EXCLUSIVE: The 85-year old five-time Oscar winning director Francis Ford Coppola is spending the days before Christmas wrapping not presents, but the international rollout of Megalopolis. This week, he’s doing interviews as the film opens in South American markets, but he took time out to weigh in on a movement gaining traction, to limit vaccines as Donald Trump prepares to reenter the White House.
The U.S. gross on Megalopolis was low for the $100 million + of his own money he spent making the film, but Coppola said the experience was largely satisfying – save for a spate of negative stories he believes were attempts to sabotage him. Finding out who was behind them in the discovery phase is largely the reason he sued Variety. That mechanism certainly proved fruitful for actress Blake Lively in finding proof of a smear campaign laid out in emails in her dispute with her This Ends With Us director Justin Baldoni. The actor/filmmaker was just dropped by WME after it was clear the agency would lose her and husband Ryan Reynolds if he stayed. Coppola said he’s dug in, determined to figure out who planted negative stories preceding each step he took on the movie. Beyond that, Coppola said he was pleased with the film’s result. It cost him part of a windfall that came with the sale of some of his wine holdings, which he mostly did to ensure his businesses would continue to run effectively after he passes away, without being a burden to his children and grandkids, most of whom are busy making films themselves.
“It pleases me because it remains extremely [polarizing]; people say it’s the worst film ever made, and it’s the greatest film ever made,” Coppola said. “I love that. People don’t make notice of the fact that it’s a film that is made for controversy. I always knew that. Obviously I know the difference between a picture of that budget that’s made without any sense of risk compared to a picture with that budget, which never gets made. This is the first film ever made as an indie with that kind of budget that just went for it all. I’m pleased with the response, I think it was money well spent, because it did what I wanted it to do.”
That is, to bring about discussion in reheated servings long after he is gone, much the way that his Hearts of Darkness set in Vietnam epic did. Pre-labeled a disaster as he made it, Apocalypse Now grew in appreciation. Coppola, who recut the film a few times before he found a version that reflected what he really was trying to say, said he made more money on it than any other film because he owned it. The only reason he owned it was, nobody else would back him.
“I feel that Megalopolis will go the way of Apocalypse Now in that regard,” he said. “I’m working to link it with New Year’s so that every New Year’s Day, we show the picture and ask the question in the society we live in, the only one available to us, and have a good healthy discussion. I know if people talk about that every year, they’ll come up with some great suggestions on how to improve things. I have an allegiance to our human family; we’re all one unique and marvelous family around the world. And as my picture expresses at the end, let’s use our profound genius to make the world a better place for our kids. That’s all I’m saying.”
His film’s positing that a utopia only comes down to making sound decisions is relevant here, as Donald Trump prepares to become president again. He has chosen a spate of controversial cabinet candidates. It gave me a shiver, reading a Washington Post report last week about the vaccine skepticism expressed by incoming Dept. of Health and Human Services appointee Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and how his top adviser Aaron Siri petitioned the government in 2022 to reconsider approval of a widely used polio vaccine. I recalled Coppola’s experience with the disease. I asked Coppola to go back to the scariest time in his life, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell did in a recent interview meant to counter any chance that public confidence in the polio vaccine might be undermined. Trump so far has indicated it will take a lot to get him to change policy on polio, but it is still alarming whenever eradicated viruses have even a glimmer of a return.
“People don’t understand that polio is a fever that just hits you for one night,” Coppola told me. “You only are sick for one night. The terrible effects of polio, like being unable to breathe so you have to be in an iron lung, or not being able to walk or be totally paralyzed, is the result of the damage of that one night of the infection. I remember that night. I was feverish and they took me to a hospital ward. It was so crammed with kids that there were gurneys piled up three and four high in the hallways because there were so many more kids than there were beds in the hospital.
“I remember the kids in the iron lungs who you could see their faces on mirrors, and they were all crying for their parents,” he said. “They didn’t understand why they were suddenly in these steel cabinets. And I remember being more frightened for those kids, and not myself, because I was not in one of those things.”
It quickly became clear he was not just going to walk away from the nightmare.
“I was looking around, and then when I tried to get out of bed, I fell on the floor and I realized I couldn’t walk,” he said. “I couldn’t get up. And I stayed in that ward for about 10 days before, finally, my parents were able to take me home.”
There was no clear course of treatment.
“It was only clear when they took me to one doctor, a French doctor. I remember who said that I should be a soldier and that I would be able to live a long life and be very active and do everything I wanted. But then he added, but always in a wheelchair. And that’s when I realized what I was up against. And we all went to have Chinese food that afternoon, and I was crying even though this was my favorite kind of food because he had told me I would always be in a wheelchair.”
Coppola was saved by his father’s unwillingness to accept the diagnosis. Carmine Coppola was a composer who won Oscar scoring several of his son’s films, but perhaps his greatest achievement in his son’s work was going against the grain to ensure Francis Coppola would get a proper shot at life.
“My father didn’t trust the opinion,” he said. “That was a strong opinion that the cure, or the therapy, was to pin you in your bed and make you immovable. It didn’t sound logical to him. So my father went to what was called in those days, the March of Dimes. It was the charity that helped kids with polio. And they told him there was a second way to possibly deal with it, which came from the Australian nurse Sister Kenny.”
Elizabeth Kenny, who would go on to be played by Rosalind Russell in a movie about her exploits, was a self-trained nurse in the Australian bush who spread the gospel that the best treatment for children with polio was to recondition the muscles. Other treatments put limbs in plaster casts to ensure immobility, and those patients did end up in wheelchairs or worse as their muscles atrophied beyond repair.
“Her method was sort of mild exercise,” Coppola said. “And my father, thank God, thought that was more sensible to take a paralyzed person than make them immobile. The idea was that if you were immobile, you wouldn’t further damage to muscles. They sent to me this wonderful lady, I remember her name, Ms. Wilson. She was an elderly lady with white hair. And she would come to see me four days a week and do these very gentle exercises where she’d lift the limbs and what have you. And that lady, over four or five months, gradually brought back my ability to move my left arm. And I’m totally grateful and know the fact that I even can walk today is due to the Sister Kenny system, which was a revolutionary thought at the time. Everyone believed in the immobile theory. So that’s the big story, but the horror is what I saw a hospital just filled with screaming kids, and that was finally all over, because of the wonderful Salk vaccine that happened just two or three years later.
“Both those doctors who developed the Salk vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, they donated the patents of their vaccines to the public as opposed to what happens today where the companies own them,” Coppola said. “To see [polio] go away, there’s so many stories about the vaccine, how many lives it saved in an epidemic that was only becoming a bigger epidemic…It makes it so absurd, the idea that they would consider reversing course on vaccines now.”
Coppola said he’ll next make a musical, and this time around, he’s hopeful its modest budget and European locations will lead to financing opportunities overseas.
“I’m looking forward to it because it’s hopefully it’s a movie I can have fun with,” he said. “But I always say that.”
