Francis Ford Coppola got political while discussing his new film Megalopolis on Monday, suggesting that the upcoming presidential election may mirror the downfall of Rome.
At a conversation as part of the New York Film Festival — which was also streamed to 65 theaters across the U.S. and Canada with support from Imax — Coppola was joined by Robert De Niro and Spike Lee to talk about his long journey to making “a Roman epic set in modern America as Rome,” as he described it.
The film follows a conflict between Cesar (played by Adam Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian future, and his opposition Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo.
“People always said to me, ‘Why do you want to make a movie about America as Rome?’ Well, today, America is Rome, and they’re about to go through the same experience, for the same reasons that Rome lost its republic and ended up with an emperor. It was very prescient to do a movie about America as Rome because it’s going to happen in a few months,” Coppola declared. “And it was the same reason; the Rome of that time was so prosperous, Rome is making lots of money so the senators were actually very interested in their power and their own wealth, and they weren’t managing the country. Well the same thing has happened here. Our senates and our representatives are all wealthy and manipulating their own power rather than running the country and then we’re in danger of losing it.”
Lee deadpanned, “Back in Rome, were they eating cats and dogs?,” in reference to Donald Trump’s comments about immigrants in the recent debate.
Coppola also explained that he “deliberately got people to make this film who disagree. I mean, there’s actors in the movie that are voting another way, and there are people in it who have been canceled… and we in the movie, we all work together together happily and creatively,” seemingly referencing co-stars Jon Voight, Shia LaBeouf and Dustin Hoffman.
“I didn’t want them to say, ‘Oh, it’s some woke movie, it’s just a political thing.’ We’re above politics in making the film, I thought, and yet, still we all liked each other and participated and made this film together,” he continued. “So I’m hopeful that we can work even with people who disagree with us to [achieve] a higher goal.” The filmmaker added that the movie calls specifically for audiences to have a debate about the future, “and I want everyone to be in on that debate. And I want no questions to be not permitted.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, the group touched upon how each of them had met, how Coppola had sold his family’s wine company to self-finance the film, and his insistence on calling The Godfather sequel The Godfather Part II: “I’m the idiot who started this thing with movies having numbers after them. So I apologize to you.”
Lee revealed he had screened Megalopolis to his students at NYU, saying of the film, “My brother continues to amaze me; his fearlessness, like he’s gonna do what has to do to get it done, bottom line.”
De Niro noted he had done a table read for the film, alongside Paul Newman and Uma Thurman, decades ago when Coppola was working on another iteration of it, and continued the night’s political theme.
“I’m worried. I see the things in Francis’ film about that, parallels and so on,” he told the crowd. “To me, it’s not over until it’s over, and we have to go at this wholeheartedly to beat the Republicans — those Republicans, they’re not real Republicans. Beat Trump. It’s that simple. We cannot have that type of person running this country. Everybody has to get out there and vote, and we have to make it very clear what America is.”
As Coppola briefly mentioned that he had gone to military school with Trump — “I was poor so I was a tuba player in the band, and he was rich, so he was in the headquarters where they could keep their lights on after ‘Taps’” — De Niro doubled down: “Just imagine Donald Trump directing this movie… He wants to destroy the country, and he could not do this movie. He couldn’t do anything that has a structure.”
Megalopolis hits theaters on Friday.