Even before its release in cinemas, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” has been called many things in reviews out of festivals so far – beautiful, daring, dull, experimental, crazy and more. It’s a film designed to provoke a lot of discussion about big ideas, about society at large and all sorts of issues that plague us today. But there’s one label Coppola himself won’t stand you calling his film – ‘woke’.
Speaking to , Coppola spoke about the film’s casting which includes not just actors like Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, and Aubrey Plaza but others who have been on the ‘outs’ in Hollywood too like Shia LeBeouf and Jon Voight. Coppola said that was very deliberate as he wanted to push back against anyone dubbing it a ‘woke production’: “What I didn’t want to happen is that we’re deemed some woke Hollywood production that’s simply lecturing viewers. The cast features people who were canceled at one point or another.
There were people who are archconservatives and others who are extremely politically progressive. But we were all working on one film together. That was interesting, I thought.
” He also praised Shia LaBeouf for his work ethic and compares him to another volatile Hollywood legend from “Apocalypse Now”: “Shia really took to it. I had no experience working with him prior to this, but he deliberately sets up a tension between himself and the director to an extreme degree. He reminds me of Dennis Hopper, who would do something similar, and then you’d say, ‘Just go do anything,’ and then they go off and do something brilliant.
” Coppola also offered an update on two potential projects he’s working on right now: “One is a regular sort of movie that I’d like someone to finance and make in England. 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.” “Megalopolis” will arrive in cinemas on September 27th so it’ll be a few more weeks before we know if the zeitgeist will crown it with the ‘woke’ labelling.
He adds that “Distant Vision” will likely be another self-funded effort and thus will depend upon the success of “Megalopolis”..
