Tema: Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

Mihai Malaimare Jr sobre la fotografía de Megalopolis:


In 2005, while in prep for Youth Without Youth, I remember seeing an amazing drawing of a man and a woman standing on a giant clockface on top of a city. I was told it was an art concept for Megalopolis. It was so visually striking I could never forget it. I also remember watching second unit footage shot by Ron Fricke in 2001 with a Sony F900, a brand-new digital camera at the time. Everybody else was still shooting film back then. I knew and admired Ron’s work in Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka and all these second unit establishing shots had his visual signature. I really wanted to see this movie get made. 22 years later we finished Megalopolis, with the giant clockface image now a scene in the movie, and we used some of Ron Fricke’s footage as well.

Francis and I developed a visual language early on with Youth Without Youth. Inspired by Yasujirô Ozu, the camera never moved. If someone was sitting in the scene and stood up, we would never follow, tilt, or reframe; we would place a second camera at the standing height. The idea seemed restrictive, but it forced us to compose better, more like still photography. We would eventually have some dolly shots but they had to be done for the very good reason of having to stand out within all the frozen compositions. We used this visual style for his next two films, Tetro and Twixt [now recut as B’Twixt Now and Sunrise].
When we first started talking about Megalopolis, Francis told me he would like to move the camera a little more this time. He was interested in certain floating crane moves and dolly shots but keeping the bulk of the coverage locked and minimizing the panning and tilting.

The other idea was to have an IMAX release. We tested quite a few cameras and even if most could hold the resolution for the really big screen, there was something about the Arri Alexa 65 that stood out. In my mind IMAX is synonymous with 65mm. We had two Alexa 65s and one Alexa LF for main unit and an Alexa Mini LF for second unit. Lenses were provided by Panavision: a combination of wide Sphero 65s, Panaspeeds, and specialty lenses like the 200 and 250mm detuned Primo Artiste, rehoused Helios, and even Lensbaby for certain scenes.

Megalopolis is not set in a specific time frame. Francis loved the idea of mixing old and new elements, cars especially, and props like still photography cameras (we had everything from the 1940s Speed Graphic to Sony a7). Visually this can be a blessing and a curse at the same time, as a certain time period will limit your options and yet guide you. For this reason, Francis worked for a few weeks in prep with Dean Sherriff creating art keyframes that became a visual
map for the entire film. They weren’t just references but precise cues for the way he saw the movie, including composition, color, lighting; every guide you could wish for. These keyframes became a very strong foundation to build upon. But even with the best map, sometimes things would change.

Francis and I have an interesting dynamic. Once in a while he would throw a crazy idea at me that changed everything I thought about a certain shot or scene. He knows that I love the challenge and somehow will find a solution to make it work. Every single time he did that it made the scene better. I think there’s nothing more dangerous artistically speaking than being in a comfort zone. Restrictions and crazy ideas will always make better art. He would also bring up specific scenes from obscure movies, like the reflection in a dark water bowl the way they did it in the 1945 Sherlock Holmes film The Woman In Green or shooting the first scene between Julia and Cesar like the “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” scene in Neptune’s Daughter from 1949. Or, trying to figure out how Busby Berkeley would do the Madison Square Garden show. There’s something really beautiful about all these tributes
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My favorite sequence in the movie is the driving scene where Julia is following Cesar and Clodio is following her. We started with the poor man’s process in mind, having a stationary vehicle, with artificial background, night and rain onstage, but we kept throwing crazy ideas at it, moving lights and small set pieces, adding some exterior driving shots from Ron Fricke, some real driving exterior shots and an amazing miniature car with human statues that Roman Coppola, our second unit director, shot brilliantly.

For some reason we tend to think that the audience is craving for hyperreal shots, but movies are about ideas. Every time someone was concerned on set about a certain element not looking real enough, Francis would tell them, “This is poetic reality.”

Osvaldo Golijov sobre la música de Megalopolis.



In March 2003 I received a handwritten letter by Francis that I have kept on top of my piano all these years. He introduced himself and told me he had been working on an ambitious film project and as the son of a classical musician, he was “most interested in the wedding of film and music.” He then invited me to his home in California, to discuss this project of his “over a meal and some wine.”


Soon after, I went to the Napa Valley to visit Francis and we read together the Megalopolis script. He asked if I would compose a Megalopolis Symphony developing in music the themes of the film. I loved the idea and set out to sketch it. Sometime later Francis told me he was shelving the project for a while and would work on a smaller film: Youth Without Youth. I was very happy when he invited me to write the music for it, followed by Tetro, and later B’Twixt Now and Sunrise (together with Dan Deacon). I was even happier when 20 years after the initial letter, Francis invited me to write the score for Megalopolis and sent me the new script: some plotlines and scenes were completely new to me, and some I remembered from 20 years earlier.

In February 2023 I visited the Megalopolis set in Atlanta. Francis's greeting, after several years of not seeing one another, was, “Oh, Osvaldo, we need a big love theme... because the love story is what will hook the audience the first time they see the film, and they’ll come back later to absorb the other layers.” I said, “Great, what kind of love theme?” He replied, “Like Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, but geometric.” I laughed because that’s a perfect example of the language Francis uses to convey his vision: utterly surprising yet surprisingly precise.

A few weeks later when the shoot wrapped, Francis showed me an assemblage of the film. As the screening finished, he said, “Think of the music and the film as an adventure. This is my gift to you: you can do whatever you want with the music.” This proved to be true, as long as it was also what he wanted! Fortunately, I have always felt his trust in my work, even in the cues for which I had to write many different versions.

Time that flows and time that stops is a big theme in the film, and, in the words of Fundi, “You can lose it, waste it, and it also flies.” Musically speaking we express time in several ways. Firstly, for Cesar’s time-stopping “superpower” we use the love theme in a few key scenes, but played in a non-realistic, spooky way, by a musical saw. Which brings me to how important it is for Francis to have unusual and specific musical fingerprints for each film. In this case I would say that the color of the musical saw and of the glass harmonica provide those fingerprints for the eerie cues, whereas the organ is featured prominently in the Madison Square Garden sequence.


Another way of expressing time in the soundtrack is by blurring the line between music and sound design: orchestral or percussive clocks that are mixed with sound design clocks, for instance. Francis’s focus on rhythm is natural because rhythm is a manifestation of time, but also because at some point in the scoring process he envisioned the texture of the movie as constant rhythm, mentioning Black Orpheus as an example. So for practically every orchestral cue, he wanted to have a clear rhythmic, propulsive element. Francis said he literally wanted the audience to get into the aisles and dance!


The film takes place in New York sometime in the 21st century, but it is at the same time the Roman Empire.

But what is Roman Empire music? Nobody knows how Rome “sounded,” but we have Hollywood’s Rome. Francis suggested that Miklós Rósza’s music for Ben-Hur had the “Rome believability effect” we were after. I decided to write an entire Roman Suite that would make sense on its own as a piece of music, unrelated to any specific scene, but with all its themes stemming from the Roman themes in the film: a big imperial fanfare that acts as a recurring chorus in the piece; a majestic, heroic, exuberantly paced section, noble at times (for Cesar and Julia), and pompous for others (Crassus, Clodio, Claudettes); and Cleopatra-like interludes, hazy, sensual, and with a certain Egyptian atmosphere. The Madison Square Garden sequence is almost a film within the film, and it contains a lot of music. When Francis showed me that sequence he simply said, “We are in Rome now.”

He liked the Roman Suite and we extracted from it cues for many scenes in the film.


Seeing the progression of the film throughout the post-production process has been one of the great privileges of my life, and a powerful lesson in storytelling. There are perhaps two qualities of Francis that continue to inspire me every day in my work: his fearlessness as an artist, and his relentless search for the best way to tell a story. In his own words, film is “all illusion” and the director’s job is “to unlock the combination that creates the emotion in the audience.”

Siguiente parada, el Festival de Sidney, donde se proyectará el próximo 15 de Junio (en IMAX).

Una pregunta, compañeros. ¿Hay algún cine IMAX en España?. Me refiero a certificado, oficial. Imagino que si.

Iniciado por Branagh/Doyle

Una pregunta, compañeros. ¿Hay algún cine IMAX en España?. Me refiero a certificado, oficial. Imagino que si.

Sala IMAX como tal no. Solo hay 30 en todo el planeta, de las cuales 25 están en USA, 2 en Reino Unido, 1 en Australia y la última en la República Checa. Esas son las auténticas salas con esa tecnología. Otra cosa son esos cines con denominación IMAX que hay en España. Concretamente 4 “dos en Madrid, una en Barcelona y otra en Mallorca” y que nada tienen que ver, aunque le pongan esas siglas.

Saludos

Lo del IMAX me parece más marketing que otro cosa, así como hace 10 años insistían en publicitar el 4K. Las de Nolan y pocas más son las películas rodadas en IMAX, ver películas filmadas en otros formatos en un cine IMAX es como ver un Bluray en una tele 4K. Pero en fin...

Iniciado por riobravo59

Lo del IMAX me parece más marketing que otro cosa, así como hace 10 años insistían en publicitar el 4K. Las de Nolan y pocas más son las películas rodadas en IMAX, ver películas filmadas en otros formatos en un cine IMAX es como ver un Bluray en una tele 4K. Pero en fin...

Bueno, ha sido filmado en el equivalente digital de los 70mm analógicos , y el razonamiento del director de fotografía del film es que donde mas se aprecia la calidad es en salas IMAX.