A Granular Look at a Grand Experiment

It’s easy to tell that Megadoc is a Mike Figgis movie – the jazz trumpet over plucked bass and brushed drums, how his camera drifts to Aubrey Plaza like a platinum blonde femme fatale, and his style of filming, tight and intimate, the same way when he snagged Oscar nominations for Leaving Las Vegas. Maybe that’s the only way that a documentarian could get anything coherent or distinctive from the impossible task of making sense of the creation of 2024 bomb Megalopolis – to be as much themselves as Francis Ford Coppola is. Invited by the Apocalypse Now filmmaker to create a fly-on-the-wall making-of for his career-ending project, his portrait of the artist as an old man is captivating but oddly limited.

That’s “career-ending” in multiple senses, not least that Coppola spent an estimated $180 million of his own money on a film that was outgrossed by the single-weekend re-release of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Figgis isn’t exactly capturing Coppola’s process from first rehearsal: After all, he’d been playing with the idea for Megalopolis so long that there’s footage of a table read from back when Billy Crudup was a star. What Figgis is recording is the fulfillment of Coppola’s decades-old dream of making his NYC-as-Rome metaphor – the dog finally catching the car.

There’s a dark humor in the fact that, since Coppola has decided to keep Megalopolis as a theatrical-only experience and theatrical audiences rejected his film, there’s a chance that more people will see Megadoc than its subject. Not that Megadoc does much to encourage audiences to change that equation. After all, this is a filmmaker talking about a filmmaker, and so directors may find moments of education, like when he instructs Plaza to perform as a spider, or “Rapunzel with a side of wow.” They may also want to watch the final film to see whether that was actually good advice or not.

Figgis’ subject seems to be less Coppola himself, or the making of Megalopolis, but more about the suggestion that he’s a filmmaking autocrat who attracts acolytes and maniacs. It becomes easy to see why Figgis’ camera looks so longingly at Plaza – she’s just as cantankerous and bloody-minded as the old man himself – but when he’s really looking at Coppola he’s doing so through the context of how his cast sees him.

It’s through those interactions that Figgis comes closest to creating a portrait of Coppola, and it’s not always flattering. His asinine insistence that nothing worthwhile has come from work, only play, seems exactly what a multimillionaire would say. It’s public record that Coppola bit deeply into his personal fortune to finance his grand folly, and it seems that there’s rarely a moment at which he cares about saving a cent (that said, Figgis constantly breaks down his budgets like Leopold Bloom with less flop sweat). Directors may relish watching Coppola work it all out on the fly, but the process the documentary reveals seems like a producer’s nightmare. Figgis’ theorem seems to be, would it be Coppola if he didn’t take such wild experimental swings? Arguably not but that means Figgis, in asides to camera, is left wondering how much he wants Megalopolis to fail so he has something interesting to talk about.

While Figgis gets this extraordinary and unrestricted access, there’s a real question about what he does with it. Coppola is infamous for finding his films in the edit, but it’s hard to see that Figgis found that much more than he had in the camera. His coverage is so deep that Megadoc never quite has a singular focus, and there may have potentially been a stronger film in Coppola’s collapsing relationship with Shia LaBeouf, the only actor who seems immune to the sense of awe that engulfs the massed throng around the director. There’s also the question of what Figgis leaves out: He may discuss Coppola’s relationship to and reputation for chaos on the set, but solely in the context of creative process, not the allegations of inappropriate behavior on the set that has led to lawsuits and countersuits.

When Figgis asks First AD Mariela Comitini about the secret to keeping peace on set with such constant friction and lack of structure, it’s probably the closest one can come to understanding why Coppola wanted him following with a camera in the first place. It takes an old friend who is not afraid of him to speak real truths. That may be why the best insights may come from Coppola’s old friend, George Lucas. After all, both have spent their careers making wildly expensive sociopolitical fables. Lucas used his fortune to make popular movies and then invest vast sums into education nonprofits and museums. Coppola took a final financial and artistic leap on a project that few audiences will ever see. Figgis captures Coppola as a black box theatre director working on a blockbuster budget, the mistakes and asides all part of his process. When Giancarlo Esposito lauds Coppola for being an 83-year-old who is still experimenting, it’s thrilling, but you’ll still be glad he’s spending his own cash.

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