The US, whose founders tried to emulate the laws and governmental structures of the Roman republic, is headed for a similarly self-inflicted collapse, director Francis Ford Coppola has said at the premiere of his first film in more than a decade.
“What’s happening in America, in our republic, in our democracy, is exactly how Rome lost their republic thousands of years ago,” Coppola told a press conference at the Cannes film festival on Friday. “Our politics has taken us to the point where we might lose our republic.”
“America was founded on the ideas of the Roman republic,” Coppola added. “We didn’t want a king, Rome didn’t want a king, so they invented a new form of government called the republic with the Senate and with Roman law and with all of the things which we embrace.”
Megalopolis, which premiered at Cannes on Thursday night, draws inspiration from the Catiline conspiracy to overthrow the rules of the Roman republic in 63BC and is set in a New York-like metropolis of the future.
Even though the 85-year-old veteran director first started developing his passion project in the 1980s, he said the analogy had only become more prescient in recent years.
“My feeling was to make a Roman epic set in modern America, and I had no idea that the politics of today would make that so relevant.”
The Roman republic, which had elements of modern democracy, in its last years succumbed to economic problems, corruption and the rise of Julius Caesar as a dictator.
The maker of Apocalypse Now, The Conversation and The Godfather said he was observing a trend “towards the more neo-right, even fascist tradition” not just in the US but across the globe, “which is frightening, because … anyone who was alive during World War II saw the horrors that took place, and we don’t want a repeat of that”.
Coppola acknowledged that not everyone shared his opinion and nodded towards Jon Voight a few seats to his left, who had “different political opinions than me”. Voight, who plays the banker Hamilton Crassus III in Megalopolis, was one of Hollywood’s most prominent supporters of former US president Donald Trump.
Decline was a theme that Coppola detected not just in US political culture but in its once all-dominant film industry. “The film industry has become more a matter of people being hired to meet their debt obligations, because the studios are in great debt,” he said. “And the job is not so much to make good movies. The job is to make sure that they pay their debt obligations.”
Newer companies such as Amazon, Apple and Microsoft were temporarily stepping in to finance Hollywood’s film industry but couldn’t be relied on to do so in the long run, he said. “It might be that the studios that we knew for so long, some wonderful ones, are not to be here in the future any more.”
Reviews for Megalopolis have been mixed, with the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw calling it a “bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow film”, while Time said the film was a “messy, imaginative sprawl” containing “gorgeous, poetic images”.
Coppola sounded unregretful about the $120m project that he largely self-financed. “There are many people, when they die, they say: ‘Oh, I wish I had done this, I wish I had done that’. But when I die, I’m going to say: ‘I’ve got to do this and I’ve got to see my daughter win an Oscar and I’ve got to make wine and I’ve got to make every movie I wanted to make.”
The director, whose wife Eleanor died last month, aged 87, added: “And I’m going to be so busy thinking of all the things that I’ve got to do that when I die, I won’t notice it.”