Robert De Niro posed a hypothetical that made the audience bust out laughing even as the actor remained utterly stone-faced.
“Just imagine Donald Trump directing this film,” he said at Monday’s New York premiere of Francis Ford Coppola‘s Megalopolis. “It’ll never go anywhere, from total craziness. He cannot do anything. He cannot hold anything together … He wants to destroy the country. And he could not do this movie. He could not do anything that has a structure.”
De Niro, Spike Lee and Coppola appeared together in a half-hour Q&A before the screening presented by the New York Film Festival at the AMC Lincoln Square Imax. (The festival kicks off Friday but extended itself for the Imax event given the rare chance to gather prominent guests together with the 85-year-old Coppola.) The Q&A was beamed out to 65 North American locations via the Imax Live network and followed a red carpet featuring cast members including Aubrey Plaza, Dustin Hoffman and Giancarlo Esposito.
In the latter minutes of the Q&A, De Niro and Lee made explicit one of the parallels between the film’s imagined world and America’s election-year anxiety.
Asked about his view on the future of cinema, De Niro instead took things in a political direction, motivated by Coppola’s ruminations on the decline of civilizations and the rise of dictators. “I’m worried,” De Niro said. “I see the things in Francis’ film about that, the parallels and so on. To me, it’s not over ’till it’s over and we have to go at this wholeheartedly to beat the Republicans – those Republicans, they’re not real Republicans – and beat Trump. It’s that simple. We cannot have that type of person. Everybody has to get out there and vote.”
Lee didn’t hesitate to agree. “As my sister says, forward not backward,” he said. “It’s simple: Register to vote and show up. …. This election is going to be very, very close. I’m a big sports fan and, the expression you used, it’s not over ’till it’s over. We cannot just think that the game is over when it’s not.”
Coppola interjected to note that he had “deliberately” cast actors who “are voting another way.” He didn’t name names, but one prominent Trump advocate, Jon Voight, plays a prominent role in the film. The filmmaker also expressed hope that “we can disagree” on a film set but that humanity can prevail (another theme of the film).
De Niro has for years been a fierce public critic of Trump, decrying the former president outside the courtroom in Lower Manhattan earlier this year when Trump was standing trial in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. His profane fervor even tripped the censor button at CBS in 2018 during the network’s live broadcast of the Tony Awards.
Earlier, the three luminaries recalled, in fits and starts, their shared New York film circles and when they all first connected. De Niro and Coppola reminisced about The Godfather and the 1970s era in the film business, making frequent mention of their mutual friend, Martin Scorsese. Lee recalled being an intern at Columbia Pictures in 1979 in L.A. and buying a ticket for the first showing of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now on its opening day. He later met Coppola when the filmmaker spoke to his class of graduate students at NYU.
Megalopolis has been an object of curiosity, passion and puzzlement across the film and cultural landscape, first surfacing as a finished work nearly two months before its world premiere in Cannes. Lionsgate claimed U.S. rights last June and will release Megalopolis wide on Friday.
Coppola owns the film via his American Zoetrope banner and drew on his personal fortune to bankroll the $120 million project. It was screened for buyers last March, a key milestone after a two-decade odyssey to get it to the screen. Coppola then personally helped secure Imax bookings for the film, whose starry cast includes Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Voight and Shia LaBeouf.
Reviews and reactions in Cannes were mixed, with some critics (including Deadline’s Damon Wise) hailing the epic sweep of its ambition. Wise acknowledged the film is “something of a mess; unruly, exaggerated and drawn to pretension” but is nevertheless “a pretty stunning achievement, the work of a master artist.” Others pronounced it a solipsistic head-scratcher or even an outright disaster, with The Guardian dismissing it as “megabloated and megaboring.”