Francis Ford Coppola, the legendary director known for his work on Apocalypse Now and The Godfather, has weighed in on an unexpected TikTok trend. In a recent Instagram post, Coppola surprised fans for weighing in on how often he thinks about the Roman Empire, revealing that he thinks about the ancient era of history “quite a lot.” In recent months, social media has been flooded with videos of women asking their partners or male family members “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?” — and being surprised to learn that a lot of men think about it on a daily or weekly basis. For Coppola, in particular, his knowledge of the Roman Empire had a massive impact on his upcoming film Megalopolis.
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“How often do I think of Ancient Rome? Quite a lot, as the Roman Republic served as the example for my country America and its institutions, and was the inspiration for my upcoming film @megalopolisfilm,” Coppola writes. “My fascination with the Roman Republic is based on the struggle between the political parties during which the interest of the Republic yielded to the ambitions of a few powerful men who espoused the aims of political parties to establish their own fortunes and authority by relying upon armed forces to achieve those ends, dealing the final blow to a constitution already tottering to its fall.”
What Is Megalopolis about?
The plot of Megalopolis largely remains under wraps, but the film is reportedly set in an alternate reality version of New York City dubbed “New Rome.” In the film, the fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems in this epic story of political ambition, genius and conflicted love. The film is somewhat of a passion project for Coppola, who has been financing almost all of the film’s $100 million budget himself.
“What would make me really happy? It’s not winning a lot of Oscars because I already have a lot and maybe more than I deserve,” Coppola said of his career in an interview last year. “And it’s not that I make a lot of money, although I think over time it will make a lot of money because anything that the people keep looking at and finding new things, that makes money. So somewhere down the line, way after I’m gone, all I want is for them to discuss [Megalopolis] and, is the society we’re living in the only one available to us? How can we make it better? Education, mental health? What the movie really is proposing is that utopia is not a place. It’s how can we make everything better? Every year, come up with two, three or four ideas that make it better.”
“I would be smiling in my grave if I thought something like that happened, because people talk about what movies really mean if you give them something,” Coppola continued. “If you encouraged people to discuss marriage and education and health and justice and opportunities and freedom and all these wonderful things that human beings have conceived of. And ask the question, how can we make it even better? That would be great. Because I bet you they would make it better if they had that conversation.”
Who Is Cast in Megalopolis?
The ensemble cast of Megalopolis will include Adam Driver, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Giancarlo Esposito, Shia LaBeouf, Chloe Fineman, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, DB Sweeney, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Bailey Ives, Grace Vanderwaal, and James Remar.
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