Cannes, May 17: Two-time Palme d’Or winner Francis Ford Coppola, 85, is back in the Cannes Competition after a 45-year hiatus with “Megalopolis”, a mainly self-funded USD 120 million project, his first directing gig in 13 years. The last time the American cinema stalwart was here, in 1979, “Apocalypse Now”, won the festival’s top prize.
It was his second. Coppola had won the Palme d’Or five years earlier for “The Conversation”.
There is one marked similarity between the paths that “Apocalypse Now” and “Megalopolis” have taken to Cannes. Both had extremely troubled production histories.
The late 1970s film, which had a painfully chaotic shoot in the Philippines, was still a work a progress when it was included in the Cannes Competition despite vehement opposition from its US distributor, United Artists.
Related Posts:
“Apocalypse Now” arrived on the Croisette amid controversy and received terrible press from the American media contingent before and during the festival. At the Cannes press conference that year, Coppola famously launched a broadside at scribes from his country. But once the film premiered, the audience was blown away and the balance tilted in Coppola’s favour. The rest is history. Will the octogenarian American cinema legend, one of the prime movers behind the resurgence of US cinema in the 1970s, repeat history with “Megalopolis”? The sci-fi epic starring Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza is set in a “fictional” modern-day US dealing with the aftermath of a disaster. (PTI)
