“I have a tendency to wander,” Francis Ford Coppola said, mid-anecdote.
An audience member had asked about the iconic director’s approach to history. Coppola’s initial answer remembered his father, a flautist under Arturo Toscanini, then his travails with a script he doctored some 45 years or more ago, when Westerns were big business, how he could never get it made, but Clint Eastwood did—Coppola called the project The Cut-Whore Massacre, but we’d likely know it as Unforgiven. The second half of his answer, after an intermission to his answer’s intermission, focused on honesty and how he’s rigorously adhered to it all these 86 years he’s been alive.
I realized he was trying to address the question. Unadulterated honesty: That was the answer.
So went An Evening with Francis Ford Coppola at the Portland Art Museum’s Tomorrow Theater, the final night in a brief, national tour for Coppola’s recent, fully self-funded behemoth, 2024’s Megalopolis. Compared to previous stops, our audience was tiny—just 265—an intimate crowd promised an “interactive audience discussion” about “how to change our future” to follow the film. The legendary director (to put it lightly) would address a few questions, extemporaneously speak about the film and the aforementioned “future,” then nightcap the gathering with a “rapid-fire Q&A.”
Debate is an ostensible theme of Megalopolis. Imagining a modern city with ancient Rome grafted over it, the story’s alternate timeline mostly gilds our current shitty America with Corinthian columns, Latin names, and the pall of death. Coppola’s $120-million “fable” casts Adam Driver as Cesar Catalina, New Rome’s most famous architect, Bruce-Wayne-like playboy, and Randian figure of aggressive futurism.
Related: Megalopolis is Francis Ford Coppola's Gloriously Dumb and Luminous Opus
When we meet Cesar, he has recently received the Nobel Prize for discovering a new indestructible organic building material he deems Megalon. That the substance is a wriggling golden soup of nanobot technology and judaeo-christian magic concerns Coppola less than how Cesar contrived it, which is at the door of his dying wife’s passage to the afterlife.
Coppola was all about doors and debates that night. Upon first entering the theater, we were handed a letter from the man who directed The Godfather(s), Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, Dracula…um, Twixt… “Dear Audience Member,” it greeted, Coppola wielding capitalization wantonly, “When a Motion Picture begins the audience enters through a door. But which door? …my door is a new way in, not yet familiar and doesn’t develop in ways you’ve been taught to expect.” He implored, “laugh when you want, shout out at it, be moved to tears or even if confused for a minute, you can still learn from it.”
Much of Megalopolis, wherein Cesar attempts to build the titular paradise over a demolished neighborhood of displaced working class families, is about that urgent need to talk it out. “We must have a great debate about our future!” Cesar hollers at a throng of citizens. New Rome, just like our old Rome, is on the precipice of collapse, and Cesar believes his utopia will rise from the 9/11-coded graveyard of concrete and steel.
Unlike Mayor Franklin Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who insists that the suffering people of the city need better jobs and functional civil services—not a glowing gold goopville with moving sidewalks—Cesar spends much of the film pushing for debate. “When we ask questions, when we have a dialogue, that is basically a utopia,” he proselytizes in a press conference. In a different press conference: “Utopias are not meant to offer great solutions, but to ask the right questions.”
No actual debates occur in Megalopolis, this film about the urgency of debate. So, choosing Coppola’s door, I rationalized that the evening would be just that: a debate with a maestro about the future we share. Turns out, the “debate” was just one person talking for most of the time, encouraging the audience to talk back but rarely pausing to let it happen.
Previous Carte Blanche series presentations at the Tomorrow Theater (which Coppola’s letter referred to more than once as a “Theatre”) have held the Q&A portion before the film, and as a result, plenty of people left those events early. For Coppola, theater lights rose upon an audience with the director’s 138-minute opus fresh in their minds—no one shouted out at the film, despite the man’s epistolary invitation.
He entered to exuberant applause, wide grin adorned by a suit rumpled by regular wear, loafers, and flamboyantly-colored mismatching socks to contrast the workmanlike cut of his outfit. With a voice practically stentorian, were it not for age creasing his words in the gurgly back of his throat, he began to talk.
Ninety minutes later, Coppola had only answered three audience questions.
He began by lamenting strife crossing centuries: “Why is it necessary that this enmity be repeated again?” Then he bemoaned falling birth rates, claiming that it must be because people no longer want to bring a child into this beleaguered civilization. “Kids should have something beautiful to live in,” he said. He failed to acknowledge parents who have no choice in the matter.
Coppola’s truth is that we are all “family,” all derived from the same early homosapiens, which means that “we”—everyone in that room—“are cousins.”
I leaned over to Oregon ArtsWatch critic Marc Mohan and whispered, “How very Italian.”
And thus Uncle Francis got to something of a point: Every human is born with the potential for greatness, and only exposure to education and experience can help people manifest their inherent gifts. “My gift is that I’m willing to work my head off,” he said, “to rewrite and re-edit” his films until they’re right. Yeah, no shit.
Enter the whiteboard, rolled out by actor and coach Austin Caldwell, who proceeded to scrawl 10 items in dry-erase marker, “EDUCATION” at #5. “Let’s make education not just for kids. Let’s make education for all human beings,” Coppola suggested, before he asked his attending stagehand to underline the word. Later he added hearts next to some items, but I never really figured out why.
Other agenda items included “TIME” (#1), “WORK” (#2), and “POLITICS/GOVERNMENT” (#4). He revealed that these were “illusions,” or 10 “beliefs we accept as facts” that must be discussed and transformed to prevent our Rome from falling.
As we neared 11 pm, four hours since the start to our evening, we had merely made it to #5, only to double-back onto #3 (“MONEY”). I was settling in to be there until at least midnight, hoping we could get to #7 (“CASTE/WAR”), because I really wanted to ask about Megalopolis the movie’s near complete dismissal of the suffering of displaced families under the progress of Megalopolis the elite conclave, and how that contrasts with Coppola funding the entire budget via his vineyard ownership.
However, right at 11 pm (mid-anecdote again) Coppola heard his time was up. “Time stop!” he blurted, mimicking one of Cesar’s most ubermensch-y lines. Everyone laughed, stood, and applauded.
The night as previewed was not the night we received, but to hear Coppola go off for so long, seemingly effortlessly, was the perfect context in which to experience Megalopolis—a movie I still don’t really like, but I’m glad exists.
One of the three questions asked that night was about Coppola’s influences, particularly which ones appeared in Megalopolis. He grinned and said he put “every movie [he] ever loved” into it. Which is how he held court, too, not only talking incessantly about film but name-checking countless authors (Davids Baltimore and Graeber), artists (Antoni Gaudi), architects (Neri Oxman, a designer and futurist who consulted on how the city of Megalopolis would actually look), and historical figures (Cleopatra, whom Coppola called “a total genius” even if she wasn’t as “attractive” as history would like you to think)... then crushing all those brainy references into an all-consuming paste.
If this was the debate Coppola had in mind, it wasn’t much of one. If this was supposed to be the chance to hear a grand explanation for a confusing movie from the writer-director himself, it wasn’t that kind of opportunity either. After all, according to Cesar, just talking about this stuff is good enough.
Instead, our Evening was something else, something incredibly singular. We shared an intimate space with one of cinema’s great masters, bathing in four solid hours of ebullient ego, relishing what it means for someone with his wealth and power to use it passionately for capital-A Art. Honestly, I came away with something resembling hope: that our time’s not running out, that Uncle Francis has one more in him, and that one day we’ll get to hear the rest of that anecdote.
