He's 82 now, and Francis Ford Coppola does the math in a lengthy profile at GQ. Based on family history, he might live another 20 years. So to be safe, cut that in half. Ten years. Plenty of time to make the movie he "has been trying to make it, intermittently, for more than 40 years," writes Zach Baron. It's called Megalopolis. The plot? Baron can't summarize it concisely because he says Coppola can't either. "The best I can do, after literally hours talking about it with him, is this: It's a love story that is also a philosophical investigation of the nature of man; it's set in New York, but a New York steeped in echoes of ancient Rome; its scale and ambition are vast enough that Coppola has estimated that it will cost $120 million to make." Yes, $120 million. The tricky part is that big studios want no part of it, and Coppola plans to finance it himself.
He's done so previously in his long career, sometimes with disastrous financial repercussions—he lost $26 million on One From the Heart in 1982, and it nearly ruined him. Coppola is in a much different place now, rich not only from his movie career but from his wine-making business in Napa Valley. He's willing to make this bet—the movie is not even written yet—because he wants Megalopolis to become an enduring classic, something people watch year after year like It's a Wonderful Life. The director says he hopes "people will be spending the next 50 years trying to think: What's really in Megalopolis? What is he saying? My God, what does that mean when that happens?” (Read the full story, which covers the Coppola classics and his struggle to make the original Godfather.)
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