Adam Driver plays an architect with the power to control time in the first trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited new film Megalopolis. Watch the clip below.
The two-minute teaser shows Driver’s character Cesar Catilina teetering on the roof of a skyscraper. As he nears the edge, he appears to think of jumping, and as gravity is about to take hold, he cries out, “Time stop”. We see the cars on the street below pause in time, until Catilina decides to let them move again.
The film is also set to star Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Jason Schwartzman, Laurence Fishburne and Dustin Hoffman.
Megalopolis has been a passion project for the Godfather and Apocalypse Now director since the early 1980s, but has been met with funding problems ever since. With major studios continuing to be hesitant about investing in a film so epic in scale, Coppola eventually funded the film himself, selling personal assets, including portions of his wine empire.
It is thought the film has run to a total cost in the region of $120million (£95million), and it is now set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17.
An official synopsis of the film states: “The City of New Rome must change, causing conflict between Cesar Catilina, a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests and partisan warfare.”
“Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.”
Coppola announced that production on the film had concluded in April last year, with an Instagram post reading: “That’s a wrap #MegalopolisFilm”.
Coppola screened the finished film for a number of major studio heads in March, including those from Universal, Netflix and Sony, but the film is still without a distribution deal. Reports of early reactions to the film from major industry figures have ranged from those who “liked it enormously” to those who dismissed it, saying “it’s so not good” (via The Hollywood Reporter).
The director’s last released film was 2011’s Twixt.