I enjoyed Will Sloan's Megadoc review on Letterboxd:
God, this was entertaining. I wish I could have this kind of fun more often.
Francis Ford Coppola hired Mike Figgis to direct a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Megalopolis and gave him Burden of Dreams-level freedom. Figgis’s only obstacle was the willingness of individual cast members to participate – so Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel mostly just appear whenever Figgis can sneak a shot without them knowing, but a lot of time is spent with Aubrey Plaza, Jon Voight (surprisingly affable), Dustin Hoffman (yes… I can see why you were cancelled…), and the man who quickly becomes the principal antagonist, Shia LaBeouf.
Coppola has been nurturing this project for somewhere between 30 and 40 years (interspersed throughout are clips from earlier read-throughs with Robert De Niro, Uma Thurman, and Ryan Gosling), and while nobody in the cast seems to understand what he’s going for, most of them are willing to follow blindly, because if you’ve made Apocalypse Now you’ve earned the benefit of the doubt. Most, that is, except for Shia, who feels hemmed in by the director’s fussed-over vision, and so spends every day being Klaus Kinski. The scenes of Coppola rolling his eyes over LaBeouf’s latest tantrum are hilarious, because LaBeouf is a genuine lunatic who doesn’t make a single reasonable point. For example, in one scene he surprises a co-star by trying to start a fistfight mid-take, and acts shocked and appalled when neither Coppola nor the actor appreciate this bit of improv.
It must be said, however, that Coppola does not exactly come across as cool as Cesar Catalina. He is frequently bewildered at how large the production is, as if it’s a surprise that a $120 million budget bought $120 million worth of stuff. After 30 years of tending to his vineyard and making the occasional underground film, he is perplexed that his modern VFX crew expect niceties like “clear directions” and “a schedule” and don’t just want to riff out ideas on the day. In fact, there is a mass exodus of the effects and art departments midway through shooting – although in fairness to Coppola, it is his money, so he can blow it however he wants. And blow it he does; Figgis offers a running tally of ludicrous expenses, which registers as a recurring joke.
We know that this was Coppola’s dream project for the whole second half of his life, and that he hopes it will “heal the world,” but we don’t hear a lot of specifics about the ideas he’s apparently so passionate about expressing. Finally, late in the movie, we see Adam Driver as Cesar Catalina delivering a monologue about how we need to “do away with old ways of thinking” and create a better world, and we remember: Oh right, Megalopolis was about vapid platitudes. This documentary affirms that the real point of Megalopolis was to be an idealized self-portrait of Coppola, the thwarted genius. Figgis ends with Coppola getting a standing ovation at Cannes, and hey, good for him. Again, he made Apocalypse Now, and it’s his money.
Figgis’s assemblage of all this raw footage is sometimes clumsy, but I frankly appreciated the lack of polish given that 99% of documentaries now just follow the Netflix template.
