Francis Ford Coppola is gearing up to drop almost $100 million of his own cash on his passion project, Megalopolis, and the legendary director of The Godfather is definitely getting his money’s worth when it comes to the cast. Coppola has been touting the epic scope of the project for years now, and he’s bringing in some A-Listers to get the job done, according to The Hollywood Reporter:
Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Forest Whitaker, Laurence Fishburne and Jon Voight will star in the project that is written and directed by The Godfather filmmaker. The logline for the film reads: “The fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems in this epic story of political ambition, genius, and conflicted love.”
As for why Coppola is putting up so much of his own money, the filmmaker says Megalopolis is the film he’s always wanted to make. Much like he did with Apocalypse Now, Coppola is willing to gamble on himself because he knows no studio will touch the ambitious project that he describes as something like It’s a Wonderful Life that people watch once a year.
“The more personal I make it, and the more like a dream in me that I do it, the harder it will be to finance,” Coppola recently told GQ. “And the longer it will earn money because people will be spending the next 50 years trying to think: What’s really in Megalopolis? What is he saying? My God, what does that mean when that happens?”
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)