We should scratch off any retirement plans for Francis Ford Coppola. According to the maestro, 85, he’s just getting started. Nothing is going to stop him from continuing to make movies, except, of course, for age and health, which tend to sneak up on you when you least expect it.
Coppola is now speaking to Rolling Stone, covering an assortment of topics, including “Megalopolis,” its production, its controversies and how James Gandolfini was initially supposed to play a role in it. Towards interview’s end, Coppola confirms that there are, at least, two more films he hopes to make:
I’m working on two potential projects right now. One is a regular sort of movie that I’d like someone to finance and make in England, because I don’t have a big history with my wife in England. Everywhere else I go, I’m reminded of her all the time. The other is called “Distant Vision”, which is the story of three generations of an Italian American family like mine, but fictionalized, during which the phenomenon of television was invented. I would finance it with whatever “Megalopolis” does. I’ll want to do another roll of the dice with that one.
Last April, I reported that Coppola was working on a new film which will be an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s “The Glimpses of the Moon” and “inspired” by Leo McCarey’s “The Awful Truth.” That is almost certainly the first project he’s referring to in the interview.
Meanwhile, “Distant Vision” seems to be the more ambitious endeavor. It’s a project Coppola initially workshopped at UCLA, back in 2015, as a live cinema performance piece, produced over three weeks, in a 6,000-square-foot soundstage on Oklahoma City Community College’s campus. Coppola claimed to be pioneering a “brand new art form” with this work.
Before “Megalopolis,” Coppola’s last big production was 1997’s “The Rainmaker.” He then went on this journey of low-budget, semi-experimental cinema for the next 14 years, directing “Youth Without Youth,” “Twixt,” and “Tetro.”
In the ‘70s, Francis Ford Coppola directed four of the greatest films of the 20th century: “The Godfather,” “The Godfather Part Two”, “The Conversation”, and “Apocalypse Now.” He’s built his entire legacy off of these four films.
Then came, from the ‘80s on, the "frustrating post-‘Apocalypse Now’ phase of his career. He’s had a few keepers here and there, but none of them have come close to his early classics. Some believe the arduous shoot of “Apocalypse Now” broke and changed the man, and with that, his movies as well.
Despite never again attaining previous heights, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Coppola did make some interesting films, I’m thinking particularly of “Rumble Fish,” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”.
Edward Berger seems to have settled on what comes next. His Lance Armstrong biopic, starring Austin Butler, is now holding casting calls, with production eyed for January.