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Few unmade movies have intrigued with possibilities than Megalopolis. And now you are ready to come back and make your first big-scale film in decades…

At this age, I have to tell you, I am more enthusiastic and excited about the cinema and what it means and what it can be and even with all of the new digital aspects of it, which I think are being misused. As for Megalopolis… Well, it looks good. I mean, we made the offer now to several actors. I can’t say they’ve accepted, but they were very enthusiastic. One of them is Jude Law and another Shia LaBeouf. I may shortly have my lead actress. The whole world of casting is so different today—when you invite an actor to read a script, right away they want an offer to go with it, when sometimes you just want to get together with them and see if they’re the right choice. Right now I have several enthusiastic people.

I don’t have any official backers. I have a sort of philosophy of how to do it, and it’s not dissimilar to how I did Apocalypse Now, where I line up a whole bunch of territories and I put it together with the bank. In one case, one of these technology companies… I can’t say which one. But as you know, in the next five years the whole film industry is going to be owned by Apple, Facebook, Amazon. One of those newly emerged media giants is intrigued by the idea.

I am so used to living with unsure situations that I don’t know that I’ll ever in my lifetime have a sure situation. Studios pretty much don’t do these movies any more. Even when they do, they don’t finance them. I’ll use the complicated formula that I used for Apocalypse, which I turned over to my good friend George Lucas and he then used for Star Wars.

How best to describe the ambition behind the new movie? I’ve heard you had hundreds of pages written, and shot second unit.

Basically, what it does is it takes a Roman epic based on real things that happened 2,000 years ago, because really America is like the modern historical counterpart of Rome. We’re just like Rome. We’re practical. We’re good engineers. We have project power. That’s what Rome had, so I sort of thought America was the modern Rome and therefore, if I set this particular story that’s a famous Roman thing in modern Manhattan, it sort of worked a little bit.

There is an accident, and you have an architect trying to rebuild the city as a utopia. And a mayor trying to stop him…

Utopia in Greek means the place that doesn’t exist. Personally, and I say this with great sincerity, I believe it can exist. I believe in the genius of the human species in its ability to come up with solutions to all of the problems that plague us. But the biggest problem of all is to get those people out of the way who like it the way it is, because they’re already in a perfect situation. In other words, there’s already a whole group that control petroleum so they’re never going to get rid of petroleum.

Self-interested, wealthy people…

But we have the genius to make a society. The script talks about what that society is like. My movie was about utopia. You know, like so many films today, Mad Max and everything, the future—even in some of the gorgeous films—is always a terrible place. To me, when I was a kid and saw The Shape of Things to Come, the future was a great thing. It’s what we all wish it could be. When I went to Disneyland I remember the thing that just knocked me out was the Monsanto Home of the Future. I wanted to live in that house. People get scared and worried about A.I. and that’s how certain people gain power. Now, that’s with self-driving trucks that supposedly will put people out of work. But they don’t say the other half, which is that maybe more people will become paid citizens who’ll get out of employment. You’ll get a check not as a worker but as a shareholder of the country. Why shouldn’t you get $70,000 a year as a dividend from the great wealth of our beautiful country? You could if some people don’t gobble it all up for themselves. So in other words, the fear of losing work isn’t the issue, because you’ll be able to do the work you love. That’s what my script explores.

I was shooting the second unit in New York, and we get attacked by Islamic terrorists. My movie is all about New York as the center of the world, but how do you make a movie about the center of the world without it dealing with the fact that, right in the heart of it, it was attacked and thousands of people were killed? How do you make a movie of utopia with that history?

So I tried. I wrote, I wrote and finally I abandoned it and then later on I went into a new way of thinking, and worked on that. I wasn’t fully confident, but then I lost weight and it felt like time.

I looked at some of the tests and some of the readings of actors for Megalopolis and I said that same fatal thing; it wasn’t as bad as I thought. There was something here. So I began to become excited about it again. I think I have a very viable script but I also had all the second unit shot already, and I began to have some interest from some actors. It’s a big, ambitious project. It has a big cast.

I think if the film could be fortunate enough to be taken by the industry not so much as, “Here’s another wacky Coppola thing, he’ll never do it,” or, “Where is he going to get the money?” But instead, “This is exciting. We want him to do this.” There are 12 big parts and now it becomes about, how do you get all these actors working together, and pay them?

Is Megalopolis the fulfillment of a dream at the end of a great career, or the start of things to come, where you return to large canvas filmmaking?

I think I will only play on the large canvas because I’ve made all the little experimental films that I wanted to experiment with, and now I’m ready to try out what I think I’ve learned. I’m 80, but I have a 102-year-old uncle who just wrote a new opera that has been well received. Genetically, I could have 20 years and I will need that long to do everything I’m excited about wanting to do.

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EXCLUSIVE: CAA has signed Francis Ford Coppola, the six-time Oscar-winning writer, director, and producer.

The agency will help Coppola mount his epic project, Megalopolis, the drama set in New York about a master architect and city design czar’s grand vision to create a utopian city of the future. Coppola has been ruminating on this project for nearly two decades, and even shot much of the second unit footage of architecture and street sounds and scenes, just before the destruction of 9/11 brought the project to a halt. Coppola, who had spent several years making small personal films, found the spark to return to Megalopolis as he made new cuts of Apocalypse Now and The Cotton Club, with new cut of The Godfather: Part III also in his plans. His production company, American Zoetrope, which he co-founded with George Lucas in 1969, continues to produce films and television, and CAA Media Finance will arrange the financing and represent the distribution rights to Megalopolis.

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EXCLUSIVE: Breathtaking bets on his vision established him as one of the greatest living American filmmakers and a vineyard magnate. Now, Francis Coppola is ready to put a lot of his hard-won chips on the table one more time to make his epic dream project, Megalopolis.

While the financial configuration is still evolving, Coppola at 82 years young is betting big on himself once again, by sharing the financial risks of a film that will cost between $100 million-$120 million. He is in deep discussions with a stellar cast of actors eager to work with the director of The Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now!, The Conversation and other classics, on a seminal picture that is decades in the making.

While some conversations are further along then others, the actors Coppola is discussing roles with include Oscar Isaac, Forest Whitaker, Cate Blanchett and Jon Voight, with Zendaya, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange also among those he is seeking. He will also reunite with James Caan, whose role as Sonny Corleone in Coppola’s The Godfather made Caan one of the biggest stars of that era. This for a big tapestry film that will have many other actors in the cast.

Deadline has written about Coppola’s Megalopolis hopes for several years – I’ve seen second-unit footage of Manhattan architecture and street sounds that was shot 20 years ago, a campaign that ended after 9/11 shook Manhattan to its core. Coppola’s enthusiasm never wavered.

Emboldened by the recent sale of a portion of his considerable vineyard holdings in Sonoma County to Delicato Family Wines, Coppola has fortified his resources to borrow against, and is ready to gamble once again on his vision to make a movie he feels can be a North Star for a younger audience, and society in general, searching for optimism in a moment where global warming is taking its toll, and polarizing politics and digital misinformation are so pronounced that half the country is resisting Covid vaccines that scientists honed in a remarkably short time to combat a global pandemic.

“It has become like a religious war, in that it’s not about anything logical,” Coppola told Deadline. “I think the big news here is that I am still the same as I was 20 years ago or 40 years ago. I’m still willing to do the dream picture, even if I have to put up my own money, and I am capable of putting up $100 million if I have to here. I don’t want to, but I will do it if I have to.

“I’m committed to making this movie, I’d like to make it in the fall of 2022,” Coppola revealed. “I don’t have all my cast approved, but I have enough of them to have confidence that it is going to be a very exciting cast. The picture’s going to cost between $100 million and $120 million. Needless to say, I hope it’s closer to $100 million. I’m prepared to match some outside financing, almost dollar for dollar. In other words, I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is. What’s interesting about that is, there was a documentary about my dream studio, when I owned Zoetrope Studios and I was unafraid to risk everything I had in order to make my dream come true. Well, I really haven’t changed my personality, at all.”

While waiting for this Megalopolis moment, Coppola has spent the last few years preparing himself. He has kept off the weight he shed several years ago, and his stamina is in evidence in the way he created new versions of some of his past films, most notably the final installment of The Godfather trilogy that he retitled The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, Apocalypse Now and The Cotton Club. I hear he will be at Telluride this weekend to unveil restored versions of his films The Rain People, and The Outsiders: The Complete Novel. After doing the work and feeling at peace with those past great films, as Coppola holds court at that festival, I expect the dominant conversation will be about how he is looking forward, toward Megalopolis.

While few filmmakers would ever put their own money on the table, Coppola detailed to Deadline his big bets in the past when studios wouldn’t back him,; the musical One From the Heart plunged him into Chapter 11 back in the early ‘90s, and his risk-taking on Apocalypse Now once threated to cost him the vineyards whose revenues now dwarf his Hollywood earnings. Each time, Coppola found his way back from adversity. The classic Apocalypse Now continues to give him financial comfort.

“You know that I own the negative of Apocalypse Now, and do you know why I own it? Because nobody wanted it,” he said. “And Apocalypse Now these years earns almost as much as we get from The Godfather. Pictures like this [are difficult]; 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. Utopia is talking about how we can make the society we live in solve these problems. I believe it is an exciting change from the kinds of movies being offered to the public,” he said. “Mainly because it puts forward a fundamental message that it’s time for us to consider that the society we live in isn’t the only alternative available to us. And that utopia isn’t so much a little experimental place in the country; utopia is a discussion of people, asking the right questions on if the society we’re living in is the only alternative or, if for the sake of young people, there are better choices that should be discussed. That is the influence I dream of this movie having. And for that reason I am willing and capable of investing at a high number, to make it come true. I’m putting together the means of doing that.”

While Coppola set his script in a contemporary city and explores timely themes, the sprawling tale has its origins in ancient Rome.

“The concept of the film is a Roman epic, in the traditional Cecile B. DeMille or Ben-Hur way, but told as a modern counterpart focusing on America,” he said. “It’s based on The Catiline Conspiracy, which comes to us from ancient Rome. This was a famous duel between a patrician, Catiline, and that part will be played by Oscar Isaac, and the famous Cicero, who will be Forest Whitaker. He is now the beleaguered mayor of New York, during a financial crisis, close to the one that Mayor Dinkins had. This story takes place in a new Rome, a Roman epic sent in modern times. The time set is not a specific year in modern New York, it’s an impression of modern New York, which I call New Rome.”

Coppola realizes these serious themes leave him swimming against the tide in an industry fixated with franchises, high concepts and familiar formulas. But he’s been a maverick his whole life and would like to stake himself this one more time, hoping to prevail again.

“This film I want to make, I believe is an exciting change from the kinds of movies being offered to the public,” Coppola said. “Mainly because it puts forward a fundamental message that it’s time for us to consider that the society we live in isn’t the only alternative available to us. And that a utopia isn’t so much a little experimental place in the country; a utopia is a discussion of people asking the right questions on just that subject, and if the society we’re living in is the only alternative or, if for the sake of young people, there are better choices that should be discussed. Hopefully that is the influence I dream of this movie having. And for that reason I am willing and capable of investing at a high number, to make it come true. I’m putting together the means of doing that.

He also understands this turn of events brings him full circle, and it seems to energize him.

“I have some private financiers who want to come in on a partner basis, and I’m willing to match their funds, if I have to,” he said. “Obviously the more money I have to put up, the more complications it gives me, but I am capable of doing it. I am capable of going the whole distance if I really had to. It would be hard for me or anyone to put up $100 million to make a utopian dream of a film, but it is not impossible for that to happen. It has been in the news I just sold one of my wineries to another company. So I’m a position where I don’t have the money but I can borrow it. So basically I am the same position as I was in that Dream Studio period, where I want to see the dream come true and I am not afraid to risk my own money to make it happen.”

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DOUBLE EXCLUSIVE: LAST NIGHT I learned that Oscar Isaac, long rumored to star in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, has passed on making the film. So the search is on to find a new star of Coppola’s $120 million epic which the famed director wants to shoot this fall.

Isaac is currently starring in Marvel’s “Moon Knight” on Disney Plus, just came off a big year with “Scenes from a Marriage” on HBO, and “Dune.” He is always working. Perhaps he couldn’t fit “Megalopolis” into his busy schedule.

Earlier I wrote: Coppola is celebrating the 50th anniversary of “The Godfather” this week. He got his star on the Walk of Fame today, and on Sunday he and the cast and producer Al Ruddy will be honored at the Academy Awards.

Now I’m told Coppola will start shooting his next blockbuster in September. The shoot will go from September through January, largely in New York, on sound stages, and maybe in Europe.

The stars of “Megalopolis” are said to be Oscar Isaac — playing architect who wants to reimagine New York, as well as Zendaya, Cate Blanchett, and Michelle Pfeiffer among others.

The cost is $120 million, and Coppola told GQ recently he’ll fund it himself if he can’t find financing. Coppola has made a fortune from a lot of thing besides movies, including his famed winery. He’s visionary, that’s for sure. Everyone wants this to be a tremendous hit.

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