Back in 1995 when Mike Figgis was making Leaving Las
Vegas with actor Nicolas Cage which ultimately won him the Academy Award for
Best Actor, Cage introduced Figgis to his uncle Francis Ford Coppola who later
asked him to be involved with an edition of Coppola’s magazine All-Story
and Figgis maintained relations with the magazine’s editor Michael Ray. Around the time Coppola ultimately began production
on his forty-seven years in the making dream project Megalopolis, Ray
shot a message to Figgis who after looking the film’s decades-spanning
development Hell congratulated Coppola and asked jokingly in passing if he was
open to letting him document the making of the film.
To Figgis’ amazement, Coppola said yes,
giving the director unprecedented fly-on-the-wall behind-the-scenes access to
the legendary filmmaker’s creative process.
While nothing in the production itself matches the calamities felt on Apocalypse
Now or One from the Heart, Figgis’ film touches on those woes while
finding ample room to illuminate Coppola’s unorthodox yet impassioned process
and how not everyone (Shia LaBeouf particularly) vibed with that way of
thinking about filmmaking.
Though the doc skips over the sexual misconduct allegations following
Coppola’s filming of the opening club scenes with Nathalie Emmanuel, it gets
entrenched in everything else from early rehearsals of the 2001 table reading
of Megalopolis featuring camera tests with Ryan Gosling in the LaBeouf
role, Uma Thurman and Robert De Niro.
There’s some early footage of Coppola looking over storyboards chronicling
every shot of the film in his head, interviews with the first visual effects
crew and art department from their joyousness at being hired to their shock and
dismay at ultimately being fired.
Once
production actually begins, the first day of shooting is a unique one which
Coppola touched on at his Henry Ford visit where you hear the sounds of the
cast and crew wishing each other good luck over the opening credits logo. Some of the actors like Adam Driver asked not
to be filmed by Figgis during the shoot which the filmmaker understood and
respected and further to Figgis’ efforts to remain unobtrusive he downsized his
camera so as to not interfere with the cast members’ spaces.
By the end of it,
in between takes, LaBeouf is visibly angry and upset and refers to the
aforementioned ‘social niceties’ being gone between them now. Probably the first moment one of the actors
in it comes across as beleaguered and distraught by his time spent on the film,
its an interesting aside and though he might be the film’s saving grace it
pained both the actor and director a great deal to get it onscreen. Oh and Coppola gets briefly into a dispute
with renowned Romanian cinematographer Mihai Mălaimare Jr. (The Master)
over the lighting. Only Aubrey Plaza
seems to tap into Coppola’s strange approach and she’s the most chipper of the bunch
including a cute aside where she films an arm-wrestling match with her costar
Dustin Hoffman.
For Figgis, who
himself is about to tour a new 4K restoration of Leaving Las Vegas, its
another minor success for the independent filmmaker navigating the space of a
major artist as far out on a limb as he has creatively ventured. Coppola’s film still doesn’t really work but
compared to One from the Heart it is a much stronger and more memorable
film featuring some wild performances across the board in a movie that might be
beyond comprehension but for what it is worth you come away from Figgis’ Megadoc
with maybe a little bit more respect or admiration for what the 86 year old
auteur was trying to achieve.
--Andrew Kotwicki