After “Megalopolis,” Coppola says he is preparing a new movie

“I’ve already started writing a new movie,” Francis Ford Coppola said Friday at the press conference for Megalopolishis film testament in the race for the Palme d’Or, which generates deep divisions.

“I promise you I’ll still be here in 20 years,” he said, adding, “if I can still make this movie better, I’ll try to do it.” “I know this project is finished because I already started writing a new movie,” she also confided.

Francis Ford Coppola, who invested his personal fortune worth $120 million to finance this pharaonic project, estimated that his children had “very good careers” and that, therefore, “they had no need to inherit fortunes.”

“That’s how I wanted to make the film,” he added, specifying: “While I was financing it, I told myself that I could do whatever I wanted.”

“I dream that people come away from this film wanting to see it again,” he said in an interview on France Inter broadcast on Friday morning.

“The only thing that matters to me is that it is a movie that people want to see every year on New Year’s Eve,” he explained.

Masterpiece or disaster?

Obtaining a third Palme d’Or would be a first in the history of Cannes. For Coppola, there are analogies between his return to the Croisette this year and his arrival to defend Apocalypse now in 1979, which earned him his second Palme.

In its first reviews, the specialist site Deadline hailed it as “a true modern genre masterpiece that shocks in its sheer audacity”, but The Guardian described the film as “bloated, dull and disconcertingly superficial”.

The Hollywood Reporter called the film “an impressive and ambitious departure, to say the least”, while the Times of London criticized its “plain performances, simple dialogue and ugly images”.

“The film is really disconcerting, especially if we expect from Coppola a definitive masterpiece like in the great era,” said Le Monde. Bluntly, Telerama called the film a “catastrophe” (verso) and Libération called it “an unbeatable, hazy retro-futurist peplum” that left its special correspondents “stunned.”