For Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, a pro­duc­tion off the rails is right on track

Last night, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter ran an exclu­sive sta­tus update on the fraught pro­duc­tion of Mega­lopo­lis, Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la​‘s $130 mil­lion behe­moth financed using the pro­ceeds from his own remark­ably lucra­tive wine sales. And true to form, the direc­tor famed for his obses­sive par­tic­u­lar­i­ty lead­ing to wild­ly hec­tic shoots once again finds him­self at the helm of a mas­sive oper­a­tion dis­rupt­ed by the mad scope of his own ambi­tion — his­tor­i­cal­ly speak­ing, an ear­ly omen of an incom­ing mas­ter­piece. Con­sid­er­ing Coppola’s record of beat­ing the impos­si­ble odds he large­ly sets for him­self, every bad sign could just as eas­i­ly be a good one.

THR’s sto­ry projects an image of dis­ar­ray, focused on the news of Cop­po­la sum­mar­i­ly dis­miss­ing his pro­duc­tion design­er and super­vis­ing art direc­tor in the past week after hav­ing done the same with his visu­al effects team back in Decem­ber. The arti­cle express­es doubt that the film (a sci-fi epic about an archi­tect rebuild­ing a lev­eled New York as a utopia, with a cast includ­ing Adam Dri­ver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Lau­rence Fish­burne, and Jon Voight) can move for­ward in its cur­rent state, but it’s a fool who ful­ly counts Cop­po­la out.

Though the report cites an insider’s claim that Mega­lopo­lis is ​“giv­ing severe Apoc­a­lypse Now vibes,” a lat­er para­graph likens this sit­u­a­tion to the shake­ups on set of Bram Stoker’s Drac­u­la, in which Cop­po­la fired an effects team dubi­ous that he could achieve every­thing he set out to do with prac­ti­cal tech­niques. The film­mak­er then installed his son Roman in the vacant posi­tion, and cre­at­ed one of the most resource­ful and rap­tur­ous­ly beau­ti­ful motion pic­tures of the ​’90s in a James Cameron-esque reminder not to bet against the house. (At least in terms of qual­i­ty, that is. Coppola’s not immune to flop­ping, but even when high­ly uncom­mer­cial, his results are always fascinating.)

The depart­ments with which he’s tak­en issue sug­gest a resis­tance to vir­tu­al effects in spe­cif­ic, the arti­cle men­tion­ing his scrapped plans to employ tech used on Star Wars tele­vi­sion show The Man­dalo­ri­an in favor of more tra­di­tion­al green-screen­ing. And so the sit­u­a­tion at hand with Mega­lopo­lis begins to look less like hay­wire chaos in line with his Viet­nam quag­mire — which encom­passed out-of-con­trol stars, weath­er events destroy­ing expen­sive sets, tense nego­ti­a­tions with the gov­ern­ment of the Philip­pines, and one grim­ly col­or­ful inci­dent involv­ing real human corpses — and more like a case of a noto­ri­ous­ly fussy direc­tor refus­ing to com­pro­mise on his principles.

So long as this thing gets fin­ished, an out­come very much still on the table, the final prod­uct will speak for itself. Until then, con­sid­er­ing the grand scheme of adver­si­ty Cop­po­la has faced in his long and sto­ried career, these hic­cups are all small pota­toes. We can start the ​“but can he pull it off?” con­ver­sa­tion in earnest when we get the first act of God con­spir­ing against its completion.