Francis Ford Coppola teases some of Megalopolis' Roman origins

Megalopolis may have been brewing in Francis Ford Coppola’s mind for over four decades now, but details of the sprawling epic have remained mostly elusive for the rest of us. That changed a little bit today, as the director shared a more holistic glimpse into some of the events and historical figures that inspired the film’s lengthy, self-funded production with Vanity Fair today—starting with the length of that production itself.

“I wasn’t really working on this screenplay for 40 years as I often see written, but rather I was collecting notes and clippings for a scrapbook of things I found interesting for some future screenplay,” he said. “Ultimately, after a lot of time, I settled on the idea of a Roman epic. And then later, a Roman epic set in modern America, so I really only began writing this script, on and off, in the last dozen years or so.”

While a dozen years is still a lot of time, it sounds like he really needed it to not only incorporate but simply learn about everything that’s going on here. The film is about the failings of modern America but it’s also about correcting the record of an attempted coup from 63 BC known as The Catiline Conspiracy, in which an insurrectionist named Catiline attempted to take down the Roman empire and start a new society, before being throttled by a consul named Cicero. “I wondered whether the traditional portrayal of Catiline as ‘evil’ and Cicero as ‘good’ was necessarily true,” he said, explaining that he chose to explore that dichotomy in a modern version of New York, but also one that was suffering from a financial crisis such as the one that occurred under former mayor Dinkins from 1990-1993. In turn, Catiline, renamed Cesar for familiarity, would also be an architect and builder in the style of Robert Moses, Frank Lloyd Wright, Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, or Walter Gropius.

Whew. It’s not surprising this thing was considered unsellable for so long, although according to recent reports it may have just found a distributor in French company Le Pacte. If true, they’ll also need to find a way to incorporate a few more elements into the film’s marketing. Per Coppola’s statement, the film was also inspired by the Claus von Bülow murder case, the Mary Cunningham—William Agee Bendix scandal, conservative reporter Maria Bartiromo, Studio 54, and the aftermath of 9/11, some of which he got on tape in early photography for the project. “I researched New York City’s most interesting cases from my scrapbooks… so that everything in my story would be true and did happen either in modern New York or in ancient Rome. To that I added everything I had ever read or learned about,” he said.

And Coppola has read a lot. He also included a bibliographic list of further scholars and influences, which you can wade through below:

I wouldn’t have been able to make it without standing as I do on the shoulders of G.B. Shaw, Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham, Mill, Dickens, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Fournier, Morris, Carlyle, Ruskin, Butler, and Wells all rolled into one; with Euripides, Thomas More, Moliere, Pirandello, Shakespeare, Beaumarchais, Swift, Kubrick, Murnau, Goethe, Plato, Aeschylus, Spinoza, Durrell, Ibsen, Abel Gance, Fellini, Visconti, Bergman, Bergson, Hesse, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Cao Xueqin, Mizoguchi, Tolstoy, McCullough, Moses, and the prophets all thrown in.

Ultimately, the filmmaker hopes the project “become a New Year’s Eve perennial favorite, with audiences discussing afterwards not their new diets or resolutions not to smoke, but rather this simple question: ‘Is the society in which we live the only one available to us?’” We’ll have a better sense of the likelihood of that dream coming true when the film premieres at Cannes later this month.