Adam Driver Stops Time in First Clip From Francis Ford Coppola's MEGALOPOLIS
Francis Ford Coppola has released the first clip from his upcoming film Megalopolis giving us our first proper look at footage from the project.
The scene features Adam Driver walking out on the ledge of a skyscraper and after a few tense moments, stops time. This seems like he is testing this out and shocked that it actually works.
My first thought after watch this footage went straight to The Twilight Zone episode “A Kind of Stopwatch” which is about a man who acquires a stopwatch that can stop time. This is obviously inspired by that in some ways.
I’m really curious about this movie! The trailer definitely teased one aspect of the story that I wasn’t expecting from it.
The film tells the story of an architect dreaming of a utopian version of New York City in the near future and his battle with the conservative mayor, who has other ideas about the city.
Contained within the epic is a myriad of storylines and characters. “The fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems in this epic story of political ambition.”
Coppola described the film as “a love story. A woman is divided between loyalties to two men. But not only two men. Each man comes with a philosophical principle.
“One is her father who raised her, who taught her Latin on his lap and is devoted to a much more classical view of society, the Marcus Aurelius kind of view.”
“The other one, who is the lover, is the enemy of the father but is dedicated to a much more progressive ‘Let’s leap into the future, let’s leap over all of this garbage that has contaminated humanity for 10,000 years. Let’s find what we really are, which are an enlightened, friendly, joyous species.’”
Coppola also talked about the film and his goal with it, saying: “My first goal always is to make a film with all my heart, so I began to realize it would be about love and loyalty in every aspect of human life.”
He explained: “Megalopolis echoed these sentiments, in which love was expressed in almost crystalline complexity, our planet in danger and our human family almost in an act of suicide, until becoming a very optimistic film that has faith in the human being to possess the genius to heal any problem put before us.”
The filmmaker added: “I believe in America. Our founders borrowed a constitution, Roman law, and senate for their revolutionary government without a king. American history could neither have taken place nor succeeded without classical learning to guide it.”
Coppola also previously said of the film: “So somewhere down the line, way after I'm gone, all I want is for them to discuss [Megalopolis] and, is the society we're living in the only one available to us? How can we make it better? Education, mental health?
“What the movie really is proposing is that utopia is not a place. It's how can we make everything better? Every year, come up with two, three or four ideas that make it better."
He went on to say: "I would be smiling in my grave if I thought something like that happened, because people talk about what movies really mean if you give them something.
“If you encouraged people to discuss marriage and education and health and justice and opportunities and freedom and all these wonderful things that human beings have conceived of. And ask the question, how can we make it even better? That would be great. Because I bet you they would make it better if they had that conversation."
The cast for the film also includes Shia LaBeouf, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Aubrey Plaza, Jason Schwartzman, Laurence Fishburne, Grace VanderWaal, Kathryn Hunter, James Remar, Talia Shire. Dustin Hoffman, Chloe Fineman (Saturday Night Live), Isabelle Kusman (Licorice Pizza), D.B. Sweeney (Fire in the Sky), Bailey Ives, and Giancarlo Esposito.
Driver previously talked about the film, saying: “The movie is wild. It’s so imaginative and big and epic, and it’s bold. It takes a risk, and I couldn’t be more excited by it.”
After the film was initially screened, it was met with mixed reactions. One person said the movie is "unflinching in how batshit it is" and said it has "zero commercial prospects."