Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la is set to fin­ish his long-delayed epic Megalopolis

Those of us who assumed that the great Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la had entered an unan­nounced retire­ment from film­mak­ing to spend more time work­ing on his boom­ing wine com­pa­ny are hap­pi­ly mis­tak­en, it would appear. A new report from Dead­line late last night states that he’s got at least one more in him, and that if he has to, he’ll pay for it him­self to real­ize his grand vision.

His long-rumored epic Mega­lopo­lis may not be the myth many fans pre­sumed it to be, as Cop­po­la has put pre-pro­duc­tion in motion on the mas­sive­ly-scaled project. The issue thus far has been that find­ing financ­ing is dif­fi­cult for such an expen­sive con­cept with such an uncom­mer­cial premise, so he fig­ures that with no oth­er choice, he’ll dip into that vast vine­yard for­tune to foot the bill.

His plan: noth­ing short of a ​“a Roman epic, in the tra­di­tion­al Cecile B DeMille or Ben-Hur way, but told as a mod­ern coun­ter­part focus­ing on Amer­i­ca,” Cop­po­la says in the Dead­line piece. He goes on to explain that it’ll be a present-day retelling of the clash between two Roman patri­cians, restyled as a con­flict involv­ing a David Dink­ins-esque may­oral fig­ure in a New York strapped by finan­cial cri­sis, a fusion-world Cop­po­la refers to as ​“New Rome.”

How­ev­er much time has gone by since his last fea­ture, the Cop­po­la name still gets A‑list actors lin­ing up for a chance to col­lab­o­rate, as indi­cat­ed by his laun­dry list of poten­tial and hoped-for cast­ing. He’s entered dis­cus­sions with Oscar Isaac, For­est Whitak­er, Cate Blanchett, Jon Voight, and his old pal James Caan to star, and his wish list also includes Zen­daya, Michelle Pfeif­fer, and Jes­si­ca Lange.

Mega­lopo­lis has been a long time com­ing, the ear­ly seedlings of shoot­ing scut­tled when the New York that Cop­po­la want­ed to depict was irrev­o­ca­bly altered by the events of ⁹⁄₁₁. But he’s opti­mistic to the point of utopi­anism about the poten­tial of his new film: “…every­one wants to make the next Mar­vel movie, but no one wants to make a pic­ture that real­ly talks to young peo­ple in a hope­ful way, that we are in a posi­tion to get togeth­er and solve any prob­lem thrown at us. That is what I believe, and it is what the theme of the pic­ture real­ly is.”