Today, AD is joined by 6x Academy Award winning director Francis Ford Coppola to break down the architectural details of ‘Megalopolis’. Modeling the fall of Rome in an alternate version of New York City, ‘Megalopolis’ has been ‘The Godfather’ director’s passion project for over 40 years. Join Coppola as he discusses the metaphors behind his movie’s design and how he brought his long-awaited dream to life.
MEGALOPOLIS is now available On Demand.
MEGALOPOLIS is now available On Demand.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00The great artist and scientist Goethe once said architecture is frozen music
00:05and I always thought what a beautiful idea.
00:11Time stop!
00:15All artists stop time and control time and they have from the very first
00:20little painting that someone did on a cave wall because
00:23when you do a painting you are taking an instant of reality and freezing it.
00:27My name is Francis Coppola. Today I would like to talk about architecture in my movie Megalopolis.
00:37Megalopolis is basically a fable and like a Roman epic but it's set in modern America.
00:43There are two principal characters who are in opposition.
00:48One is a mayor of the city named Cicero and of course he's an evolution of the famous
00:53Latin consul and writer Cicero and his opponent is a sort of an amalgamation of modern people
01:00namely Robert Moses and Walter Gropius who came here with his Bauhaus art school and his first
01:06name is Caesar and he is the artist architect of the story. In the first frame I was trying to pose
01:13those principal elements which would then go on to unveil itself in the story of Megalopolis.
01:20This is Grand Central Station. Of course we see the Roman columns and the clock and the issue of time
01:26is a big factor of this movie and then of course we see modern times as reflected in the
01:32Arctic co-tower of the Chrysler building which is a unique building. It was a men's club in the days
01:38when men's clubs were gentlemen sitting around reading newspapers and I got the privilege of
01:46seeing it. It was so beautiful it had a giant mural up there and it was a heavenly space and then the
01:53Chrysler building was sold. I went recently to look at it and whoever had bought it had dismantled
01:58the cloud tower and I have no idea what happened to those murals. So basically juxtaposing the cloud
02:06tower with the time element in Grand Central Station and the Romanesque nature of the building
02:11In the first frame I was trying to pose the one exotic notion that America is essentially the historical counterpart of the Rome Republic.
02:26We have these golden images of the top of the beautiful Chrysler building and my character
02:31at the beginning of the picture. I designed the film along with a fabulous concept artist named
02:37Dean Sheriff and in this one of course it's obviously not the real Chrysler building. This is
02:42in movie talk is called the volume. In other words it's really only part of it actually built and on
02:48the real Chrysler building the ledge is not really horizontal enough to be able to stand on it so I
02:54took some liberties but he steps out on the ledge and you don't know why at the beginning of the
02:59picture is he going to in some way test his own ability as an artist and he does in fact stop time.
03:11All artists stop time and control time. Filmmakers move back and forth freely in time so that theme
03:17of the artist's natural ability to manipulate time to move and combine time and space I thought
03:23was fascinating. And let me just say a little bit about the settings of movies which is of course a
03:31place which is architecture. In more adventurous movies and plays those settings might be secondarily
03:37not only the place where the action happens but a metaphor for what's happening and I decided
03:42at Megalopolis that I would enjoy doing that. This scene where they're walking around 5,000 feet above
03:48the ground and obviously one slip is death. Of course they discuss the notion of how artists stop
03:54time and everything I spoke about earlier but at one point they do stop time together and they kiss.
04:06And the reason I wanted it to take place 5,000 feet above the ground a certain death is because
04:13when you kiss someone in a serious way it's very dangerous because your life and the life of
04:19everyone you love is about to change. I believe that when you make art risk is an essential part
04:26of it. When you leap into the unknown you prove that you're free because you've leapt into something
04:32that you have no idea what's going to happen. What they're doing is going to change their lives.
04:37Rome conquered half the known world. They went as far as Great Britain but basically a lot of money
04:42came into Rome but the money didn't go to the people. It went to providing what they called
04:48bread and circuses to keep them busy and we all know about the Colosseum. I wanted to do the
04:54modern version of the Colosseum. It would have been logical and my production designer wanted
04:59it to be a circular theater that she had found and I said you know no I want to do it in a
05:04stadium and the reason I want to do this stadium because as a child I went to Madison Square Garden
05:10to see the circus and it was this Madison Square Garden because there's been four Madison Square
05:16Gardens and between Penn Station which looked like the Roman Baths of Caracalla and the New York
05:22Public Library and the post office a whole section of New York was Rome. New York and America not
05:30was Rome. New York and America not only based itself on Rome it built itself to look like Rome.
05:37Penn Station was the ultimate construction but they destroyed this magnificent landmark
05:44that doesn't exist anymore as with a lot of great things in New York it's torn down for reasons
05:50that only bankers can explain. I mean if I could rebuild Penn Station on film I would do it. I
05:56didn't have the the opportunity nor the need but I did with this Madison Square Garden. As a kid
06:02Madison Square Garden that building had like five floors and on the other floors there were lots of
06:07other things. It was sort of like carnival freak shows where you saw the two-headed woman and the
06:13snake child or places where you could buy baby salamanders and there were bowling alleys and
06:19bars and it was a whole carny world of five floors of Madison Square Garden and then at the
06:26top was the arena and so I had such strong emotional ties to that experience in Madison
06:33Square Garden that I really wanted to set it there and it was very emotional to see
06:38these things I loved in New York.
06:40Caesar, the main character, Adam Dravich, he's a man of the present but with a vision of the future.
06:47Time, show me the future.
06:54Both these images are three screens and you're seeing some glimpses of the architecture and to
06:58understand the architecture let's go to Barcelona and talk about Gaudi. He made these extraordinary
07:06structures. They were stone or they were then later reinforced concrete and other materials,
07:11steel, but Gaudi, his architecture looked as though they had grown and I said how do you
07:17collaborate with nature? In other words a Gaudi vision made of something more durable than steel
07:24which is life, which is living material. So there is this unique idea pioneered by a number of
07:31people including Neri Oxman, a scientist at MIT but also an architect who proposed that
07:36architecture could be actually living plant material and that we would like it and that not
07:42only would it do things for us like provide an abode that would be a dream place to live in
07:48but we could do good things for it. So it's like living in a flower or living in a natural thing
07:53and that's there's many of these forms in the architecture here that reflect and are
07:59here that reflect an architecture that you don't build but that you encourage to grow.
08:08This is an artist's view of what the city would look like when it was transitional. In other words
08:15obviously if you were going to grow a new city right in the middle of New York there'd be a
08:18transition period where a lot of the old buildings, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building
08:23are kept but there's the beginning of these more vegetable type architectures happening.
08:29And one movie that I actually loved as a kid was made by H.G. Wells who wrote the script
08:35and the Korda Company was called The Shape of Things to Come and you see them build the world
08:40of the future but you know it takes time to build the world of the future so that when you get to
08:44the future it's all about their grandchildren. So I said when I do it in my future movie I want there
08:50to be some amazing new architectural medium or invention which he invented which lets you go
08:58build the world of the future fast enough that you don't have to be your own grandchildren in the
09:03story. And then you know as these things work in your mind in this script it began to be this
09:10material called Megalon and that was sort of a material that was not dissimilar to what
09:16Neary Otzman that was the sort of scientific advisor of this called mediated material. Rather
09:22than be built we can work on them on an atomic level. Nature and humanity as a collaboration
09:30liking each other and I saw that whatever world I wanted to present for people in Megalopolis
09:36you had to say well I like to live there and maybe I'm nuts but I'd love to live in a flower
09:40especially one that liked me.
09:46you