Coppola’s Megalopolis Madness Unveiled in Megadoc

29 August 2025

‘Every time something negative happened I thought: “Oh, that’s good for the documentary”’ … Coppola and Mike Figgis filming for Megadoc. Photograph: Elliefilm Megadoc LLC

Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestated dream project Megalopolis, nearly five decades in the making and wholly funded from his own wine fortune, has finally taken shape and not without spectacle, sacrifice, and a fair dose of chaos. Mike Figgis’s new documentary Megadoc, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, pulls back the curtain on the wild, unpredictable shoot and exposes the filmmaker at his most uncompromisingly creative and most volatile.

Coppola financed Megalopolis by putting up a staggering $120 million drawn from the sale of part of his winemaking empire, securing total artistic control that studios had twice denied him over the years.

This isolated freedom, however, brought its own form of pressure. On the sprawling sets designed as a retrofuturist version of New York renamed “New Rome” the atmosphere was intentionally unruly. Every morning Coppola showed up with a barrage of new ideas rewrites, reshoots, last-minute casting changes, or requests for Adam Driver on his day off, leaving crew scrambling to adapt. “He’s in his 80s, so he’s basically just sitting there waiting,” Figgis says. “Which for me was a joy, because in those periods, he’s very happy to talk, have a moan or tell stories about Brando.”

Coppola’s chaotic methodology wasn’t merely happenstance. He insisted he was "making order out of chaos," suggesting that his spontaneous revisions and daily upheavals were a necessary tool rather than arbitrary. When pressed, he dodged revealing whether he intentionally manufactured disorder to then master it.

Figgis’s camera captures these volatile dynamics with an unflinching eye. Crew walkouts, the sudden dismissal of the entire VFX team mid-production, battles with star Shia LaBeouf whose energy alternated between inspired and exasperating are all caught on film. Amid all this, the emotional presence of Coppola's late wife Eleanor herself an acclaimed documentarian is both tender and haunting. Her appearances in Megadoc echo the intimacy of her own legendary behind-the-scenes chronicle of Apocalypse Now.

Several cast members defend Coppola’s unpredictability while acknowledging its toll. Aubrey Plaza, who plays a journalist named Wow Platinum, described her initial read of the script as "disturbing," even likening the experience to a nightmare. Yet she praised the film’s creative uniqueness and repressed emotional content, calling Coppola a “repressed” Willy Wonka enigmatic, whimsical, and uncanny.

Elsewhere, Megadoc showcases rehearsal games and creative workshops that Coppola orchestrated—techniques rarely seen in traditional filmmaking documentaries. He guided actors through improvised exercises and exploratory stagecraft, occasionally working new material written on set directly into the script.

The Guardian

Despite or perhaps because of its creative fervor, Megalopolis itself faltered at the box office, grossing only $14 million. Yet Figgis’s documentary succeeds precisely by chronicling that collapse as both a personal reckoning and a public spectacle. Megadoc does not shy away from controversies including alleged inappropriate conduct on set; some extras reported feeling uncomfortable during a hedonistic scene, while others described Coppola’s affectionate behavior as benign. Figgis, however, largely sidesteps these allegations, choosing instead to focus on the art rather than the aftermath.

Ultimately, Megadoc offers a bracing portrait of a veteran auteur whose lifelong devotion to cinema has culminated in this final, sprawling gamble. The film is a study in creative obsession as much as it is an emotional reckoning with age, ambition, and legacy. Coppola remains a figure of contradictions gloriously bold, deeply flawed, and daringly relentless defined as much by what he risked as by what he created.

In the end, Megadoc stands not only as a making-of record but as a meditation on artistic courage. It shows that even a movie widely regarded as a misfire can be a testament to the fire that compels a filmmaker to keep igniting new visions, come what may.