I was the first interview of the day: Thirty minutes on camera for the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast (you can watch the full conversation above), and I was trying to end the interview. Time was up. The army of publicists and crew had a full day planned, and Francis Ford Coppola was still talking.
I’m not going to flatter myself that Coppola was so engaged talking to me that he didn’t want the conversation to end, but he seemed bothered by the vibe. The sense we were on the clock. That talking about art was a job for everyone else in the room, including me.
Standing, as I waited for the lav mic to be detached, Coppola asked, “What was the question you wanted to ask me, but didn’t?” Knowing the professionals running the press day wanted me out ASAP, I flipped the question on him and asked what it was he had wanted to talk about that hadn’t been asked. Coppola lit up as he started talking about the future of cinema, how video games and his dreams of live cinema could merge into something new. The sound was no longer recording, so I’m not going to attempt to paraphrase — like “ Megalopolis ,” the man can weave together seemingly disparate threads in a way that makes complete sense — but here was a man at 85 years old, who had made some of the greatest films ever, and what got him excited was the conviction cinema had only just scraped its true potential.
That spirit is at the heart of “Megalopolis,” a film that connects the fall of Rome to what it sees as th.
