As ambitious as Megalopolis is, one factor that Francis Ford Coppola wanted to push even further was the fact that he included a scene that featured a “live theater” component in which a person from the audience would stand in front of the screen and briefly interact with Adam Driver’s character on screen. Coppola instituted this unique fourth wall-break at the Cannes screenings and certain IMAX presentations have also played out the scene with a microphone set up at the foot of the screen and the picture shrinking to a size so that Driver’s character can make somewhat eye contact with the person in the theater.
Obviously, it would be a monumental task for every single theater screening to incorporate a plant in the audience to bring this moment to life, but IndieWire reports that over 20 markets in North America will feature this live participant component to the film. The scene in question is largely inconsequential to the rest of the film, except for Coppola’s philosophical writing that he may still have wanted the viewers exposed to. However, instead of simply cutting out the scene, the picture shrinks as intended, but the interaction comes from an actor off-screen.
In the screenings that will feature the live actor, the screening may be labeled “The Ultimate Experience” when you’re buying your tickets, and each of those showings will feature what Lionsgate is calling a “Live Participant” as part of the movie. It is being assumed that this will mostly take place on IMAX or PLF screens. However, it is also said that there are a handful of the live experiences that will also be available on standard screens.
As unique and strange as this hook is, it’s not even the most experimentally ambitious that Coppola has gotten. For 2011’s Twixt, which was a horror mystery starring Elle Fanning and Val Kilmer, Coppola intended to do a 30-city tour of that film in which he would “live edit” the movie so that it would play differently to each audience it’s screening for. With that concept, “they have a great deal of footage which adds up to a movie called Twixt, but depending upon where and when you see the presentation, you might see a totally different telling of the story than others.”
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