It’s finally happening. After developing the project for decades, Francis Ford Coppola is embarking on his epic drama Megalopolis this fall in Georgia. With a cast already including Adam Driver, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Shia LaBeouf, Jason Schwartzman, Grace Vanderwaal, Kathryn Hunter, Aubrey Plaza, and James Remar, the last additions to the main ensemble have arrived.
Deadline reports that Dustin Hoffman, Chloe Fineman, Isabelle Kusman, D.B. Sweeney, and Bailey Ives will round out the cast. Cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. has also recently 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 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.’”
Coppola, who will shoot the film around the same time his daughter gets into production on her next film, discussed more about the project around the 25-minute mark below.