A new trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s forthcoming film Megalopolis has been released – with an audacious marketing angle, to say the least. Watch it below.
Shared today (August 21), the trailer features a closer look at the high-wire stakes of the film, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival last May to mixed reviews. Before showing film footage, however, the clip begins with voiceover narration by cast member Laurence Fishburne.
“True genius is often misunderstood,” says Fishburne before a procession of film review quotes begin to flash on screen.
Instead of Megalopolis reviews, however, these quotes are specifically attributed to negative reviews of films from Coppola’s oeuvre: The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
“A sloppy, self-indulgent movie,” reads an early review of The Godfather, while another critic declares Apocalypse Now “a spectacular failure”.
“One filmmaker has always been ahead of his time,” Fishburne continues, before leading into scenes from Megalopolis that feature actors Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia Labeouf, and Giancarlo Esposito, among others.
Critics who saw Megalopolis at its Cannes premiere emerged with mixed responses – The Ringer’s Manuela Lazic writes that the film “ultimately amounts to a banal vanity project”, while GQ’s Iana Murray called it “ludicrous and awe-inspiring”. While it received a seven-minute standing ovation from the audience, some of its members were also reportedly booing.
The trailer for Megalopolis – which opens in the UK on September 27 – also arrives not long after the film had been in the headlines due to Coppola’s alleged onset behaviour during its production.
In July, footage leaked from the making of the film showing Coppola, 85, kissing several extras. In two different video clips, published by Variety, the director is seen hugging and kissing female extras during the making of a dancefloor scene.
He is reported to have said over a microphone: “Sorry, if I come up to you and kiss you, just know it’s solely for my pleasure”.
One of the women in the clips, Lauren Pagone, later said: “I was in shock. I didn’t expect him to kiss and hug me like that. I was caught off guard. And I can tell you he came around a couple times.”
In NME’s two-star review of Megalopolis, Lou Thomas writes: “The whole piece is so uneven, that at times it’s akin to watching a toddler being given free rein as an interior decorator. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you always should.”
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