At long last, Francis Ford Coppola’s sci-fi epic Megalopolis is moving forward though with quite a casting change-up. Although Oscar Isaac, James Caan, Zendaya, Cate Blanchett, and Michelle Pfeiffer have all been attached to the project, they’ve now departed and a new ensemble has been announced.
THR reports Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, and Laurence Fishburne will be joining the previously attached Forest Whitaker and Jon Voight in the epic of architecture, class struggle, and freedom conveyed on a massive metropolitan scale. With Coppola fronting the $100 million budget, production is expected to kick off this fall.
Coppola recently called it “a love story,” adding, “A woman is divided between loyalties to two men. But not only two men. Each man comes with a philosophical principle. One is her father who raised her, who taught her Latin on his lap and is devoted to a much more classical view of society, the Marcus Aurelius kind of view. The other one, who is the lover, is the enemy of the father but is dedicated to a much more progressive ‘Let’s leap into the future, let’s leap over all of this garbage that has contaminated humanity for 10,000 years. Let’s find what we really are, which are an enlightened, friendly, joyous species.’”
Driver, coming off of Annette, a pair of Ridley Scott projects, the sci-fi project 65, and White Noise, is jumping into Michael Mann’s Enzo Ferrari this summer before heading to work with Coppola.