Now that you mention it, Francis Ford Coppola does think about the Roman Empire a lot

Normally, we would ask y’all to respectfully keep your memes away from Francis Ford Coppola. The man is 85 years old, the man is occasionally cantankerous, the man has his own problems to worry about: Don’t bug him with your various online jokes. Still, there is one meme we would genuinely like to see Coppola react to, and, wouldn’t you know it, it’s the first one that came up in a recent, very brief AMA the Megalopolis director conducted on Twitter on Friday. To wit: How often does Francis Ford Coppola think about the Roman Empire?

“Quite a lot” was the delightfully unsurprising answer, given that Coppola’s new film Megalopolis is a clear outgrowth of an obsession with the fall of the Roman Republic, complete with most characters taking names from classic figures of the period. (Except, of course, for Aubrey Plaza’s Wow Platinum, who is instead, as Coppola also revealed in the AMA, named after a “southern young lady who told me her great grandmother was so beautiful that her name evolved as “WOW”.) To be fair to Coppola, it’s clear that, yes, he has thought a lot about Rome, as evidenced by his answer to that initial question being the most detailed of the bunch by a fair margin:

The Roman Republic served as the example for my country America and its institutions, and was the inspiration for Megalopolis. My fascination with the Roman Republic is based on the struggle between the political parties during which the interest of the Republic yielded to the ambitions of a few powerful men who espoused the aims of political parties to establish their own fortunes and authority by relying upon armed forces to achieve those ends, dealing the final blow to a constitution already tottering to its fall.

(Technically, that’s more “how much do you think about the Roman Republic?” but we’re hoping the Amalgamated Council Of Middle-Aged Men You Exclusively Give Civil War Books To As Presents will look on the slight irregularity with leniency.)

Elsewhere in the AMA, Coppola also named Rumblefish as the movie he’s most proud of having made, and promoted his Letterboxd, because, hey: Man’s gotta hustle.