Photo by Amanda Edwards/Getty Images(LOS ANGELES) — For years, Godfather director and Oscar-winner Francis Ford Coppola dreamed of an epic film called Megalopolis, and now — three days before he turns 80 — he’s announced he’s making it a reality.
According to Deadline, Coppola even shot footage for the film — about an architect’s plans to revamp a major city — but the project was shelved after the 9/11 attacks on New York.
Now, given what’s possible thanks to computer-generated special effects, Coppola has given himself the go-ahead, and the publication notes that Captain Marvel star Jude Law could be among its leads.
“I plan this year to begin my longstanding ambition to make a major work utilizing all I have learned during my long career, beginning at age 16 doing theater, and that will be an epic on a grand scale, which I’ve titled Megalopolis,” Coppola told Deadline’s Michael Fleming Jr. on Thursday.
“It is unusual,” Coppola said of the project. “[I]t will be a production on a grand scale with a large cast. It makes use of all of my years of trying films in different styles and types, culminating in what I think is my own voice and aspiration. It is not within the mainstream of what is produced now, but I am intending and wishing and, in fact, encouraged, to begin production this year.”
Coppola also mentioned that he’s re-edited a new version of his classic Apocalypse Now. While the 1979 Vietnam-set original “was too abruptly shortened,” a successful 2001 re-edit called Apocalypse Now Redux was “too long,” in Coppola’s eyes. He says now, he’s “settled on what I now felt was the perfect version.”
Apocalypse Now Final Cut will debut later this month at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.
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