figgis’s skill as an intuitive, self-effacing, and observant film-maker. “I have a huge problem with the way documentaries are shot now; they’re shot like bad B-movies,” says Figgis, just before Megadoc’s premiere at the Venice film festival. “I know from my own experience that in order to get funding for a documentary, you have to kind of submit a script, which seems to me the antithesis of what a documentary should be; it should be a journey of discovery.”
Figgis says he has known Coppola for decades. They first met in the 1990s, after he cast Nicolas Cage – Coppola’s nephew – in his hit movie Leaving Las Vegas. When he heard Coppola was about to start work on Megalopolis at last, Figgis wrote to congratulate him. “Almost as a little afterthought, a bit of a joke, I said: ‘If you need a fly on the wall, just let me know.’” A few months later, he recalls, Coppola called him out of the blue saying: “‘When could you be here? Do you have a visa? Can you come now?’ It’s a very Francis thing.”
Days later, in November 2022, with a small crew and his smallest camera, Figgis arrived in Atlanta where Coppola and his cast were just getting started on rehearsals. “When I first turned up, I wasn’t introduced, so nobody knew who I was.” As well as seeing Coppola at work, Figgis’s film is a window on to his actors, including Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Giancarlo Esposito and Laurence Fishburne. We get to see them in and out of role, interacting with Coppola, with each other and with Figgis. Driver keeps his distance, Plaza is mischievous and playful, but it’s LaBoeuf that Figgis zeroes in on as good material.
Where most of the cast respect and trust Coppola and go along with his wishes and whims, LaBoeuf “was the one actor that really – very bravely, actually – challenged the process on many, many levels”, says Figgis. LaBoeuf, a notoriously volatile figure, persistently questions Coppola’s direction, his character’s backstory, his blocking, even his own performance (“some of these takes are just trash”). LaBoeuf also confesses he is terrified of getting fired, mindful that Coppola famously replaced Harvey Keitel with Martin Sheen a month into shooting Apocalypse Now. He survives, and there’s even affection between the two men, but by the end Coppola is so exasperated with him he throws up his hands and walks off the set, saying: “If you don’t need me tonight, I’m happy to go home.”
As Figgis readily admits, “all the really good docs about film-making have been stories about disasters, so every time something negative happened I was thinking: ‘Oh, that’s good for the documentary.’”
Fortunately for Figgis, if not for Coppola, there were more crises on the horizon. The production almost collapses halfway through when Coppola fires the visual effects supervisor, Mark Russell, and half the art department leave with him. At its heart, the split was perhaps a clash of two incompatible styles of film-making: the art department were accustomed to working on big, state-of-the-art effects movies, such as Marvel films, which require a lot of planning and collaboration (and money); Coppola’s preferred mode is more like experimental theatre, allowing for instinct and spontaneity. “That’s where the size of the film didn’t do him any favours,” says Figgis, “because the flexibility that he needs to go with that mindset isn’t supported by such a big production.”
The net result was a lot of frustration and wasted time, all on Coppola’s dime. “Every day his regime was, he would get up early, make lots and lots of notes, and then he’d turn up and make everyone a bit crazy by going: ‘I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to shoot that today actually. Can we get Adam Driver?’ ‘No, it’s his day off.’ ‘How long is it going to take to get him on the set?’ ‘Three hours.’ ‘OK. What should we do?’” Figgis recalls. “He’s in his 80s, so he’s basically just sitting there waiting, which for me was a joy, of course, because in those periods, he’s very happy to talk, have a moan or tell stories about Brando or whatever.”
Meanwhile, throughout the shoot, Coppola was staying in an old Atlanta hotel that he had bought and decided to renovate – so he would go home every night to another, parallel project. “He invited me to live in the hotel,” says Figgis, “and someone said: ‘Mike, they start work at six in the morning. There’s dust everywhere. It’s so noisy, you won’t get any sleep.’ So I declined and got a hotel in Atlanta.”
When Figgis suggests to Coppola that he seems to thrive on chaos, however, he immediately rebuts the notion. “He says: ‘I’m very good with chaos. I make order out of chaos.’ But he then dodges the question of: ‘Did you actually create the chaos in order to fix the chaos?’ But that’s not unusual for film-makers or artists in general, who kind of throw everything up in the air and see how it lands.”
There was another troubled aspect of the shoot that Figgis’s film doesn’t address. When I spoke to former crew members who had worked on Megalopolis before its premiere at Cannes last year, several reported concerns about Coppola’s behaviour on set, not least a bacchanalian party scene during which witnesses say the director tried to kiss some of the topless and scantily clad female extras. The film’s executive producer Darren Demetre told the Guardian at the time that Coppola “walked around the set to establish the spirit of the scene by giving kind hugs and kisses on the cheek to the cast and background players. It was his way to help inspire and establish the club atmosphere.” Some extras recalled their experience of working on the film differently; one cast member described it to Variety as “super weird and uncomfortable”.
Figgis did not witness any inappropriate behaviour, he says. “My obsession was film-making and the process. There are hundreds of people [on set], and there’s adoring fans everywhere who want to take a selfie with Francis and all the rest of it. And he likes that. Outside the film-making thing, he’s a very warm and affectionate person. So I had no sense of what emerged later. And, you know, I was a little bit puzzled by it, I have to say.”
Some critics praised Megalopolis, others were less enamoured (the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw found it “bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow”). Even Figgis admits he never fully understood the script: “It was like reading a Russian novel.” The movie has not been a commercial success: to date it has made $14m. But then Apocalypse Now was not hailed as a classic until long after its initial release. Perhaps Megalopolis will undergo a similar process of rehabilitation, with its themes of authoritarian control, political scheming and utopian idealism. If it does, Figgis’s film will doubtless be a part of that.
Whatever his views on the script, Figgis is full of admiration for Coppola as a film-maker. “The process for him has always been one of experimentation and actually, putting that into perspective, who else is doing that? Nobody. Whether you like the film or you don’t like the film, no one of that stature is doing it.” Others agree. In the documentary, George Lucas tells Figgis: “My whole career is based on watching Francis.” But he says they are complete opposites: “I’m a plodding along, careful what I’m doing, plan it out … and he’s a jump-off-the-cliff guy.”
Watching Coppola contend with all the challenges and setbacks on set, making his way through a stressful four-month shoot, contending with the illness of his wife of 60 years, Eleanor (who died in April 2024), all while maintaining superhuman energy levels for an man in his 80s, it feels as if simply getting Megalopolis made, and walking the Cannes red carpet one last time, was success enough for Coppola. Perhaps it will come to be seen as the last, defiant moonshot from a larger-than-life film-maker who always cared more about art than money.
Does Figgis think Coppola had fun? “Well, he didn’t look very happy a lot of the time,” he says. “But there were times I saw him chuckling and I thought: ‘Oh, he is sort of having fun now.’ Because he’s got a bunch of actors around him, they’re all kind of vibing with each other, it’s raining, and there’s, like, this chaos to be dealt with. He would have had more fun had everybody been more prepared for what he actually wanted, except he didn’t quite know what he wanted at the outset. But ultimately, I think he’s glad he made the film, because it was something that was sitting there on his back burner, and he wanted to get through it and articulate those ideas.” He laughs. “But I think we all have a different idea of fun.”
