LISTEN: Atlanta film critic Stephen Brown speaks to GPB News about why the new Francis Ford Coppola film "Megalopolis" was filmed in Atlanta.
On Thursday, movie director Francis Ford Coppola's self-financed opus Megalopolis made its much-awaited premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
The futuristic epic about America after a major disaster was filmed at Trilith Studios in Fayetteville, Ga., and other metro Atlanta locations and utilized multiple Georgia-based film industry businesses.
It is the first movie made by the 85-year-old filmmaker in 13 years and has stirred both excitement and skepticism from fans for its lengthy production schedule and incubation of more than four decades and its large cast of Hollywood actors, some of whom have skirted controversy in recent years.
The ensemble includes Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Jason Schwartzman, Talia Shire, Grace VanderWaal, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter and Dustin Hoffman.
Coppola forked over $120 million of his own money to make Megalopolis.
"It's Francis Ford Coppola's multi-decade passion project, and he self-financed it on the back of his wine business," Stephen Brown, writer at Atlanta movie review site Silver Screen Capture, told GPB Thursday as the film premiered in France. "He's always been a renegade, from the very beginning when he did The Godfather movies, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now."
Brown said Coppola often places bets on cinema that don't pan out, but the Megalopolis story of an architect who wants to rebuild New York as a utopia is a classic theme.
Shortly after the film's premiere Thursday, the Hollywood Reporter said its Cannes debut "was greeted with a 10-minute standing ovation inside the Grand Lumiere Theatre."
AP reporter Jake Coyle wrote that festival reviews of the film "ranged from 'a folly of gargantuan proportions' to 'the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.' But most assuredly, once again, Coppola had everyone in Cannes talking."
Long before it arrived at the Cote D'Azur, Megalopolis' ups and downs were chronicled in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, including cash flow, cast member exits and rumors of erratic and questionable behavior from the helm.
Gilles Jacob, delegate general of Cannes, told AP he recounted finding Coppola in a similar situation with Apocalypse Now in 1979, when he was "beset by financial woes and struggling with 20 miles of film."
Despite the setbacks, the Coppola family were seen in the community near the Megalopolis filming site in Fayetteville over the last two years. They reportedly bought a roadside motel near Peachtree City during production, and Francis Ford Coppola and fellow filmmaker wife Eleanor Coppola (who died last month at age 87) visited the Georgia Film Academy and Georgia State University to speak with students. They also hired a local Frank Sintara-style singer famous for his Brookhaveen Kroger karaoke sessions for a scene in the film after meeting him in Peachtree City.
Ultimately, 1979's Apocalypse Now would go down as one of Cannes' most mythologized premieres. Brown said whether Megalopolis does the same remains to be seen as the movie is released.
“This week's trailer and the [festival] gala going on as we speak is showing promising signs that there is some major life for this movie that's going to get a global IMAX release, at the very least," he said.
At this writing, Atlanta audiences may have to wait until September or later to see the special-effects-heavy Megalopolis on a local IMAX screen, as a confirmed U.S. distribution timeline has yet to be announced.
But when moviegoers do see the flick, Brown said regardless of what they think of its story, they will see the handiwork of the Georgia film industry.
"The film studios in Georgia have definitely upped their game in the past decade, to create all sorts of immersive environments," he said. "The idea that you can surround yourself completely with LED screens and bring environments in and do practical effects in front of those environments ... There's a lot of rich experimentation that's going on with those types of environments in Georgia that I think is luring a lot of filmmakers, geniuses like Francis Ford Coppola, to come here."
