Figgis comments that Coppola uses the script as a mere premise, and he likens Coppola’s approach to it as “instinctive,” calling the director “kind of like a jazz musician.” Voight, who says, “I’ve never worked with a more open process,” repeats a remark of Coppola’s, saying, “The script is just the bones and we’re going to have to find out what it is.” Hoffman (who plays the mayor’s fixer) describes Coppola’s way of working with actors: “In a sense, he’s rehearsing at the same time that he’s shooting.” Driver offers a trenchantly dialectical account of Coppola’s artistic and practical method: “He’s structured his day—and that’s why he’s paying for it—to make sure that he can control how to . . . trust his cast and give them total control to come up with something that he hasn’t thought of.” Daniel Ezralow, the choreographer of “Megalopolis,” discusses advanced techniques that he taught cast members (including “alternate movement” and “body therapy”) and that Coppola integrated into the performances, saying that Coppola’s work has “one foot in theatrical, one foot in cinema.” Talking with Plaza, Figgis likens the shoot to a “weird experimental theatre company.” He also puts on view the most daringly experimental aspect of the production of “Megalopolis”—and it’s not the direction of actors.
The scale of “Megalopolis” is enormous—the size of its sets, the number of its extras, the set design and costumes that it requires, the complexity of its staging. Coppola says that even “Apocalypse Now”—which, he emphasizes, used helicopters—“wasn’t on this scale.” “Megalopolis” is filled with grand crowd scenes, fight scenes, chase scenes, dance scenes, harrowing violence, public celebrations, mighty spectacles of political conflict. But, for Coppola, the massive sets and elaborate dramaturgy didn’t impose rigorous order on the shoot or dictate meticulous forethought regarding its use; on the contrary, they served as his own gigantic playground. The filming emerges as less a matter of Coppola fulfilling intricately preconceived stagings than of his setting the tumult in motion and discovering its possibilities as it’s unleashed.
When Coppola refers to fun, he means it literally. “Moviemaking is not work, it’s play,” he tells Figgis. “Toil gives you nothing, play gives you everything.” He provided himself with the resources for a great deal of play, and the freedom to engage in it. The visual extravagances of “Megalopolis” require complicated visual effects, and Coppola intended to realize them not with C.G.I. but with practical, physical devices—knowing that he’d only find out whether they work by actually filming them. The producer Michael Bederman says that Coppola “really needs to feel physical space,” and that space, shown in “Megadoc,” is, above all, felt in “Megalopolis.” When Driver and Emmanuel are seen walking on construction beams suspended from cables, they are—as Figgis shows—actually walking on dangling beams. (A 2024 report explains that the actors had no harnesses, and their safety net was trapeze netting, which they had to be taught to fall safely into.) Coppola’s audaciously improvisational approach to his sets is inseparable from the acting that takes place on them. For all the image-mad artifice of “Megalopolis,” the movie is driven by its exuberant performances. The actors’ wild, eccentric, impulsive immediacy—which Coppola’s direction not only favors but provokes, even demands—turns “Megalopolis” into another mega-documentary, an accurate record of the excitement.
A revelatory sequence in “Megadoc” shows Coppola arguing with the cinematographer, Mihai Mălaimare, Jr., about the lighting of a shot, which Mălaimare wants to keep consistent with other shots in the scene, for the sake of a conventionally smooth edit. Coppola says that Mălaimare has no business anticipating how the film will be edited, and the director lays down the law: “To me, your job is not to match all the light. Your job is to get beautiful images of the scenes that we have.” Figgis teases out of Coppola the underlying philosophy behind these free-spirited methods. Coppola, who has been directing movies since 1963, voices his frustrations with the technical and material encumbrances that inhere in the conventional, professional way of working. The emphasis on keeping things “controllable,” he says, means that “cinema is the only art that kills what it’s trying to preserve.” In “Megalopolis,” he tries to keep the live part of cinema, the theatre-like aspect, alive.
My one-word definition of theatre is fear—the awareness that there’s nothing separating performers from spectators, that what’s occurring onstage could easily carry over into the audience. Coppola famously built exactly such a disturbing thrill into “Megalopolis,” with a scene designed so that an actor comes out from the wings of the theatre, stands in front of the screen, and interviews the movie’s protagonist, played by Driver. (At a screening I attended, a publicist working for the distributor did the honors.) But even before that literally frame-breaking moment, the events onscreen in “Megalopolis” seem to escape the frame metaphorically: the hectic performances leap through it, the camera moves defy it, the sets overflow its borders, and near-cosmic visions of supernaturally biomorphic magnificence unsynch the frame from the normal flow of time.
Figgis shows a clip of Coppola planning “One from the Heart”—the project that left the ruins from which “Megalopolis” arose—and discussing the intricate electronic-cinema system, housed in a trailer called the Silverfish (which still exists and which Coppola uses on “Megalopolis”), as a way not merely to tell a story but to explore “what the nature of existence is, what the nature of being a human being is.” That’s what it feels like to watch “Megalopolis”; Coppola didn’t have the practical freedom to pursue this philosophical dream until providing it for himself.
Coppola describes his own methods and their relationship to the realities that they provoke. He may look as if he’s “thriving on chaos,” he says, but actually he is “confronting chaos.” The chaos, however, is of his own making, and, though the onscreen results are thrilling, the real-life chaos during the shoot was sometimes troubling. In “Megadoc,” Figgis asks Bederman about “the kind of safety nets that would normally be there that are missing” from the shoot of “Megalopolis.” “Well, anybody who can say no,” Bederman responds. That may have worked well aesthetically, but not necessarily in other ways.
Figgis notes that there was discord on the set, which led to the departure, mid-shoot, of key personnel in the art and design departments. “Megadoc” features interviews with the production designer Beth Mickle, who was among those who left, and who cites communication failures leaving her feeling “put in a position where there was no way forward.” After the film was done, there were allegations that Coppola, while filming a scene set in a night club, tried to kiss several female extras, and Variety published videos of such incidents; Coppola has denied the allegations and sued the publication for libel. “Megadoc” doesn’t address the matter. What it does make clear, nonetheless, is that a movie set isn’t a blank canvas but a workplace; the first human beings whose nature is implicated in a film are the ones who are working on it. Just as with freedom, chaos taken for oneself isn’t the same as chaos given to others, and the difference again involves a power relationship. What one person intends as play, another may find painfully serious. Personal freedom, on a movie set as in civil society at large, risks impinging on that of others, and the balance remains as crucial in law as it does on a movie set. The making of “Megalopolis” may not be just an experiment in the art of cinema—it may also serve as an unintended experiment in the social psychology and the managerial ethics of filmmaking, with findings of similarly great importance. ♦