“Happy New Year. For me, this is a dream come true,” said Francis Ford Coppola, as she polled the audience who had come to see his passion project Megalopolis, at a talk and screening event at the American Cinematheque to kick off 2025. Of which, for him, it was an opportunity to spend 100 Minutes is about not so much talking about his passion project itself, but rather using it as a starting point for an infinitely wide-ranging discussion of political, economic and social ideals.
“Big Cities,” as anyone who watches it knows, is largely about lending credibility to utopian ideals that politicians and number-crunchers might view as cynical. Coppola’s personal vision of utopia includes a Q&A in which movie fans don’t ask questions about budgets, box office, critics, or even the details of filmmaking (a few were asked, and answered with a cursory glance), but instead, engage him on topics that… Discuss it. He said he would rather talk about it in this “interactive” discussion. Which included: restructuring the government from the bottom up; universal basic income; undo patriarchy; aligning urban architecture with the lessons of nature; Make “work” a thing of the past in favor of “play.”
In other words, the discussion was as intense as the movie, or maybe ten times more intense, if you can imagine that. By dealing with a sold-out house that not only rejected these questions and ideas as entertainment, but was eager to have an “interactive” experience with them for a full four hours, Coppola made it clear that he was in heaven.
It wasn’t meant to be a memoir-type discussion, but the veteran director would occasionally delve into his own history, saying at one point: “My life is interesting. Either I’m completely broke and broke or I’m rich. Very strange.” Following up on this idea at the conclusion of the event, the veteran director gave a mini-summary of his relationship with capital over the years.
“I took over my company just because I had a different vision for the company, and other people’s vision was that they didn’t want to get fired. They didn’t want me to go bankrupt. They were protecting themselves. And I was like, ‘I’m not protecting myself. I never protected myself. In “Apocalypse Now,” I (got) 21% interest on that (investment), and I owed $30 million. I didn’t come from money. When I went to UCLA, I lived on $1 a day. That’s when I got really fat. I’d have a 19-cent Kraft macaroni and cheese dinner; That’s all I had every night. But if you said to me now: I’ll write you a check for a hundred million dollars, I’d rather have a hundred million friends.
Coppola had 425 old or new friends who eagerly bought $45 tickets to the Aero Theater event as soon as they went on sale, and were ready to show up at 11 a.m. on New Year’s Day for a four-hour movie and speech (and live for lunch that’s not… Macaroni and cheese but from theatrical popcorn). He occasionally submitted side notes like the one above, but mostly he remained in the world of philosophy and social and economic thought, with intellectual assistance from two of the committee members he brought along, Juliet Shor, an economist and socialist who wrote the book Filling: The New Age. The Economics of Real Wealth, and Jim Augustine, an entrepreneur who works with technology companies interested in adopting innovator methodologies.
Coppola had a lot on his mind, speaking for eight minutes before the show and then launching into another 25-minute monologue as the credits rolled, before handing over more speakers to the panelists and audience during the remaining 65 minutes. . Without explicitly stating it, he makes it clear that he identifies with the hero of “Megalopolis,” the high-profile architect Cesare Catilina (Adam Driver), repeating verbatim at various points the question Cesare poses in the film: “Is society a society?” We live in the only one available to us? (At some point midway through the simple film, the house lights came on and a figure approached the screen, silently playing the role of questioning journalist, while Driver’s image looked down on him and uttered the same sweeping question about the big case. Image.)
In his fitting introduction to the film, Coppola asked the audience to pretend they were watching “Megalopolis” a few years in the future — specifically “New Year’s Day 2027,” because “seven is my lucky number.” Looking at the film with a few years of hindsight also gave Coppola the opportunity to imagine that the debate around “Megalopolis” (which was widely polarizing, to say the least, and which grossed $18 million worldwide) might change, as it did actually. With some other movies. “With Apocalypse Now, the reaction I got was ‘the worst movie ever made’ — someone said that — but when you have such a divide, it’s ultimately ingredients for further discussion. That means there’s something about it.” You can talk about it later,” he noted, adding, “Apocalypse Now is still making money. I mean, what is it, 50 years later?
“We humans are one family,” Coppola said. “You’re all my cousins I talk to. And honestly, even though no one wants to say it, we’re geniuses (as a species). There’s nothing we can’t accomplish when we’re in our own game mode, so we’re in our own game mode.” Today, when you go to a movie, you walk into an open door, and in this door, I want you to walk in without any expectations. Hopefully, it’s not boring and I want you to walk into it and laugh at it , or scream On it, or you talk to it, or you say it’s ridiculous and you can cry and do whatever you want; there are no rules for watching this movie.
After the screening, Coppola was thinking about money, not as a connection to the making of his film, but as a topic about how society can become more equitable. “The relationship between time and work” is a major theme in the final film, Shore noted, “and of course, (economist John Maynard) Keynes said a hundred years ago that we would have a 15-hour work week now. And things have gone in the opposite direction.”
Francis Ford Coppola, Juliette Shore and Jim Augustine at the Aero Theatre, January 1, 2025
Chris Wellman/Variety
“I’ve been working on a four-day week, where people get 32 hours with no pay cut, which is really life-changing and good for businesses,” Coppola said. “I have a winery in Napa Valley, and the winery, you know, is open for seven.” Days a week, because on the weekends the visitors come… And thanks to what I learned from Juliet, I said, “If you want to have four days a week and you can see how that works for you, do it and so we are the only winery I know.” – Because they all work for seven days – in a four-day week… We even do another program that helps anyone in the company as part of its benefits, if they or their children want to learn how to play the accordion or the cello or learn to draw… to do something Other than work because people are happier so they do better… We pay for that, as part of the benefit program in the company.”
Beyond what private companies can do, Coppola shared ideas about changing the government. He discussed his own lessons on community work from a charity he founded, North Beach Homeless. The director often referenced Jane Jacobs, author of the influential 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in saying: “You can do better with a (government-based) community because everyone is looking out for each other.” Other… So one of the things I would suggest is reversing power… Now we have this very powerful federal thing, and then all these powerful states. But what if the real power to help people and ensure sane government went the other way? In other words, it was about the neighborhood, and then as you progressed from the neighborhood to the city, to the state, it became less about really ruling the people but more about ceremonial, even at the top, it became primarily ceremonial.
Coppola also said: “There should be no lifelong politicians.” Going back to the time when he was an “Officer of the Day” at military school, he said: “I think politics should be more like jury duty, where you’re mayor for maybe six weeks…and then your last week is of course when you’re training the newcomer.” Politics in which politicians compete for lifetime privileges (of being in government)… so that when they leave, they then become lobbyists and have the real money… What if we could change it and turn it upside down… This is it. “My initial thoughts on how to change things.”
Keynes and Jacobs were not the only authors or historical figures cited; The discussion could have had its own lengthy bibliography. Coppola also pointed to the work of his friend Stephen Greenblatt, author of Deviance: How the World Became Modern; Stefan Zweig, author of the 1960s book Yesterday’s World; Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, “Power Broker”; Anthropologist David Graeber wrote The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity and Bullshit Functions: A Theory; Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics; Famous early twentiesycentury urban planner Robert Moses; and Lithuanian anthropologist Marija Gimbutas. Even Lady Bird Johnson’s anti-litter campaign came up in the conversation.
When the subject returned to his own career, Coppola said, “People had kind of gotten around to the idea that film wasn’t that different from fast food in the sense that they were going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a potato chip that was so addictive that you couldn’t stop eating it, but they did.” The same thing with art. It was funny when I didn’t want to do a second Godfather movie, and the company’s president, Charlie (Bluhdorn, Gulf and Western), said to me: ‘You have the ability to make Coca-Cola’ and I said: ‘No.’ I want to make Coca-Cola.” But that’s what it’s become, because being in anything is about profit without risk. And as I’ve said many times in my life, making profit without risk is like having children without sex. I mean, it’s possible, But it’s not the best way to do it.
American Cinematheque at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica presents a discussion with Francis Ford Coppola
Chris Wellman/Variety
“After I made a movie called The Rainmker directed by John Grisham, I took 14 years off, and I didn’t want to be a professional director,” the director said of his long career hiatus. I wanted to be a student. I wanted to know more about training actors. And in filmmaking, they pay the same amount whether you shoot or rehearse, so you never rehearse. …And my rehearsals are completely different – I don’t rehearse from the script. I remember Marlon (Brando) always said that one of the reasons he never learned the lines was because he didn’t want to say the lines until the time really came. …You do a lot of other things. You play theater games, you improvise. But I want to learn more about movies. “I’m a first-class student.”
Returning to the topic of the world as a whole, Coppola said: “Look at what’s happening in parts of the world right now. It’s the haves versus the have-nots. And it can’t be that. I’m a very old man. I…what am I? I’m 85 years old.” I don’t know how many years I have, but all I can think of is that I would like the world of children to be beautiful and I believe that it can be, we have the talent, but we have to be on a higher level of thinking.
“I feel like each and every one of you here is a million-to-one opportunity, and that you are unique because there is no one like you. So, if you do art, I will always say, as I do to my kids, be personal, because your art will be unique…I think That we are full of intelligence that can be expressed in the form of our ideas and our vision of the future and we have to jump over this 10,000-year period of patriarchy and say: I am a king and I want it all.