Here’s some more good news for Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis.” The $120 million, and self-funded, epic already found distribution in France, via Le Pacte, and that company’s President, Jean Labadie, is telling Le Point that the film has also found buyers in Italy, Germany, UK, and Spain.
Labadie says the film was inspired by the conspiracy of Catlline, as told by historian Sallust. Some of the dialogue in “Megalopolis” is in English, some of it in Latin. About the film itself, Labadie calls it “spectacular” film with a “unique visual universe.”
It's a film that keeps surprising you, both by the story and the form. Coppola dares to be daring and I challenge audiences to predict what will happen from one scene to the next, you can’t. It's an unimaginable approach in cinema today. You’ll feel emotion and extraordinary intellectual stimulation, as the film speaks about our society of today and tomorrow. Megalopolis talks about our lives, politics, science, time, family, creation, the trace we leave... So many themes with which Coppola's cinema is familiar.
The film is set premiere at Cannes in less than five days from now. It still doesn’t have a U.S. distributor, but recent rumors suggest that a few studios are in the running for it, including Amazon and Apple. “Megalopolis” stars Adam Driver, Forrest Whittaker, Jon Voight, Nathalie Emmanuel, Laurence Fishbourne, Shia LaBeouf, Aubrey Plaza, Talia Shire, and Dustin Hoffman.
Criterion's December lineup has some great additions to the library, but the title that jumped out at me is Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man," which officially joins the Collection on December 8.