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Francis Ford Coppola has always done things his own way and that certainly hasn’t changed when it comes to his new movie Megalopolis.
According to the legendary director of The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now, in an effort to avoid making the film a “woke Hollywood production,” he intentionally cast actors who had been previously “canceled.”
As for who Coppola’s referencing, he’s speaking about Jon Voight and Shia LaBeouf, who both feature in the film despite being on the outskirts of Hollywood in recent years.
“What I didn’t want to happen is that we’re deemed some woke Hollywood production that’s simply lecturing viewers,” Coppola said of his new film, which seems to be generating one self-inflicted controversy after another, during an interview with Rolling Stone.
“The cast features people who were canceled at one point or another. There were people who are archconservatives and others who are extremely politically progressive. But we were all working on one film together. That was interesting, I thought.”
Coppola expanded on his casting of LaBeouf, praising the way that the actor challenges directors and comparing him to the late Dennis Hopper, whom Coppola worked with on Apocalypse Now.
“Shia [LaBeouf] really took to it,” Coppola said of the once up-and-coming actor. “I had no experience working with him prior to this, but he deliberately sets up a tension between himself and the director to an extreme degree. He reminds me of Dennis Hopper, who would do something similar, and then you’d say, ‘Just go do anything,’ and then they go off and do something brilliant.”
Since being accused of sexual assault in 2021, LaBeouf — who was in the midst of a career comeback thanks to projects like Honey Boy, The Peanut Butter Falcon, and Pieces of a Woman — has appeared in just two films: the Italian production Padre Pio and Megalopolis.
As for Voight, he’s gone from being liberal to conservative to outright conspiratorial over the course of his life, as he falsely accused President Biden of “stealing” the 2020 election — not a single significant lawsuit election integrity filed by Trump’s team has been victorious — with the majority being dismissed either due to procedural issues or a lack of merit — and claimed that the United States was “engaged in our greatest fight since the Civil War, the battle of righteousness versus Satan.
Megalopolis stars Adam Driver in the lead role alongside Voight, LaBeouf, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, D. B. Sweeney, and Dustin Hoffman.
You can watch the official trailer for Megalopolis, which will be released in movie theaters on Friday, September 27, below.