Mike Figgis sent an email congratulating Francis Ford Coppola for resuming, forty years after imagining it, a project called ‘Megalopolis‘, a film financing and collection apocalyptic He added a postscript half jokingly: if he felt like it, he could document the filming. Coppola accepted, and thus ‘MegaDoc‘, that Filmin premieres today. Figgis had full access to the filming, without a script or preconditions.
Figgis and Coppola had known each other since the nineties, when the Briton directed Nicolas Cage, the director’s nephew, in ‘Leaving Las Vegas’. In November 2022, when filming began, ‘Megalopolis’ was the biggest unknown in American independent cinema: a science fiction fable set in a New York inspired by Catiline’s conspiracy against republican Rome, financed entirely by Coppola with more than 120 million dollars from the sale of part of his wine business
There is a very interesting detail in the nature of ‘MegaDoc’. Eleanor Coppola, the director’s wife for more than sixty years, died on April 12, 2024, just a month before the premiere of ‘Megalopolis’. It was she who in 1991 directed ‘Corazones en tinieblas’, the documentary about the filming of ‘Apocalypse Now’ that became the making of in its own genre within documentaries. ‘MegaDoc’ inherits that family tradition of documenting the creative process from withinalthough this time it is a filmmaker from outside the clan who holds the camera.
In ‘MegaDoc’ we will see Shia LaBeouf’s confrontations with Coppola, who even told him that he was the most difficult actor he had ever worked with. Aubrey Plaza turned Figgis almost into another character in the film, ordering her without leaving her role as the Wow Platinum presenter to follow him as if it were her personal camera. Adam Driver, the protagonist, asked not to be filmed during filming and only gave an interview at the end. The result is a documentary as eventful and as peculiar in its destiny as the film it portrays.
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