Review: ‘Megadoc’ is a window into Francis Ford Coppola at work, on his own dime, pursuing art

At one point in “Megadoc,” a documentary about the production of Francis Ford Coppola’s ambitious, self-financed “Megalopolis,” director Mike Figgis offers to his camera that all the best films about the making of a movie are stories about disasters.

Which puts Figgis in a bit of a dilemma — does he want what’s better for his own film or for Coppola to succeed with the project he has been dreaming of for decades? While Figgis’ documentary doesn’t dwell on the problem, “Megadoc” does arguably end up suffering because that ethical knot is never fully disentangled. Figgis gets moments of real tension and genuine behind-the-scenes drama, but is also too respectful and admiring of Coppola, understandably so, to push his own inquiry to its limits.

Coppola sold off parts of his wine business to finance “Megalopolis” himself for a reported $120 million. (Figgis occasionally inserts eye-popping figures onscreen: art department $27 million, wardrobe $7 million, locations $16 million, etc.) Conjoining a story drawn from ancient Rome with a setting in near-future New York City (and shooting around Atlanta), Coppola crafts a fantastical allegory of wealth, power and politics.

Though there are moments of genuine beauty, tenderness and pure transcendence in the finished “Megalopolis,” it also has a debilitating air of too-muchness, as if Coppola were trying so hard to make a totalizing statement on humanity, society and a possible future that he got lost in his own creation.

“Megadoc” is not exactly a skeleton key for understanding “Megalopolis,” but it is useful and insightful, full of scenes of conflict followed by resolution, understanding emerging from confusion. And at a moment when “Megalopolis” itself is difficult to see (a just-announced run of shows at Eastwood Performing Arts Center is a local exception), that means “Megadoc” might be the best way for the faithful to commune with this cult object.

Hovering over all of this, of course, is the ghost of Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” and the 1991 chronicle of its making, “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” directed by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper from documentary footage shot by the director’s wife, Eleanor Coppola, and widely considered among the best portraits of a film’s creation ever made.

That connection is made even more explicit in that Eleanor is, in fact, the first voice heard in “Megadoc,” as she asks a question of her husband. It is deeply touching to see Francis and Eleanor, the latter of whom died in April 2024 shortly before the premiere of “Megalopolis,” celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary on set with the cast and crew.

Francis Coppola himself brings up “Apocalypse Now” at one point, complaining that there is too much machinery and bureaucracy around “Megalopolis” and the team cannot respond to his creative desires fast enough. It’s a bigger production than “Apocalypse,” he notes, even though that involved loaned military helicopters and all sorts of logistical complications. Actor Shia LaBeouf brings up “Apocalypse” as well, worried that he is about to get fired from the production as Harvey Keitel was let go from Coppola’s earlier film.

As with the finished “Megalopolis” itself, lead actors Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel are somewhat overshadowed in “Megadoc” by supporting players LaBeouf and Aubrey Plaza. Driver and Emmanuel are both reluctant to have Figgis’ camera capture them at work, supplying rather formal sit-down interviews instead, so their presence feels diminished here.

LaBeouf admits he was surprised to even be cast in the film — “I was beyond persona non grata, I was nuclear,” he says — and so there is a last-chance desperation to the way he needs to endlessly talk over the smallest of moments, pushing Coppola to the edge of exasperation more than once. Plaza, on the other hand, approaches the project with joyful, anarchic glee, taking to heart Coppola’s own sense of play. In one moment not in the finished “Megalopolis,” Plaza challenges Dustin Hoffman to an arm-wrestling match during an improvisation and the winner is undoubtedly anyone who gets to watch.

Figgis, still best known for directing 1995’s “Leaving Las Vegas,” never presses Coppola too hard or digs too deep, just seeming to take what he can get. So while “Megadoc” does capture a moment reported on in the press when Coppola fires his VFX supervisor and the art department walks off the picture, it never quite gets to the heart of the matter. And though it does include footage from the scene in question, “Megadoc” does not at all address the allegations that Coppola was inappropriate with extras during a party scene, charges that resulted in competing lawsuits.

The film concludes with the premiere of “Megalopolis” at Cannes, skipping over a now-infamous early screening in Los Angeles for buyers and assorted notables that advanced negative word of mouth on the film and scared away any major distributors, or anything from the film’s eventual theatrical release, including Lionsgate’s bungled trailer that manufactured fake quotes from notable critics.

So “Megadoc” is not an autopsy of disaster along the lines of “Hearts of Darkness” or “Burden of Dreams” or “American Movie” or “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” all tales of filmmakers tipping over into tragedy. Rather, it is a portrait of an artist at work, marshaling tremendous resources at great personal expense in pursuit of a result that remains elusive, perhaps to himself most of all.

At one point, Coppola spends an inordinate amount of time attempting to capture a theatrical lighting effect in camera when many people are telling him it would be easier to do it later in post with digital effects. But the finished result, per Coppola’s insistence, with the light seeming to glow from within Driver’s face, is one of the most astonishing shots in “Megalopolis.”

During production Coppola acknowledges he only got about 70% of what he was hoping for. And yet, true to his core as an iconoclastic dreamer willing to risk everything for the sake of discovering the unknown, he still says, “It was worth it.” Figgis may not have gotten his disaster, but it seems Coppola got his money’s worth.