Francis Ford Coppola Didn’t Want ‘Some Woke Hollywood Production’ With ‘Megalopolis’

Director Francis Ford Coppola promised that his new film, “Megalopolis,” won’t be filled with leftist propaganda like so many other Hollywood films.

“What I didn’t want to happen is that we’re deemed some woke Hollywood production that’s simply lecturing viewers,” the director told Rolling Stone in a new interview. 

“The cast features people who were canceled at one point or another,” he continued. “There were people who are archconservatives and others who are extremely politically progressive. But we were all working on one film together. That was interesting, I thought.”

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That star-studded roster includes Academy Award-winning actor Jon Voight, who is vocally conservative and supports Donald Trump. His role in the film is said to be loosely based on Trump. 

Coppola also cast Shia LeBeouf, a former Disney Channel star who was accused of sexual assault in 2021. 

“Shia really took to it,” Coppola said. “I had no experience working with him prior to this, but he deliberately sets up a tension between himself and the director to an extreme degree. He reminds me of Dennis Hopper, who would do something similar, and then you’d say, ‘Just go do anything,’ and then they go off and do something brilliant.”

“Megalopolis” stars Adam Driver as architect Cesar Catilina, who has dreams of building a utopian city after a catastrophic incident destroys a large city resembling New York. His plans receive pushback from various characters and support from others.

Other big-name stars in the production include Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, D. B. Sweeney, and Dustin Hoffman.

The film received mixed reviews after it premiered at Cannes earlier this year. 

Deadline reviewer Damon Wise called the movie a “mad modern masterwork that reinvents the possibilities of cinema.” He said “Megalopolis” is “something of a mess; unruly, exaggerated and drawn to pretension like a moth to a flame” but is also “a pretty stunning achievement.”

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Indiewire writer David Ehrlich said the spectacle was the point. “The silliness is a feature, not a bug!” he wrote of the movie on X. “A garish, epic, & utterly singular $120 million self-portrait that’s also a fable about the fall of ancient Rome & a plea to save our civilization (and its cinema) from itself. big fan.”

Meanwhile, the reviewer from The Guardian gave it two stars, describing the project as “megabloated and megaboring.”

A trailer for the film was taken down last week after it was discovered that it contained fake and misattributed critic quotes, as The Daily Wire previously reported.