Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis: First look features Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel

The director gives viewers a glimpse of his new film inspired by everything from Roman history to 9/11.

Francis Ford Coppola, the mastermind behind “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now,” is gearing up to release his passion project: “Megalopolis.” 

The film – a science fiction epic set in a New York City on the brink of collapse – has been in the works for nearly 23 years and is now set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival next month.

In a first look obtained by Vanity Fair, Adam Driver plays a visionary architect, clashing with a corrupt mayor (Giancarlo Esposito), whose daughter (Nathalie Emmanuel) – Driver’s love interest – is forced “to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.”

In a written statement addressed to Vanity Fair, Coppola opens up about his inspirations for the film, “The seeds for Megalopolis were planted when as a kid I saw H.G. Wells’s Things to Come. This 1930s Korda classic is about building the world of tomorrow, and has always been with me, first as the ‘boy scientist’ I was and later as a filmmaker.”

Coppola also revealed he financed a significant portion of the film's $120 million budget himself. 

About his journey with the film, he said, “I wasn’t really working on this screenplay for 40 years as I often see written, but rather I was collecting notes and clippings for a scrapbook of things I found interesting for some future screenplay, or examples of political cartoons or different historical subjects. 

“Ultimately, after a lot of time, I settled on the idea of a Roman epic. And then later, a Roman epic set in modern America, so I really only began writing this script, on and off, in the last dozen years or so.”

Coppola believes “Megalopolis” to be a defining project for his personal style, “I hoped for a project later in life when I might better understand what my personal style was.”

Early reactions to Megalopolis have been mixed, with some praising its ambition and others left bewildered. 
The “Godfather” director expressed his own aspirations for the film, “It’s my dream that Megalopolis will become a New Year’s Eve perennial favorite, with audiences discussing afterwards not their new diets or resolutions not to smoke, but rather this simple question: ‘Is the society in which we live the only one available to us?’”