Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis | Control the message

Interviews with two well-known actors from the film Megalopolis by Francis Ford Coppola, which opens in a week, were supposed to take place on Sunday. I received an email from Los Angeles on Saturday afternoon confirming that they would instead take place on Monday, then a second email that evening telling me that there had been a mix-up. Immediately afterward, a publicist called me, frankly apologetic, to tell me that the interviews had been canceled.

These things happen in my profession. What has never happened to me before is that interviews scheduled for the next day with actors are cancelled at the last minute… on the pretext that I didn’t like the film in which they act.

In May, at the Cannes Film Festival, I wrote that Megalopolisset in a futuristic city called New Rome and whose storyline makes many allusions to the fall of ancient Rome, had the feel of a “Roman chariot accident.” That wasn’t a compliment. I guess a PR person figured it out, four months later, thanks to Google Translate…

Management of communications surrounding Megalopolis has been a disaster from the start. At its world premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, journalists had to agree to a special embargo and not talk about the film until well after its official screening, contrary to usual protocol. This was probably the first sign that the production company was not hopeful that Megalopolis would be well received by the press. It was not, except by a few American critics.

Everything about this film, into which Francis Ford Coppola invested some US$120 million of his personal fortune, seems to end in failure.

In the London daily The Guardian and Hollywood magazine Varietyextras accused the 85-year-old filmmaker of inappropriate touching and unwanted kisses on his film set.

Last month, distributor Lionsgate attempted to demonstrate Coppola’s misunderstood genius by releasing a trailer containing excerpts from critics who supposedly failed to grasp the visionary works that are The Godfather And Apocalypse Now. Except that the distributor has completely invented quotes from famous journalists, including Pauline Kael of New Yorkerwho is not alive to testify to it. Fortunately, others took care of it for her. The trailer disappeared immediately, but the damage was done. Another trailer has since been released.

I am not the only journalist who has been offered, confirmed, and then refused at the last minute interviews with the artisans of MegalopolisThis is another blow in a public relations fiasco.

The most paradoxical thing is that Francis Ford Coppola himself laments the Orwellian control of the message by the big political, religious and business institutions. He said it in all its forms in his commentary on the Blu-ray of The Godfather Part IIIwhich I was listening to this week. In the early 2000s, he regretted the time when official communications were less polite. He hadn’t seen anything yet.

I understand Francis Coppola’s distrust of the media, of course. He has been scalded by critics in his up-and-down career, with its artistic and financial ups and downs. He has been praised and reviled more often than other great masters of American cinema, including his friends Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese.

Coppola was particularly hurt by the reception he received The Godfather Part IIIdescribed as “tedious” by Pauline Kael, because according to him, people attacked his daughter Sofia, in her first and only major film role. She was criticized for her lack of naturalness, her Californian accent, and she won the Razzie Award for worst supporting actress of the year in 1990, despite herself.

“It was Sofia who was shot at, while it was me who was targeted, like Michael Corleone in the film,” said the filmmaker.

This time, it is Coppola who is targeted for the failures of Megalopolis and the reaction of his entourage is to limit the press’s access to the maestro as well as to his actors.

This is, moreover, an increasingly widespread practice. Access to artists is increasingly restricted, particularly at film festivals, as some fifty colleagues present at the Venice Film Festival recently lamented, as they were not given access to interviews with directors and actors. They had to make do with clips of a few seconds on the red carpet.

I can say the same about the Toronto International Film Festival. All four of my scheduled interviews at TIFF were cancelled last week. This is not a trivial detail. The fewer journalists there are to ask artists a critical eye and sensitive or delicate questions – about accusations of sexual misconduct, for example – the more we are at the mercy of well-oiled promotional campaigns that resemble press releases.

At a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, a journalist asked Francis Coppola whether his fable about the fall of the Roman Empire and the decline of the American empire should be seen as a critique of the rise of populism. He replied that we should be wary of the dictatorial ways of leaders like Donald Trump (personified in some way by Shia LaBeouf in Megalopolis), throwing a jab at one of its actors, Jon Voight, who is a supporter of the Republican candidate.

Artists are not accountable to citizens in the same way that politicians are. The fact remains that agreeing to answer only the questions of those who are favorable to us, in culture as in politics, is not only wanting to control the message at all costs, it is also lacking in consideration for the public.