Live at the Chicago Theatre: Francis Ford Coppola, ‘Megalopolis' and your questions

Chicago Tribune

20-06-2025

Want a better America? A very famous filmmaker would like your thoughts on that one.
Hiding in plain sight, 'Megalopolis' is no longer streaming anywhere (it was available, briefly, as a digital download) and it's not on DVD. There's a reason. Its writer-director prefers that you experience his long-brewing, half-mad argument for democracy, aesthetics and a brighter future in a big way. Not a small, pauseable one.
In July, one of modern cinema's towering figures will embark on a multi-city tour of 'An Evening with Francis Ford Coppola and 'Megalopolis' Screening.' The film presentation will be followed by Coppola's discussion, built around questions from the audience, on the topic 'How to Change Our Future.'
The July 25 Chicago Theatre event follows engagements in Red Bank, New Jersey, and Port Chester, New York. After Chicago, Coppola and 'Megalopolis' move on to Denver, Dallas and San Francisco; Live Nation presents five of the six tour stops, with the Texas Theatre handling the Dallas engagement.
'This is the way 'Megalopolis' was meant to be seen, in a large venue, with a crowd and followed by intense interactive discussions about the future,' Coppola wrote in a statement for Live Nation.
Coppola has wrestled with 'Megalopolis' for nearly 50 years. Covering much of the $120 million production costs himself, with money from his celebrated winery, the filmmaker's latest premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival to wildly mixed reactions.
After several months of searching for a distributor (Lionsgate, ultimately), 'Megalopolis' grossed $14 million in theaters, making it one of modern cinema's most brazen rolls of the dice.
The film stars Adam Driver as visionary architect and inventor Cesar Catilina. A few decades in the future, this idealistic savior vies for urban redevelopment and design control of the Manhattan-like city of New Rome with its weak, corrupt mayor (Giancarlo Esposito). Evoking a metropolis on the brink of total collapse, New Rome's scheming politicians and half-ruined architectural monuments also suggest ancient Rome, just before Nero started fiddling.
Catilina wants something better for the people, a utopian rebuke to mediocrity. His motto is unmistakably Coppola's as well: 'When we leap into the unknown, we prove we are free.'
Now 86, the director will forever be best known for his 'Godfather' trilogy, 'Apocalypse Now' and smaller-scaled masterworks such as 'The Conversation.' His latest film, he has said, may too pass the test of time, long after the memes and the financial reports have faded.
As Coppola posted on Instagram earlier this year, noting that director Jacques Tati risked all he had (or nearly) on his wondrous 1967 utopian/dystopian dream 'Play Time,' now considered a classic: 'Box-office is only about money, and like war, stupidity and politics (it) has no true place in our future.'