Adam Driver precipitously balances himself on a ledge of a building in a first look clip from Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. The director shared the anxiety-inducing clip from his long-brewing project on May 4, the date of his late wife Eleanor’s birthday.
“Megalopolis has always been a film dedicated to my dear wife Eleanor. I really had hoped to celebrate her birthday together this May 4th,” Coppola captioned the clip in an Instagram post on Saturday. “But sadly that was not to be, so let me share with everyone a gift on her behalf.”
In the film, Driver portrays a man named Caesar who lives in a world that mirrors his precarious viewpoint on the edge of the building. It’s a civilization “devouring itself in a whirl of unchecked greed, self-absorption, and political propaganda, while a few bold dreamers push against the tide, striving to usher in a new dawn,” as a statement from Coppola on the film details. Caesar is one of those dreamers.
“But he is also clearly an avatar of myself — a grand visionary witnessing a once-great thing (call it cinema if you must) withering before his very eyes and determined to revivify it,” Coppola continued.
In the clip, sirens are heard in the background as Caesar peers out a window in a building high above a city street below. He tentatively steps out on to the ledge before making his way to its edge. As he peers over, he extends a foot off as if to jump, but he soon finds he has power to control his current precarious circumstance with a shouted command and a snap of his fingers.
Coppola said working on the sci-fi epic has made him feel “born-again” at age 85 via the “provocative ideas and relentless ideas and relentless cinematic invention,” among other experiences he had from making the film.
“To paraphrase myself speaking decades ago about APOCALYPSE NOW, MEGALOPOLIS isn’t a movie about the end of the world as we know it, it is the end of the world as we know it,” he said. “Only, where APOCALYPSE left us in a napalm-bombed fever-dream haze, MEGALOPOLIS, movingly, bestows on us a final image glowing with hope for the future.”
Coppola invested $120 million of his own money to fund the passion project, which premieres in competition at the Cannes Film festival later this month, as Variety reports. He first began working on the project in the early 1980s.
In addition to Driver, the film stars Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, D.B. Sweeney, and Dustin Hoffman.
