Mike Figgis’ new film Megadoc chronicles the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s would-be opus Megalopolis.
Before the Film:
Last year Francis Ford Coppola unleashed Megalopolis on the world: a sprawling epic vision, a passion project long in gestation, that was either loved or hated or, in the case of this critic, paradoxically called the best and worst film of the year in equal measure. Now we have a documentary that promises answers, or at least an inside look at the making of Megalopolis.
In the annals of great making-of and behind-the-scenes films — Lost in La Mancha, Burden of Dreams, and Island of Lost Souls come to mind — the greatest are often about troubled and failed productions. Coppola’s previous film Apocalypse Now has famously been the subject of the film Hearts of Darkness. Now, Megadoc, the theatrical threshold of which I stand poised to cross in a few minutes, chronicles a production whose greatest failure may be in its reception as a flop from a legendary auteur. Maybe Megadoc can do something for the film.
After the Film:
The screening itself was marked by laughter. Hearing the whole theater (not that it was a packed house) cracking up at some key points only served to highlight how silly the behind-the-scenes and featurette-style talking-head mythologizing really is.
In this way, Megadoc cuts Coppola’s self-aggrandizement, and the pretenses around Megalopolis, down to size. It’s impossible to overly elevate a film while you watch the chaos of its making, and laugh together when someone says something pretentious or canned. It’s difficult not to see the whole endeavor for what it is: masturbatory playtime. That is to say, art as performed by guys like Coppola, who says in the film something like “nothing good ever came from toil, all good things come from play”.
Early on in Hearts of Darkness, Coppola can be heard to utter the line “little by little, we went insane”. The film chronicles the intense and chaotic production of Apocalypse Now, a film that emerged from a troubled production as a classic of its era. Megalopolis is a kind of mirror of Apocalypse Now, in the sense that the production, as documented in Megadoc, was a smooth enough process that resulted in a flop of a film. There could be a lesson there.
Read between the lines of the classic interview nonsense about vision or style. The true revelation of Megadoc is that there is no revelation: Megalopolis is just a film, perhaps even an average film at best. The heart of darkness here is just a void where a film’s soul should be. The best compliment I can give Megadoc is that I appreciate it more and Megalopolis less.