Francis Ford Coppola Rings in the New Year at American Cinematheque With an Epic Salon About Money, Politics and Power

“Happy New Year. For me, this is a dream come true,” said Frances Ford Coppola, surveying the audience that had come to see his passion project, “Megalopolis,” at an American Cinematheque conversation-and-screening event to kick off 2025. The dream part of it, for him, was the chance to spend 100 minutes talking not very much about his passion project itself, but rather using it as a springboard for an infinitely widespread discussion about about political, economic and social ideals.

“Megalopolis,” as anyone who’s seen it will know, is largely about lending credibility to utopian ideals that politicians and numbers-crunchers would view as cynical. And Coppola’s own personal vision of a utopia involves Q&As in which film fans aren’t asking questions about budgets or box office or critics or even filmmaking minutiae (a few were asked, and answered glancingly) but, rather, engaging him on the subjects he said he’d rather be talking about, in this “interactive” discussion. Which included: remaking government from the bottom up; a universal basic income; undoing the patriarchy; aligning urban architecture with the lessons of nature; and making “work” a thing of the past in favor of “play.”

In other words, the discussion was as heady as the movie — or maybe 10 times headier, if you can imagine that. In engaging a sold-out house that not only didn’t reject these questions and ideas as entertainment but was eager for a whole four-hour “interactive” experience with them, Coppola made it clear he was in heaven.

It wasn’t meant to be a memoir-type discussion, but the veteran filmmaker did occasionally dive into his own history, at one point saying, “My life is interesting. I either have been totally broke and bankrupt or I’m rich. Very strange.” Following up on that thought at the close of the event, the veteran filmmaker offered a thumbnail summary of his relationship with capital over the years.

“I took over my company just by the fact that I had a different vision for the company, and all the other people’s vision was, they didn’t want get fired. They didn’t want me to go bankrupt. They were protecting themselves. And I was saying, I don’t protect myself. I never protected myself. On ‘Apocalypse Now,’ (I had) 21% interest on that (investment), and I owed $30 million. I didn’t come from money. When I went to UCLA, I lived on a dollar a day. That’s when I got so fat. I would have 19-cent Kraft macaroni and cheese dinners; that’s all I had every night. But if you tell me now, ‘I’ll write you a check for a hundred million dollars’ — I’d rather have a hundred million friends.”

Coppola had 425 old or new friends who had eagerly snapped up $45 tickets for the Aero Theatre event as soon as they went on sale, willing to show up at 11 a.m. on New Year’s Day for four hours of film and discourse (and to subsist on a lunch not of mac-and-cheese but of theater popcorn). He offered occasional memoir-style asides like those above, but mostly remained in the realm of philosophy and socioeconomic thought, with an intellectual assist from two panelists he brought along, Juliet Shor, an economist and socialist who wrote the book “Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth,” and Jim Augustine, an entrpreneur who works with tech companies interested in adopting the methodologies of creatives.

Coppola had a lot on his mind, speaking for eight minutes before the screening and then energetically launching into another 25-minute monologue as the credits began to roll, before turning over more of the floor to his panelists and the audience for the remaining 65 minutes. Without stating it outright, he made it clear he identifies with the protagonist of “Megalopolis,” high-minded architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), as at various points he repeated verbatim a question that Cesar asks in the movie: “Is the society we’re living in the only one available to us?” (At one point midway through the otherwise straightforward film screening, the house lights brightened and a person approached the screen, silently playing the role of interrogating journalist, as the image of Driver looked down on him and uttered that same, overarching question about the big picture.)

In his proper introduction to the film, Coppola asked the audience to pretend they were watching “Megalopolis” a few years in the future — specifically “New Year’s Day 2027,” because “seven’s my lucky number.” Looking at the film with an imagined few years of hindsight also allowed Coppola the chance to imagine that the discussion over “Megalopolis” (which was widely polarizing, to say the least, and has $18 million in worldwide gross) might change, as it has with some other films. “With ‘Apocalypse Now,’ the reaction I got was ‘the worst movie ever made’ — someone said that — but when you have such divisiveness, that’s ultimately ingredients for further discussion. That means there’s something about it that you can talk about it later on,” he noted, adding that “’Apocalypse Now’ still makes money. I mean, it’s, what is it, 50 years later?”

“We humans are one family,” Coppola said. “You’re all my cousins I’m talking to. And frankly, although no one wants to say it, we’re geniuses (as a species). There’s nothing that we can’t accomplish when we’re in our play mode, so we’re in our play mode today. When you go to a movie, you kind of walk into a door that is opening. And in this door, I want you to go in without any anticipation. (‘Megalopolis’) doesn’t play by the rules. Hopefully it’s not boring. And I want you to take the door into it where you can laugh at it, you can shout at it, you can talk to it, you can say it’s ridiculous. You can be moved by it and you can cry. Do whatever you want; there are no rules for seeing this movie. Just go through that door.”

Following the screening, Coppola had money on his mind — not for how it related to the making of his film, but as a topic of how society can become more equitable. Shor noted that “the relationship between time and work” is a key theme of the recent film, “and of course, (economist John Maynard) Keynes famously said a hundred years ago that we’d have a 15-hour work week by now. And things have gone in the opposite direction.”

Said Coppola, “I’ve been working on the four-day week, people getting 32 hours with no reduction in pay, and it is truly life-changing and it works for the companies. I have a winery in Napa Valley, and a winery, as you know, is a seven-day-a-week proposition, because on the weekend the visitors come… Thanks to what I learned from Juliet, I said, ‘If you want to have a four-day week and you can figure out how it can work for you, do it.’ And so we are the only winery in existence that I know of — because they’re all seven-day — on a four-day week… We even do one other program that helps in that anyone in the company as part of their benefits, if they or their kids want to learn how to play the accordion or cello or learn to paint… to do something other than work because the people are happier and so they even do the work better… we pay for it, as part of the benefit program in the company.”

Beyond what private companies can do, Coppola shared ideas about changing government. He discussed his own lessons about community action from a charity he founded, North Beach Homeless. And the filmmaker frequently referenced Jane Jacobs, author of the influential 1961 book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” in saying that “you can do better with a (government based in) community because everyone sort of is looking out for each other… So one of the things I would propose is reverse the authority… Now we have this gigantically powerful federal thing, and then all these powerful states. But what if the real power for helping people and assuring sensible government went the other way? In other words, it was the neighborhood, and then as you got higher from the neighborhood to the city, to the state, it became less about really governing people but became more ceremonial, until at the very top, it was primarily ceremonial.”

Also, Coppola said, “There shouldn’t be lifetime politicians.” Thinking back to a time when he was “officer of the day” in military school, he said, “I think politics should be more like jury duty, where you become mayor for maybe six weeks… and then your last week is of course when you are coaching the new incoming one. The politics that have politicians are competing for the privileges that you get from a lifetime (of being in government)… so that when they leave, they then become lobbyists and are in the real money… what if we could change it and turn it around and upside-down…So those are my starting-out ideas of how to shake things up.”

Keynes and Jacobs were hardly the only authors or historical figures cited; the discussion could have had its own length bibilography. Coppola also referenced the work of his friend Stephen Greenblatt, author of “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern”; Stefan Zweig, author of the ‘60s book “The World of Yesterday”; Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker”; anthropologist David Graeber’s books “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” and “Bullshit Jobs: A Theory”; Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for economics; the famous early 20^th-century urban planner Robert Moses; and Lithuanian anthropologist Marija Gimbutas. Even Lady Bird Johnson’s anti-litter campaign came up in conversation.

When the topic came back to his own profession, Coppola said, “People have sort of come out with this idea that a movie is not that really terribly different than fast food in the sense that. They’ll spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a potato chip that you’re addicted to and can’t stop eating, but they’ve done the same thing with art. It was funny when I didn’t want to do a second ‘Godfather’ film, and the head of the company, Charlie (Bluhdorn, of Gulf and Western), said to me, ‘You have the ability to make Coca-Cola.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to make Coca-Cola.’ But that’s sort of what it’s become, because the business of anything is to produce profit with without risk. And as I’ve said many times in my life, making profit without risk is like making babies without sex. I mean, it’s possible, but it’s not the best way to do it.”

Of his long career hiatus, the filmmaker said, “After I made a movie called ‘John Grisham’s ‘The Rainmker,’ I basically took 14 years off, and I didn’t want to be a professional director. I wanted to be a student. I wanted to learn more about rehearsing actors. And in the movie business, they pay the same whether you shoot or rehearse, so that you never rehearse. … And my rehearsals are very different — I don’t rehearse the text. I remember Marlon (Brando) always said that one of the reasons he never learned the lines is because he didn’t want to say the lines until it was really the time. … You do a lot of other things. You play theater games, you do improvisations. But I want to learn more about movies. I am a student, primarily.”

Returning to the subject of the world at large, Coppola said, “Look at what’s going on in parts of the world right now. It’s the people that have versus the have-nots. And it can’t be that. I’m a very old man. I’m… what am I? I’m 85. I don’t know how many years I have, but all I can think of is that I would like the world for the children to be beautiful. And I think it can be. We have the ability, we have the talent, but we have to be in a higher level of thinking.

“I feel that every one of you here is a million-to-one shot, that you’re unique because there’s no one else like you. So if you do art, I would always say, as I have to my kids, be personal, because then your art will be unique… I think we are filled with brilliance that can be expressed in the form of our ideas and our vision for the future. And we have to jump over this period of 10,000 years of patriarchy and ‘I’m king and I want it all.’”