Adam Driver Can Freeze Time in Megalopolis

By
Alejandra Gularte,
a Vulture news blogger who covers TV and comedy

Photo: Francis Ford Coppola/YouTube

Francis Ford Coppola has been teasing up for decades on Megalopolis, his longtime passion project that is almost at the finish line. He told Vanity Fair he first grew inspiration for the film as a child when he saw H.G. Wells’s Things to Come. Coppola further explains that he wasn’t diligently working on this project for all of these years but instead collected inspiration, a.k.a. thought about the Roman Empire a lot, and gathered footage of New York City in the early 2000s, including “heartbreaking images” of September 11.

Coppola financed the $120 million budget himself, selling part of his vineyard, only growing anticipation for the movie. At last, Megalopolis will premiere at Cannes on May 17, later this month, and compete for the Palme d’Or against Kinds of Kindness, Oh, Canada, and more. Here’s everything we know about the movie, including the latest update featuring a first-look clip with Adam Driver.

Adam Driver stars as Cesar, an architect who plans to rebuild the city to a sustainable utopia after an accident destroys most of Megalopolis. Opposing him is Giancarlo Esposito’s Frank Cicero, who is the mayor and doesn’t want to change a thing. In between both of them is Julia Cicero, played by Nathalie Emmanuel, who’s Frank’s daughter and Cesar’s love interest. The rest of the cast is made up of Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Grace VanderWaal, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, D. B. Sweeney, James Remar, Chloe Fineman, plus Coppola’s sister Talia Shire, and her son Jason Schwartzman.

Oh, one tiny major detail we forgot: Cesar can freeze time.

In the first-look clip released on May 4 (take that, Star Wars!), Cesar (Driver) seems to almost fall to his death off of a building until he yells, “Time stop!” which is oddly reminiscent of a technique used when losing a playground game. Cesar shakes as he is frozen in mid-air and falls back into a standing position.

The movie premieres at Cannes on May 17 but there is no word yet on a worldwide release for the film.

Adam Driver Can Freeze Time in Megalopolis