Update: Megalopolis has expanded by two Coppolas, the cast adding Talia Shire and Jason Schwartzman, while (per THR) Shia LaBeouf continues his (contentious) comeback trail; Grace Vanderwaal, Kathryn Hunter, and James Remar (The Cotton Club) are also aboard. Original story below.
The cast of Francis Ford Coppola’s long-in-the-works sci-fi epic Megalopolis just got quite a bit more interesting. With Adam Driver, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, and Laurence Fishburne all onboard, a new addition has arrived.
Deadline reports Aubrey Plaza, coming off fine work in Emily the Criminal, has joined the epic of architecture, class struggle, and freedom conveyed on a massive metropolitan scale. With Coppola fronting the near-$100 million budget, production is now confirmed to kick off this fall with distribution rights up for grabs. (There were also recent rumors that Shia LaBeouf would be joining the project, but those have yet to be confirmed.)
Cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. has also confirmed he will reteam with Coppola on the project, following Youth Without Youth, Tetro, Twixt, and the live cinema experiment Distant Vision. Along with his Coppola collaborations, he also shot The Master and The Harder They 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.’”
In other Coppola-related news, Sofia Coppola has received a tax credit to shoot her next film in California, Variety reports. While she was working on an adaptation of The Custom of the Country for Apple, this looks to be an entirely new project, the details of which haven’t been disclosed yet.