Francis Ford Coppola Breaks Down The Design of ‘Megalopolis’

The great artist

and scientist Gerta once said,

Architecture is frozen music.

And I always thought, what a beautiful idea.

[tense music]

[Speaker] Time stop.

All artists stop time and control time

and they have

from the very first little painting

that someone did on a cave wall.

Because when you do a painting, you are taking an instant

of reality and freezing it.

My name is Francis Coppola.

Today I would like to talk about architecture

in my movie Megalopolis.

[upbeat music]

Megalopolis is basically fable and like a Roman epic,

but is set in modern America.

There are two principle characters who are in opposition.

One is a mayor of the city named Cicero,

and of course he's an evolution of the famous Latin consul

and writer Cicero.

And his opponent is a sort of an amalgamation

of modern people, namely Robert Moses

and Walter Gropius who came here

with his Bauhaus art school.

And his first name is Caesar

and he is the artist architect of the story.

In the first frame, I was trying

to pose those principle elements, which would then go on

to unveil itself in the story of Megalopolis.

[upbeat music]

This is Grand Central Station.

Of course we see the Roman columns and the clock

and the issue of time is a big factor of this movie.

And then of course we see modern times

as reflected in the Art Deco tower

of the Chrysler Building, which is a unique building.

It was a men's club in the days when men's clubs

were gentlemen sitting around reading newspapers.

And I got the privilege of seeing it, it was so beautiful.

It had a giant mural up there and it was a heavenly space.

And then the Chrysler Building was sold.

I went recently to look at it

and whoever had bought it had dismantled the cloud tower

and I have no idea what happened to those murals.

So basically juxtaposing the cloud tower

with the time element in Grand Central Station

and the Romanesque nature of the building.

In the first frame, I was trying

to pose the one exotic notion

that America is essentially the historical counterpart

of the Rome Republic.

We have these golden images of the top

of the beautiful Chrysler building

and my character at the beginning of the picture.

I designed the film along

with a fabulous concept artist named Dean Sheriff.

And in this one of course,

it's obviously not the real Chrysler building.

This is, in movie talk, is called The Volume.

In other words, it's really only part of it actually built.

And on the real Chrysler building,

the ledge is not really horizontal enough

to be able to stand on it.

So I took some liberties, but he steps out on the ledge

and you don't know why.

It's the beginning of the picture.

Is he going to, in some way test his own ability

as an artist?

I mean, he does, in fact stop time.

Time stop,

[finger snapping]

All artists stop time and control time.

Film makers move back and forth freely in time.

So that theme of the artist's natural ability

to manipulate time to move and combine time and space,

I thought was fascinating.

[upbeat music]

And let me just say a little bit about the settings

of movies, which is of course a place which is architecture.

In more adventurous movies and plays,

those settings might be secondarily not only the place

where the action happens,

but a metaphor for what's happening.

And I decided in Megalopolis

that I would enjoy doing that.

This scene where they're walking around 5,000 feet

above the ground and obviously one slip is death.

Of course, they discuss the notion of how artists stop time

and everything I spoke about earlier.

But at one point they do stop time together and they kiss.

Do it for me.

[bright music]

And the reason I wanted it to take place 5,000 feet

above the ground, certain death,

is because when you kiss someone in a serious way,

it's very dangerous because your life

and the life of everyone you love is about to change.

I believe that when you make art,

risk is an essential part of it.

When you leap into the unknown, you prove that you're free

because you've lept into something

that you have no idea what's gonna happen.

What they're doing is gonna change their lives.

[soft music]

Rome conquered half the known world.

They went as far as Great Britain,

but basically a lot of money came into Rome.

But the money didn't go to the people.

It went to providing what they call bread

and circuses that keep them busy.

And we all know about the Colosseum.

I wanted to do the modern version of the Colosseum.

It would've been logical

and my production designer wanted it

to be a circular theater that she had found.

And I said, No, I wanna do it as a stadium.

And the reason I wanted do this stadium,

because as a child, I went to Madison Square Garden

to see the circus and it was this Madison Square Garden

because there's been four Madison Square Gardens

and between Penn Station, which looked like the Roman baths

of Caracalla and the New York Public Library

and the post office,

a whole section of New York was Rome.

New York and America not only based itself on Rome,

it built itself to look like Rome.

Penn Station was the ultimate construction,

but they destroyed this magnificent landmark.

It doesn't exist anymore.

As with a lot of great things in New York, it's torn down

for reasons that only bankers can explain.

I mean, if I could rebuild Penn Station

on film, I would do it.

I didn't the the opportunity nor the need,

but I did with this Madison Square Garden.

As a kid, Madison Square Garden,

that building had like five floors.

And on the other floors there were lots of other things.

It was sort of like carnival freak shows

where you saw the two-headed woman and the snake child,

or places where you could buy baby salamanders.

And there were bowling alleys and bars

and there was a whole carny world of five floors

of Madison Square Garden.

And then at the top was the arena.

And so I had such strong emotional ties

to that experience in Madison Square Garden

that I really wanted to set it there.

And it was very emotional

to see these things I loved in New York.

[upbeat music]

Caesar the main character, Adam Driver, he's a man

of the present, but with a vision of the future.

Time, show me the future.

[warm music]

Both these images are three screens

and you're seeing some glimpses of the architecture.

And to understand the architecture, let's go to Barcelona

and talk about Gaudi.

He made these extraordinary structures.

They were strong or they were then later reinforced concrete

and other materials, steel.

But Gaudi, his architecture looked as though they had grown.

And I said, how do you collaborate with nature?

In other words, a Gaudi vision made of something

more durable than steel, which is life,

which is living material.

So there is this unique idea pioneered by a number

of people, including Neri Oxman, a scientist at MIT,

but also an architect who proposed

that architecture could be actually living plant material

and that we would like it.

And that not only would it do things for us,

like provided an abode that would be a dream place

to live in, but we could do good things for it.

So it's like living in a flower

or living in a natural thing.

And there's many

of these forms in the architecture here

that reflect an architecture that you don't build,

but that you encourage to grow.

[upbeat music]

This is an artist's view

of what the city would look like when it was transitional.

In other words, obviously if you were gonna grow a new city

right in the middle of New York,

there'd be a transition period where a lot

of the old buildings, the Empire State Building,

the Chrysler Building are kept.

But there's the beginning

of these more vegetable type architectures happening.

And one movie that I actually loved as a kid was made

by H.G. Wells who wrote the script

and the quarter company was called The Shape

of Things to Come.

And you see them build this world of the future.

But it takes time to build a world of the future

so that when you get to the future,

it's all about their grandchildren.

So I say when I do it in my future movie, I want there

to be some amazing new architectural medium

or invention which he invented,

which lets you go build a world of future fast enough

that you don't have to be your own grandchildren

in the story.

And then as these things work in your mind

in the script, it began to be this material called megalon.

And that was sort of a material that was not dissimilar

to what Neri Oxman that was the sort of scientific advisor

of this called mediated material.

Rather than be built, we could work on an atomic level,

nature and humanity as a collaboration liking each other.

And I saw that whatever world I wanted to present

for people in Megalopolis, you had to say, Well, I'd like

to live there, and maybe I'm nuts,

but I'd love to live in a flower,

especially one that liked me.