Francis Ford Coppola Smoked a Lot of Weed on ‘Megalopolis' Set

I recently predicted that another hit piece would no doubt be coming right before Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” premieres at Cannes on Thursday, and, wouldn’t you know it, here it is. Hollywood sometimes has a way of being very predictable.

People really want this film to be a bust. I cannot understand why you’d be hoping for a master like Coppola to fail, but here we are, and The Guardian has published a very nasty piece of business here. Their sources are anonymous crew members, with clear axes to grind.

According to this report, the “Megalopolis” shoot was a clash between Coppola’s” old-school approach,” and “finding magic in the moment”, and newer digital film-making methods. Here’s one of the sources, via The Guardian:

I think Coppola still lives in this world where, as an auteur, you’re the only one who knows what’s happening, and everybody else is there just to do what he asks them to do.

Another excerpt, from a crew member, obviously, speaking anonymously, recalls Coppola being so overwhelmed by the four-month production that he went to hide in his trailer and would smoke endless amounts of marijuana:

He would often show up in the mornings before these big sequences and because no plan had been put in place, and because he wouldn’t allow his collaborators to put a plan in place, he would often just sit in his trailer for hours on end, wouldn’t talk to anybody, was often smoking marijuana … And hours and hours would go by without anything being filmed. And the crew and the cast would all stand around and wait. And then he’d come out and whip up something that didn’t make sense, and that didn’t follow anything anybody had spoken about or anything that was on the page, and we’d all just go along with it, trying to make the best out of it.

They added that every day “we’d walk away shaking our heads wondering what we’d just spent the last 12 hours doing.” As a third crew member puts it: “This sounds crazy to say, but there were times when we were all standing around going: ‘Has this guy ever made a movie before?’”

Another crew member:

We were all aware that we were participating in what might be a really sad finish to his career […] He was just so unpleasant toward a lot of the people who were trying to help facilitate the process and help make the movie better

Now, here’s where things could get dicey for Coppola. “Several sources” felt that Coppola could be “old school” in his behavior around women.

He allegedly pulled women to sit on his lap, for example. And during one bacchanalian nightclub scene being shot for the film, witnesses say, Coppola came on to the set and tried to kiss some of the topless and scantily clad female extras. He apparently claimed he was “trying to get them in the mood”.

Another anonymous participant in The Guardian write-up claims that being on-set “was like watching a train wreck unfold day after day, week after week, and knowing that everybody there had tried their hardest to help the train wreck be avoided.”

We’ll have a verdict on this film in a few days. The film has already been described in such terms as “batsh*t crazy.” “baffling,” “downright confounding,” “undefinable,” “fit for a museum” and the “work of a madman.”