Cannes 2024: Why Francis Ford Coppola’s return to competition is an event

The giant with the two Palmes d'Or will present the very ambitious Megalopolis on the Croisette, in which he has invested part of his fortune.

That's it, it's official, the rumor was true: Francis Ford Coppola will unveil his new film, Megalopolis, at the next Cannes Film Festival. And not in the comfort of an out-of-competition screening, no, but in the merciless arena of the race for the Palme d'Or. It's a first-class cinema event, the likes of which have never been seen since 1979, the year Apocalypse Now had earned the American filmmaker his second Palme – five years earlier, he had already won it for the paranoid thriller Secret conversation. Megalopolis will therefore make its world premiere half a century after Coppola's first Cannes title.

“Coppola built the legend of the Cannes festival” said in Variety the general delegate of the event, Thierry Frémaux. And Cannes built the Coppola legend, one might add. The director actually came to the Croisette in 1967, on the occasion of the competition presentation of his film Big Boy, which then symbolized a new lease of life in American cinema, one of the very first seeds of what would become the New Hollywood – the selectors of the time had failed. In 1974, the Palme which crowned Secret conversation is inserted for its author between two Oscars for best film, awarded to Godfatherin 73, then following it, The Godfather, Part 2in 75. With Palmes, Oscars and box office records, Francis Ford Coppola established himself as a titan of cinema.

The official selection of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival

Megalopolis now?
In 1979, Apocalypse Now is the film of all dangers: a work financed without the support of a major studio, an epic shoot, an endless editing process, catastrophic rumors… It is the Cannes screening, and the press conference organized in the stride, which will seal the legend of the film: Coppola comes surrounded by his children, very angry against the American press (“American journalism is the most decadent, immoral, and mendacious profession imaginable.. TEverything that has been written about this film over the past four years is false.) and improvise some punchlines legendary, including the famous “My film is not a film not about Vietnam, It is Vietnam”.

45 years later, when we thought for a long time that Twixt (released in 2011) would be his final film, the giant Coppola, now 85 years old, is therefore preparing to return to competition with another ultra ambitious film, Megalopoliswhose design, and the crazy expectation it arouses, recalls in a certain way Apocalypse Now : it's a dream project which its author has been talking about since the beginning of the 80s, and whose very title underlines the excess. The story of the rivalry between an idealistic architect and a corrupt mayor in a futuristic and reinvented New York, a sort of anticipation peplum with Shakespearean accents and casting all-star (Adam Driver, Dustin Hoffman, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf…). A potential new reflection from the director of Godfather and of Tucker about hubris, utopia and power.

The filmmaker financed this extravagant project himself, investing $120 million, drawn from his own savings, after the mortgage on his Californian vineyards. The film is currently looking for a distributor who can offer the film a release that matches its ambition. “Coppola wants to make Megalopolis a simultaneous worldwide cinema release, which necessarily means its purchase by a major studio”explained to Point someone close to the director. The costs necessary to promote the film, according to the lawyer and consigliere of the filmmaker Barry Hirsch, also exceed 100 million dollars.

A big bet
With this film, Coppola plays big. Very big. The man is accustomed to this type of bet: at the beginning of the 80s, the failure of the musical Heart stroke had caused the bankruptcy of Zoetrope, the studio he had built to compete with the Hollywood majors, and had condemned him to spend the next two decades making a series of commissioned films – a hard blow for this demiurge who had just shot masterpieces -colossal works and had acquired a taste for total artistic freedom. By choosing to show Megalopolis in competition at Cannes, Coppola knows that he risks taking blows, especially since the feedback from the first spectators of the film, which the American press has echoed, is extremely polarized.

Everything we know about Megalopolis, by Francis Ford Coppola

When some praise an extraordinary, visionary work, “cinema that thinks big”others are put off by its appearance “tvery experimental”. A few days ago, an article from Hollywood Reporter reported the circumspection of some of the happy few who had seen the film – studio executives clearly not too keen on the avant-garde, and who did not consider the film commercial enough. After this bad buzz, the announcement of the film's arrival in competition at Cannes is a way for Coppola to roll the dice again. To place the film in the realm of art rather than commerce. It is also a message sent to his fans: the Coppola we loved so much, the one who moved mountains throughout his career, flamboyant and flamboyant, has not said his last word.

Coppola had certainly already returned to the festival since Apocalypse Nowbut for less risky events from a critical and financial point of view: out-of-competition screening in 1989 of the sketch film New York Stories (co-signed with Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen), presidency of the jury in 1996, presentation ofApocalypse Now Redux in 2001, opening of the Directors' Fortnight with Tetro in 2009…

If Megalopolis were to appear on the list, on the evening of May 25, the filmmaker would find himself on the stage of the Palais des Festivals at the same time as his old friend George Lucas, who would be awarded an honorary Palme d'Or for the ensemble of his work. The Cannes history of the two men goes back a long way, since Coppola notably produced Lucas' first feature film, THX-1138presented at the Directors' Fortnight in 1971. A film whose failure had put its young producer in great financial difficulties… forcing him to shoot The Godfather to repay his debts. We of course wish him to recoup his costs with Megalopolis – and not having to turn The Godfather 4 to reconcile with his banker.