‘Megalopolis’ Can Only Imagine Genius As a Brand

The latest in pop-culture news, recaps, and reviews, plus close reads, profiles, interviews, and more from Vulture.com. [Brand Logo]( a great debate [Megalopolis Can Only Imagine Genius As a Brand]( Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project about a visionary architect is a banal paean to stale ideas about great men. Photo: Lionsgate Films/Everett Collection Cesar Catilina, the renegade architect played by Adam Driver in Megalopolis, may not be a direct stand-in for Francis Ford Coppola, but he’s certainly a repository for the director’s frustrations and philosophy. The new film can be looked at as a collection of decades of Coppola’s ideas — he’s been mulling Megalopolis over since the ’70s and working on it since 1983. He financed it himself to the tune of $120 million because he didn’t feel like he could achieve his vision via the studio system he’d begrudgingly worked within and warred with for decades. And architecture, as a pursuit, is a useful metaphor for filmmaking — the 85-year-old’s passion project is releasing a few months before another sweeping drama, [Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist](, that presents a similar parallel. Movies, like buildings, can’t be made alone. They require the help of a few to hundreds of other people, and, critically, the sort of capital that demands their production be a function of commerce as well as art. In Catilina’s swashbuckling conviction in the would-be utopia he’s trying to build, and in his clashes with mayoral nemesis Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and the Establishment he represents, you can see a frustrated auteur railing against the business-oriented executives who want to deny him the resources and permission to make his masterpiece. There’s definitely a lot of Coppola in the character — though watching Megalopolis, the person Catilina really brings to mind is Elon Musk. [read more]( Devour pop culture with us. 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