"The way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam," Francis Ford Coppola infamously said at the premiere of Apocalypse Now at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival. "We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane."

He says something very similar about midway through Mike Figgis's Megadoc, which Coppola commissioned as the official document of the production of his late-stage, some might say ill-conceived, magnum opus Megalopolis. It is tempting to take the similar statements as evidence of Coppola's not having "learned his lesson," but I don't think there is a lesson to be learned. Coppola has always been a damn-the-torpedoes cinematic trailblazer whose bold ambitions are inherently challenging to anything smacking of the status quo, and, as a result, he has fallen flat on his face as many times as he has triumphed (with some commercial compromises in between).

The 85-year-old Coppola embarking on Megalopolis, a project he had been developing for 40 years, with $120 million of his own money seemed a fool's errand from the get-go, and it failed spectacularly with both critics and audiences. But, it is hard not to appreciate Coppola's audacity and how he was willing to put it all on the line to bring to life something he genuinely believed in. Figgis's film is a raw look at what happened in the process.

Of course, when all the footage for Megadoc was being shot, no one knew if Megalopolis would be triumph or tragedy. The film had been in Coppola's head for so long and there had been so many false starts (we get to see brief footage of a table read of the script back in 2001 that included Uma Thurman and Robert De Niro, as well as rehearsal footage from 2003 with Ryan Gosling) that there was no telling what it might become. Figgis does not offer a coda to Megadoc; there is no debriefing in the shadow of its failure because the film is not about what it became, but rather how it become. Megadoc therefore ends with the much anticipated premiere of Megalopolis at the Cannes Film Festival, having begun with pre-production table reads and improvisation with the actors long before cameras rolled. Figgis, who is familiar with success and failure within the realms of both independent and Hollywood cinema, is a sympathetic fly on the wall to the action, at one point confiding to the camera his inherently conflicted feelings about capturing moments when things are not going well. As a documentarian, he knows that disaster and conflict make for great content; as a filmmaker who has experienced them on his own productions, he knows the pain they inflict on the artist.

And, for the most part, the portrait he creates is one that is relatively free of enormous incidents (there are no near deaths like Martin Sheen's heart attack during the production of Apocalypse Now). There is a lot of down time because Coppola often changed his mind in the middle of production, necessitating major—and costly—changes, although this provides plenty of time for him to talk to Figgis's camera. One of the biggest incidents is a tense meeting with the special effects team, after which Coppola fired (off-screen) the visual effects supervisor and several others. There are also some amusingly tense moments between Coppola and Shia LaBeouf, who already had a reputation for difficulty on-set and is self-aware enough to laugh about how he has the least job security of anyone in the cast (he is perpetually terrified of being fired). That doesn't stop him, though, from open conflict with Coppola about how scenes should be played and what his character should be doing, although they always seem to work it out. Coppola, while exasperated at times, never completely loses his cool, perhaps because of his insistence that he is doing all of this for "fun" (expensive fun, but fun nonetheless). Of course, there are plenty of times when it looks like anything but fun, although anyone who knows anything about film production—especially film production at this scale—knows how challenging even the best productions can be.

For all of its candor and insight, Megadoc feels oddly truncated at times, largely because certain members of the cast declined to participate in the documentary and therefore are all but absent from the behind-the-scenes footage. This is most apparent with Adam Driver, who plays the film's protagonist and has the most screen time, yet is rarely if ever present in Megadoc. He did sit down with Figgis for an interview at some point during the production, but the brevity of his comments suggests that either the interview was very short or it didn't go well. Plenty of the other actors were more than happy to sit with Figgis and be recorded on-set, and they tend to dominate the documentary. Chief among these is LaBeouf, who seems to be playing his own character, and Aubrey Plaza, who gave an extensive interview, although much of what she says is vague and hazy. More informative is Dustin Hoffman, Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Voight, and longtime Coppola friend George Lucas, who talks candidly about the differences between them (e.g., Lucas takes a cautious approach, while Coppola barrels straight ahead). Megalopolis may not have turned into the great masterwork that Coppola had been envisioning for decades, but Megadoc will stand alongside Les Blank's Burden of Dreams (1982), Georger Hickenlooper's Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991), Ed W. Marsh's Under Pressure: Making The Abyss (1993), and Chris Smith's American Movie (1999) as a memorable peak into the highs and lows of the cinematic process.

Copyright © 2025 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © Utopia Select LLC