Cannes Film Festival officially kicks off today with the latest from Quentin Dupieux, but Francis Ford Coppola has decided to truly begin the festivities with a bang. After a brief, enticing tease earlier this month, he’s now debuted the epic first trailer for Megalopolis, chock full of jaw-dropping images that has us counting down the hours until Thursday’s world premiere. “Our new film MEGALOPOLIS is the best work I’ve ever had the privilege to preside over,” notes Coppola with the trailer.
Along with French distribution from Le Pacte, the film was also picked up by Constantin Film for Germany and all German-speaking territories, including Switzerland and Austria; Eagle Pictures for Italy; Tripictures for Spain; and Entertainment Film Distributors Limited for the U.K., per Deadline. A U.S. deal has yet to be announced, but here’s hoping it comes during the festival.
“My first goal always is to make a film with all my heart, so I began to realize it would be about love and loyalty in every aspect of human life,” said the director last month. “Megalopolis echoed these sentiments, in which love was expressed in almost crystalline complexity, our planet in danger and our human family almost in an act of suicide, until becoming a very optimistic film that has faith in the human being to possess the genius to heal any problem put before us.”
“I believe in America,” he adds, nodding to The Godfather. “Our founders borrowed a constitution, Roman law, and senate for their revolutionary government without a king. American history could neither have taken place nor succeeded without classical learning to guide it.”
He continues, “I wouldn’t have been able to make it without standing as I do on the shoulders of G.B. Shaw, Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham, Mill, Dickens, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Fournier, Morris, Carlyle, Ruskin, Butler, and Wells all rolled into one; with Euripides, Thomas More, Moliere, Pirandello, Shakespeare, Beaumarchais, Swift, Kubrick, Murnau, Goethe, Plato, Aeschylus, Spinoza, Durrell, Ibsen, Abel Gance, Fellini, Visconti, Bergman, Bergson, Hesse, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Cao Xueqin, Mizoguchi, Tolstoy, McCullough, Moses, and the prophets all thrown in.”
Starring Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Giancarlo Esposito, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, and more, here’s the synopsis: “The destruction of a New York City-like metropolis after an accident brings clashing visions of the future. On one side is an ambitious architectural idealist Cesar (Adam Driver). On the other is his sworn enemy, city Mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). The debate becomes whether to embrace the future and build a utopia with renewable materials, or take a business-as-usual rebuild strategy, replete with corruption and power brokering. In between their struggle is the mayor’s socialite daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), a restless young woman who grew up around power and is looking for meaning in her life.”
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