Venice 2025: Megadoc, when Shia Labeouf turns Coppola in Bourrique

The spouts between the boosted actor and the director of the godfather are the great attraction of Megadoc, documentary on the set of Megalopolis.

At the Venice Mostra, in the Venice Classics section, the director Mike Figgis (LEAVING LAS VEGAS,, Time code…) Present Megadochis making-of of Megalopolisthe project fantasized by Francis Ford Coppola for 40 years and that he ended up realizing last year. “”How does a good makeup-of from a Francis film ? “ Asks, in the intro of his documentary, Mike Figgis to Eleanor Coppola, wife of the legendary director, died in 2024, to whom we owe one of the greatest making-of in history, At the heart of darknessdevoted to Revelation Now. Figgis will then ask George Lucas, who also filmed Coppola at work in Moviemakerdocument on the set of Rainin 1969, when the two apprentice bearded filmmakers had not yet revolutionized Hollywood. The “film behind the scenes of a coppola film” is therefore a full-fledged sub-genre, and Figgis knows.

Of Moviemaker has MegadocCoppola may have aged, but he hasn’t changed much. He always speaks with passion, expresses his doubts, is not embarrassed to be shown in bad posture, bad hair, in a creative or financial impasse. The Figgis camera is the “fly on the wall”, as they say in English, chronizing the different stages of the production of MegalopolisSlipping discreetly within rehearsals with the actors, Coppola discussions with his producers and the various artistic departments, to the tense exchanges of the filmmaker with his team of visual effects, which he will eventually put in the door, generated by Ricochet an article of Hollywood Reporter Resumed everywhere on the planet and evoking a cataclysmic shoot.

What we see in Megadoc Demine the rumors of an improvising coppola in the fog, and rather maintains the legend of the insatiable experimenter, a genius tightrope walker determined to repel the limits of cinema rather than lounging in his vineyards, doubled with a flamber who broke his piggy bank to accomplish one of his wildest fantasies. The most complertist Coppola fans will be happy to discover images of a first project Megalopolis Dating from the early 2000s, with Robert de Niro and Uma Thurman reading the script, and Ryan Gosling performing some claudio scenes (the role ultimately held by Shia Labeouf). Over the documentary, we see figgis groping, looking for the axis of his film, he also confesses at a time that he hopes that Megalopolis Truly turns to disaster, just to have something to tell, because all the great making-of, he says, are stories of disaster.

Figgis ended up, without pre -established plan, a documentary on the Coppola report to the actors, thanks to the complicity of the actors of Megalopolis. Not Adam Driver, which we barely see, because he does not like to be filmed when he works. Ni Nathalie Emmanuel, because her agent told Figgis that the actress does not like to be filmed when she … eats (and rehearsals with Coppola often involve food). But Dustin Hoffman gives here a sympathetic interview, Jon Voight regularly passes a head, the air a little bewildered, and Aubrey Plaza dynamites all thanks to her hilarious hearing by zoom and the showdown that she wanted to organize against Dustin Hoffman (we do not spoil the outcome of the fight). And above all, above all, there is the essential Shia Labeouf.

We heard that there had been tensions between the actor and Coppola. Megadoc is the proof by the image that Labeouf actually spent his days to run his director in a watery, pushing him in his entrenchments with his incessant questions, contesting his choices of staging, offering ideas that Coppola finds absurd, going so far as to force the door of the Silverfish, the mythical truck-control of the filmmaker, in which he likes to take refuge. On his director’s chair, the maestro has trouble keeping his calm, gross, sulk … Labeouf tires so coppola that he thinks he will be fired, we would even swear that he wants to be fired, like Harvey Keitel on Revelation Now (It is Labeouf himself who quotes this example). Rather than prostrating yourself from morning to evening at the foot of Coppola, on the pretext that he would be an indisputable genius, Labeouf prefers to take the desire to experiment with the master to the letter. And play the dirty kids, because it is in his nature, but also in the name of the history of cinema, because he knows that Marlon Brando also exasperated Coppola, landing in the Philippines with dozens of extra pounds and without having read the scenario ofRevelation Now… In the end, Megalopolis is not Revelation Now,, Megadoc is not At the heart of darknessand Shia Labeouf is not Marlon Brando. But there is still a happy end at the end: Francis ended up writing to Shia a long email where he tells him that he loves her. And Shia of course wanted to read the message facing the camera.

Megadocfrom Mike Figgis, with Francis Ford Coppola, Shia Labeouf, Aubrey Plaza… Unknown release date.