It took the director of ‘The Godfather’ 40 years to make his sci-fi film

The sci-fi genre is likely to have some of the most ambitious films ever made and projects thought to be impossible, such as ‘Dune’. One of these was the vision that Francis Ford Coppola, director of ‘The Godfather’, had of one of the most dreamed projects of his career, and which took 40 years to be able to achieve.

It’s about ‘Megalopolis’, a science fiction film by Francis Ford Copolla that it took 40 long years to be able to say that now it will be a production that will arrive in cinemas. Just as James Cameron thought ‘Avatar’ was impossible at the time due to technological limitations, ‘The Godfather’ director also delayed by many years one of his stories that would have been impossible to make.

After failures like “One from the Heart” and “The Outsiders”, that was it Francis Ford Coppola started a science fiction film in the early 80s. The project will take shape as ‘Megalopolis’, a film that has a reference to ‘Metropolis’, the science fiction work of Fritz Lang that has become a fundamental part not only of the genre, but also of cinema as a medium of expression.

It was during an interview in 2007 when Francis Ford Coppola admitted it ‘Megalopolis’ I was so ambitious, that many studios had distrusted the director, after the failure of his most recent deliveries. Reason that led him to put this title aside, to devote himself to other films such as ‘Dracula’, ‘Jack’ and ‘The Rainmaker’ in 1997.

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9/11 and the fall of Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’

Everything seemed to indicate that the new millennium would be the perfect season for the director to finally get ‘Megalopolis’. Russel Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio, Paul Newman and Nicolas Cage were some of those who were in talks to star in the film, and then the unthinkable happened, the attack of September 11, 2001, which stopped the 30 hours of filming. without going anywhere.

Like Alejandro Jodorowski’s ‘Dune’, ‘Megalopolis’ would be known for many years as the most ambitious science fiction film ever made. It was in 2019 that Coppola announced that he would return to produce this project, and nothing has been heard since. At 83, many fans believed the director’s words had stuck again.

But nothing could be further from reality, because right now Francis Ford Coppola is filming ‘Megalopolis’, accompanied by a first-rate cast such as Adam Driver, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Jason Schwartzman, Shia LaBeouf, Talia Shire and Dustin Hoffman. Using technology used in “The Mandalorian” and “The Batman,” the sci-fi film is expected to wrap in March 2023, with a 2024 release.