The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now director is set to shoot his most ambitious project yet, Megalopolis, more than ten years after his last feature film. The filming of this pharaonic film is due to begin next November and will use state-of-the-art special effects technology, the StageCraft, used for the first time in the series. The Mandalorian (Disney+).
Francis Ford Coppola is not one to do things by halves. The American director, who won the Palme d’Or twice during his career (secret talk and Apocalypse Now), is about to make a big comeback behind the camera more than ten years after his last feature film (Twixt). Slowly but surely, Coppola raised the necessary funds to produce, largely from his own family, this film announced as insane, Megalopolis, after having trotted in the head of its director for nearly forty years.
With a budget of around $120 million, it could quite simply be one of the most expensive “indie” films in history. The 83-year-old filmmaker has today confirmed that his film will be treated to booming technology in Hollywood.
Soon the end of green funds?
Megalopolis will be the first feature film to be shot within the “LED Volume” recently developed by the company Prysm Stages within the Trilith studios – located south of Atlanta (Georgia, United States), the Trilith studios welcome , since 2015, almost all productions Marvel.
This new installation from Trilith studios takes advantage of an LED technology also called StageCraft, developed a few years ago by the famous special effects company ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) and consisting in emancipating itself from the usual green backgrounds to offer film crews an immersive, real-time setting – a gigantic curved screen of LED panels 6 meters high and 22 meters long, forming a 270-degree arc.
This technology was first used for the first series of the Star Wars universe, The Mandalorian, then for blockbusters such as The Batman, Black Adam Where Thor: Love and Thunder. The new “Volume” by Trilith studios has the particularity of being the first set of its kind to develop this 360-degree technology – including with an LED ceiling – on an area of almost 1,700 square meters.
The director of Godfather would nevertheless like to mix analog and digital techniques in order to have both ” one foot in the past and one in the future “, in his words. Sofia Coppola’s father would also consider using techniques that have never been seen before to give shape to the film of his dreams. The filming of the film is due to begin next November and could last until March 2023.
In the cast, we will find (as previously announced) Adam Driver, Jon Voight, Forest Whitaker, Laurence Fishburne, but also Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Talia Shire (Coppola’s sister, unforgettable Connie in The Godfather and Adrian in rocky), Jason Schwartzman and Kathryn Hunter. The release of the film is currently expected – fingers crossed – by 2025.
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Megalopolis: Francis F. Coppola relies on revolutionary technology