Tema: Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

Circula por los mentideros de Internet -hay que cogerlo con pinzas, claro- que efectivamente existe un corte de 4 horas de duración de Megalópolis (quién lo afirma cuenta que un familiar suyo trabajó en la película, y fue testigo directo de la existencia de este montaje), pero que claro, esta lleno de citas literarias, de voces en off, de reuniones en despachos (!), y que Coppola pensó que era redundante a nivel de ideas y subtexto y que afectaba demasiado al ritmo, aunque narrativamente cerraba mucho mejor todas las subtramas.

En fin, veremos.

Igual nos llevamos una sopresa cuando el film salga a la venta en formato físico y digital, quién sabe.

Coppola could have easily made Hollywood blockbusters his whole career and made a boat load of money, and rested on the laurels of his reputation -- but instead he has consistently put his own money and reputation on the line in pursuit of his own vision.

Ceasar mirrors Coppola's career and also serves as something like an inverse Howard Roark. Where the Randian vision is that there is a small group of super-talented people and everyone else is a dumb piece of shit that needs to get out of the way, Coppola's vision is that the rich have almost a responsibility to create something bold and inspiring to show people what is possible. Cesar is not the only immensely talented person on Earth, but is in a unique position where he can use his influence to show what is possible and to help inspire others reach their own personal potential, and humanity's potential. Cesar is from a rich aristocratic family, and Megalon could presumably be monetized and sold, and could live as an uber-rich playboy celebrity --but instead of doing this he goes to war with the establishment in pursuit of his vision.

Ultimately I think the film serves as a mythologizing of Coppola's own career, and a sort of meta-commentary on filmmaking/creating art. Creating something genuinely new, whether its art, or a new society is inherently messy and chaotic. At a time where movies have reached a new low of being derivative and formulaic, Coppola spends $120M of his own money just to let the actors improvise and basically make shit up as he went along. Literally just throwing shit against a wall to see what sticks.

I don't even know if I liked the movie, but I have genuinely never seen anything like that in my life.

Bruce, es curioso como la película se las apaña para ser irreverente y extravagante y al mismo tiempo sincera, emotiva y nada cínica.

De tus primeras impresiones extraigo, tras reflexionar estos días, que te ha gustado bastante, pero también cierta frustración porque según tu parecer, si se hubiese pulido más el montaje y el acabado formal de algunos planos, podríamos estar ante una gran película, y de momento para ti se queda en buen film a secas (o bastante bueno). ¿Voy bien?.

Me da a mí en la nariz, no obstante, que si de aquí a Enero anuncian una edición especial junto con el cómic (que ya han adelantado desde la editorial que NO contará lo mismo que la película), caerá en cuanto te sea posible.

En cualquier caso, si que ha acabado siendo EL TIPO de película que tu querías. Un film anti mainstream que ha dejado a todo el mundo perplejo y algo confundido.

El montador principal del film:

SPOILERS



How much did the script evolve in post?

Oh, a lot. It evolved a lot up to the shoot. Then once the shooting began, it didn’t change a lot. It changed day by day within a scene because of a location issue or some other issue, but it tended to track with the script at that point. Then definitely in post it evolved into a whole other beast.

Structurally?

Structurally. Tonally. Something that doesn’t come off the page is tone. This film has sort of been marketed as a sci-fi drama that’s very serious, but when you watch it, it’s sort of satirical and comical and goofy and there’s things that you wouldn’t expect based on the marketing treatment. The film is a different thing to experience as a piece.


Were those tonal differences or tonal shifts or changes difficult thing to navigate?

There’s so much of Francis’ personal biography in this movie. There’s so many things that are an homage to other cinema that he’s collecting and giving respect to. He’s 85 and of course there’s a ticking clock on him… and all of us. I’m not saying that he made a picture to say goodbye to cinema, but the way he was expressing it was like a love letter at times.

It was all also baked into this bigger plot and idea that Rome and modern Western civilization is sort of following a path that history is repeating itself. I’m Canadian, but clearly if America sneezes, sometimes Canada catches a cold.

Paying attention to the current climate politics, there’s something to be said about the timing of the film. Of course some of it’s very obvious and blatant - like who John Voight’s Hamilton Crassus character is and represents.

So it is not meant to be like any of Francis’ earlier films like The Godfather, where it’s a story about a family, or Gene Hackman in The Conversation, which is a character study. It’s really just a global take of the pulse of current politics and but baked into a fable - like a bedtime story. That’s why things kind of can veer and be a little tricky. So it was definitely challenging.


You mentioned that this was kind of like a love letter to cinema from Francis. Did he have you watch certain films or did you feel like you needed to? Or did you ask, “Hey, should I watch something?”


I’ll ask questions of directors, but with him, he referenced certain things. For example, Abel Gance’s Napoleon, which used triptychs, which we used. So that was a visual reference. The material all comes from actual real events, like the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BC.

The murder trial is from the Sonny Von Bulow case in New York, which the woman was apparently being poisoned or the husband was accused of poisoning his wife. And then he was later found out to be innocent. Robert Moses was sort of the architect of New York and he went up against the city kind of trying to rebuild the city.

So in a way, Caesar Catalina was an amalgamation of Julius Caesar and Robert Moses, and also very much to be included in that is Francis himself. It’s very personal and biographical as well. Francis is an architect in many ways.


You mentioned the Catilinarian conspiracy. Is that something you bothered to read about?

Yeah. There’s a Hardcore history about it with Dan Carlin.

Oh yeah, I love Hardcore History.

I re-listened to that. But all you have to do is ask Francis anything. He’s a history buff and he’s very well read, so in between cutting or having lunch and whatnot, we would talk about stuff. Another odd thing about the making of this film is that while he was shooting the film, he had also purchased an old Days Inn hotel just outside of Atlanta in Peachtree City called the All Movie Hotel.

He was building a hotel while making a film, so it very kind of meta in a way. We all stayed at the hotel. They’re doing construction. There’s drills coming through the wall and banging and you’re trying to watch dailies with your headphones on and concentrate. Francis would come in and we’d watch dailies every night.

Glen Scantlebury, who is the other editor, he and I built the framework of Megalopolis together. We would screen dailies in the morning and then Francis would come back after shooting and mostly he would show up with Roman, his son, who was shooting second unit. We would watch all the footage again.

Glen and I would watch everything in the morning. We’d both cut the scene. I’d see this sort of pathway, and Glen would see another pathway. We’d both cut it to be mentally up to speed with the material. They finished building the hotel a month or two after shooting was over, so it kind of calmed down.

I stayed in a room around the corner from Francis. In the morning, on my way to the edit suite, I’d stop by, have a coffee with him, talk about politics or what we’re reading or watching. Some nights he’d watch the film the night before.

So we’d talk about his feelings because he wasn’t in the edit suite 10 hours a day. He’d pop in and out during the director’s cut. He would definitely spend like a four hour session, but once we got past the director’s cut, he liked to kind of push things a little bit and see what we’d come up with and then come and look, then he liked to kind of have some distance.

We would dig into certain things where I’d say, “Francis, I need you here. You can’t leave me.” Other times I’d say, “Okay, I know what you want. It’ll take a little time. Let me figure it out.” Then maybe I come up with a couple versions or something and I’d show him the next day or we’d give him a little hard disk and he could go to his room where he had a nice projector and he could check it out and then either text me or email me at night or see him in the morning.


I wanted to ask about a couple of specifics. Early on there’s editing of a building explosion and a section before the building explosion.

The opening of the film used to be more documentary-style where we’re coming from the past - and it still has lingering moments of that - with the Laurence Fishburne narration: “When does an Empire die?” And comparing the new world to Old Rome, but then Francis said, “All my movies have these openings that everyone recalls and they’re spectacular.”

So as we went down the timeline and looked at it, the first thing that really jumps out is introducing the film with our main character and Caesar Catalina - Adam Driver- and him stopping time. Of course it’s tricky because that whole notion of stopping time isn’t something that is completely fulfilled as an answer.

I can give you Francis’s sort of idea of it and my idea of it, but it’s also just something for the audience to kind of trip out on because of course this movie is sort of the talk of the town because it’s understated, it’s mysterious, it’s sort of bewildering and confusing, but also sort of fascinating at the decision-making process.

So I think having the film start with time is something of his own personal biography. It is a personal film in many ways, and I think time is something that you could say is obviously universal, but for him at his state in his career is something that he’s considering.

But he’s also dealt with this in Rumble Fish where Tom Waits has a similar sort of speech as Laurence Fishburne does in the film - talking about: you can’t buy time. So it’s somewhat of a metaphor. My wife watched the film.

She hadn’t seen it until the premiere at TIFF and she thought, “Oh, this sort of feels like a superhero film, but in a very art house way.”

If it had been a more Hollywood style film, it would’ve received a lot of notes and rewrites and probably would’ve whittled things down to, “It’s about time and it’s about Megalon and mMgalopolis,” but Francis wanted to insert a lot of ideas into the film, so it was wrangling this beast with a lot of different heads.

The idea of time and Caesar is also illustrated with Julia when she’s on top of the scaffolding and they kiss, after he is released from jail. It explores the idea that architects freeze time with their buildings and musicians play with time, so it’s not really a literal thing, it’s more of a metaphor or figurative thing. Even the set design in that scene, doesn’t really make sense.

She’s on a little clock and then they’re on some scaffolding beams. It’s just meant to be more sort of metaphorical, but also sort of more beautiful and not really a traditional thing.

So Francis is departing from a lot of things where audiences perhaps are not used to dealing with, given the amount of times we depart from traditional storytelling in a way, even though the film isn’t impossible to track, but it just keeps you guessing and changing gears so that you start to wonder, “Where is this all leading to?”

So it was always a matter of trying to make sure we could track the film as much as we could explore sort of the artistic adventure that Francis wanted to take.


You mentioned the voiceover. How much did that evolve throughout the edit?

The voiceover is interesting because Adobe had teased the idea that there’d be a program where you could kind of punch in text and they would spit out VO that matched a voice. Our apprentice editor Dana, became like the AI expert and we uploaded a lot of Laurence Fishburne audio books and scenes from movies. We developed a database that AI could then extrapolate a performance out of the narration that Francis was writing. So we didn’t have to go after Laurence every time to get him to re-record something and we could play with it. The timing and the performance were close enough that you knew it was gonna be okay once he recorded it for real. His voice is so incredible that you definitely had confidence that it would land. It was just a matter of the amount of dialogue and what it’s saying. So we utilized that a lot.

And how much did it evolve as you watched the entire movie - in context after the editor’s cut or after the director’s cut? What was happening with that narration? Were you finding you were using it more, trying to shorten it, trying to spread it out?

I think we were trying to use it a bit more. There’s consistency of certain visual language with plaques but it’s always jumping from one thing to the next. So to have the spine of Laurence Fishburne’s narration cement in some sense, “Okay, we’re back in the hands of the narrator.” It wasn’t really a crutch, it was just something to kind of layer in as another part of the storytelling.


There’s a nighttime driving scene through the city fairly early in the movie in a black Citroen. Talk about editing the tension of that.

Francis shot the performances and Roman, his son, shot everything else. It was like a tonal shift. For that section of the film, Francis referenced a film called Ugetsu, a Japanese ghost story film (1953). He wanted to have this supernatural feel to it, to kind of match the idea that Caesar’s wife mysteriously died, but we don’t really know why.

We sort of begin to understand as the film progresses. But he wanted to have that kind of ethereal ghost-like quality to it, to kind of heighten the sadness and loss, but also just the yearning for his wife.

Do you remember having to create tension throughout that section of the movie?

Yeah, it’s coming from the opening catwalk sequence when the mayor whispers into his ear that something happened and you see her face flash and then again you see her later when he’s trying to work with Megalon in his apartment in the Chrysler building. He again has a flash of her and that sort of motivates him to go off and deliver flowers to her.

You think she’s in this hospice but when Julia’s character arrives, the room’s empty. It had these spooky vibes to it. The music helped a lot and it was another little mini sequence within the film. It’s something that Francis wanted to explore and have and the statue’s crumbling - Lady Justice and sort of the values from the past that are sort of being destroyed.

What about the editing of the wedding fantasy montage?

That actually was given to another editor, Chris Donaldson, and he broke the back on it and did an incredible job. Francis likened it to the helicopter sequence for Apocalypse Now. Chris really created a structure to it, after which it kept evolving and moving.

Hats off to Chris. There was a sequence with Julia and Caesar kind of pulling this imaginary rope. He’s on drugs and he kind of pulls out an imaginary knife or scarf and he slashes the rope and he falls and kind of disappears.

That was something that was born out of old theatrical games for actors to sort of workshop and build trust or develop a playful environment. Francis just did that on the spot.

Glenn and I responded to it when we watched dailies, “Oh this is interesting. This feels right for Caesar because while Caesar can “stop time” (or can he?) he’s like an Elon Musk-type character. He’s also like Francis. He’s constantly moving and evolving and creating.


You mentioned the triptychs - these three, side-by-side split screens basically. Is there a trick to editing those, not only juxtaposing images in time but in space across the screen?

Glenn and our assistant editor, Gretchen built the beginning of it and it was great. I think we just sort of tweaked it thereafter. But there has to be a harmony between the screens and we had a nice piece of temp track from Ben Hur I think, and then Osvaldo took it to the next level.

Y siguen con los clips. No lo comprendo.

Al parecer hay unos pocos minutos del tercer acto -los trípticos- rodados en IMAX (1:43:1). El resto del film está rodado en 2:00:1 con la Arri Alexa 65. La gradación de color de la película es un homenaje directo -e intencional- al estilo de Vittorio Storaro, con el que Coppola ha colaborado en múltiples ocasiones.

¿Cómo gestionarán esto en la edición doméstica?

Iniciado por Branagh/Doyle

Al parecer hay unos pocos minutos del tercer acto -los trípticos- rodados en IMAX (1:43:1). El resto del film está rodado en 2:00:1 con la Arri Alexa 65. La gradación de color de la película es un homenaje directo -e intencional- al estilo de Vittorio Storaro, con el que Coppola ha colaborado en múltiples ocasiones.

¿Cómo gestionarán esto en la edición doméstica?

No han rodado nada en IMAX, la Alexa Mini tiene un sensor nativo que simula el 35mm que dan in 1.43 nativo, pero no es IMAX. La Alexa 65 da una relación de aspecto nativa por su sensor de 2.11.
Ya a cualquier cosa le llaman Imax los directores de fotografía.