In Praise of Francis Ford Coppola

My Four Days on the Set of Megalopolis

By Jane Doe, Guest Author

(Ms. Jane Doe is an actress who worked on the movie Megalopolis as a background artist. She is using a fake name because she’s legally obligated not to speak about the film. She had signed an NDA to that effect, but her article was so compelling that we decided to publish it. We have signed an NDA with her not to reveal her name and claim our First Amendment rights of free speech to publish this article.)

For four days, I sat on the movie set of Megalopolis, an upcoming American science fiction epic by director/producer/screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola and watched as the master filmmaker slowly and meticulously made his movie. Coppola is the director of such amazing award-winning movies as the Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation and other movies like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Outsiders and The Rainmaker. He has also served as the producer of over 50+ movies through his American Zoetrope production company. The simple premise of Megalopolis is that in a New York City set sometime in the future and with a culture very much based on early Rome, a young woman is divided between loyalties to her father, who has a classical view of society, and her lover, who is more progressive and ready for the new future. Of course, the film has many much deeper plot points like an autocratic society, democracy versus a dictatorship much like early Rome itself, and morality and what is moral in a strict futuristic society.

Rumors and speculation about Megalopolis which is being shot in Atlanta and based at Trilith Studios have been swirling since the film began its five-month shoot in November of 2022. Stories of budget overruns, mass staff and actor defections, and just general disfunction as theories began to spread that Francis maybe was too old (84) to make another movie or that he just did not understand how to make a film with all the modern technology available now. 

Francis Ford Coppola started writing Megalopolis in the 1980s and has been trying to get the movie made since that time. He came close to production in early 2001 when he recorded roughly 30 hours of second-unit footage of New York City, but when the tragedy of 9/11 happened the film was placed on indefinite hold. By 2007 Coppola publicly announced that the film would never be made. Yet in 2019 just before the pandemic it was announced that Coppola was going to try and make the movie. However, since he had not had a money-making movie in several years he could not find a studio that would finance what would be a multimillion dollar science fiction epic.

Coppola is not only a world-famous filmmaker but he’s also a very shrewd and successful businessman. His empire includes several wineries including Coppola vineyards, magazines, restaurants and hotels, cannabis, and online activities. In 2021 Coppola sold several of his wineries and when he could find no one to finance his film, he announced that he would self-finance the movie himself. At the start of production, the budget was set at $120 million and by January 2023 the reported overruns had cost the film an added $30 million. The film was originally to be shot using OSVP technology also known as The Volume. This is a system where a set is surrounded by 40-foot-high LED panels on which backgrounds and scenes and locations can be projected making that your scenery. This technology has been used in movies produced by Marvel and Star Wars. However, the technology of this system is extremely costly, and the budget quickly ballooned. Then Coppola and his team decided to pivot to a less costly and more traditional green screen approach.

I was very excited when I was cast as a wedding guest in an opulent scene that required about 300 background artists. I was going to get a chance to see Francis Ford Coppola directing up close and to see if the rumors about the film’s dysfunction and his decline were either true or false.

Most background fittings usually take 30 to 45 minutes tops, mine took over 4 hours. I was astonished at the number of costumes that I saw that took up an entire soundstage and the attention to detail on each costume. It quickly became clear why the costumes were so elaborate. Four-time Oscar winner, Milena Canonero was the costume designer and her staff was painstakingly fussy over each and every item. The style of the film costumes, hair, and sets might be called “modern Roman”. All our hair and gowns were done up in styles that would resemble what wealthy women wore during Roman times. Each morning after we got dressed in our lavish costumes, our hair and makeup took about an hour each day for each person. My hair alone took over an hour as my stylist pinned my long blond hair up, adding hair pieces and finally a fake diamond tiara that gave me a headache it weighed so much. The elaborate makeup took another 30 minutes. Multiple that by about 100 or more women and you can see how long it took for just background to get ready.   

The first day that I reported for shooting our location was Gas South Arena in Duluth, GA which was being used as a facsimile for Madison Square Garden. They had covered the entire floor of the auditorium in a thick layer of red dirt and on that placed three rings that gave it a circus atmosphere. That day we watched a chariot race, and male and female wrestlers perform in each one of the three rings. My first impressions of Mr. Coppola when he finally appeared on set surrounded by his massive crew and Roman, his son who is a cinematographer/director was that he was old and a little disorganized. Yet as I listened to background artists who have been working on the film since its beginning, it appeared that the overtime that it took to get the OSPV LED screens to work correctly was where much of the budget overruns came from. The other rumor was that many of his star actors came to set without knowing their lines. With great interest I listened to one background person who had been part of this scene with at least ten of the major stars for over a week and what had happened. The plan appeared to be for Mr. Coppola to spend two or three days filming this complex scene. Yet none of the actors seemed to know their lines and when they tried to rehearse, it just became obvious that this would not work. Instead, Francis decided to spend an entire day focused on each individual actor to get the different takes and styles he felt he needed. This expanded the time from two or three days to 10 days all with star actors on the clock getting paid. It seemed it was recurring situations like this that had started to cause budget overruns.

By the time I got to set, they had corrected that situation by ending each day after 12 hours. They had also gone to the green screens exclusively. What people forget about Francis Ford Coppola is that he is an improvisational director. Yes, he is done gigantic epics like Apocalypse Now and supposedly that ran into all kinds of budget overruns and time problems. However, early in his career Coppola was a filmmaker who made small personal films and was very improvisational in how he shot them. Sometimes he would change things at a moment’s notice. He brought that style to Megalopolis, and it was obvious that it was frustrating for the crew and perhaps even the cast. It’s hard to be improvisational when your crew is over 100 people, and you have four cameras going including a crane camera but somehow that’s what he managed to do.

On our second day we reported to the same location and the three rings of the circus were gone and replaced with a giant platform on which a Greek style temple had been built. That day we sat in the bleachers that posed for Madison Square Garden again and watched a parade of scantily dressed women walk around the stadium. Then four female aerial artists and Grace Vanderwaal, American singer, and actress, who plays one of the leads performed for about three or four hours to recorded dance music and vocals by Vanderwaal. After the scene was done the way that it was written, Coppola would begin to ask for changes: move the camera here, can you do the scene this way and then on the next take he would change it again. He might move a camera to another position or ask the crane to come in a different way or ask the dance number to change. With the crew this large it took time to make all these changes and it might seem confusing to somebody who had not been on the set for 24 hours over two days but it became apparent he was in complete control and knew exactly what was going on. They had a riot scene planned at the end of the dance section, and watching the stunt coordinator and Coppola add layer upon layer to the fight scenes was so interesting.

On top of that Francis is an old school gentleman. We never heard him curse or raise his voice. Each day he was dressed in a suit and was wonderfully nice and complementary to everyone and treated us with great dignity. Because the set was so big and he is 84 years old, he used a microphone to talk to everybody. The first day I was on set people talked over Francis and that did create confusion for people.  That did not happen on the second day.

When I returned a week later to complete this wedding scene we were now at Trilith Studios and our numbers have been reduced down to about 100. To get us in the mood for what we were going to be working on that day, Coppola showed a 5 minute clip of what we had shot the week before with Grace Vanderwaal and the aerialists It was amazing. The color correction, the editing, how the scene flowed together with this beautiful song sung by Grace was stunning. It’s not often on a film set that actors, background, and entire crew members stop to applaud a little vignette but that’s what happened. That day we watched parades of people walk by with us applauding for them. The group passing by included Dustin Hoffman, Talia Shire and Giancarlo Esposito. I almost got bumped up to have a line with Talia Shire unfortunately it went to someone else, but for a few moments I thought I was going to have a line in a Francis Ford Coppola movie.

I don’t know if this movie will be a success. I don’t know if the movie will be good or if it will make any money. All I know on those four days that I sat there and watched Mr. Coppola interact with his crew and his cast and all the background was a man who still knows what he’s doing and is in command of his craft. Perhaps chaos is part of his creative process, but it’s helped him make three of the greatest movies ever made and served him well through the rest of his career. If that little 5 minute sequence that I saw is any indication, Megalopolis is going to be beautiful and amazing. Thank you, Mr. Coppola. It was an awesome four days watching you work.