Ace filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola known for making The Godfather franchise is currently making one of the biggest projects of his career while simultaneously joining the world of comics.
At WonderCon 2023, Syzygy co-founder Chris Ryall and artist Jacob Phillips announced that they will be adapting an original story by Coppola into the graphic novel Megalopolis. The movie is based on a science fiction story that The Godfather and Apocalypse Now filmmaker Coppola has been working on intermittently since the 1980s and finally wrapped up filming earlier this month.
On spending time with Coppola on the sets of the movie while working on this graphic novel, Ryall said, “The exciting thing is that I’ve only worked directly with him on this. This isn’t the kind of thing where he licensed out the material – the movie and the book are solely his. We spent a few hours in Atlanta last month talking about not only this graphic novel but the childhood comics he loved, and all the way along, he’s been permissive and encouraging in telling us to make the book very much its own thing. So it’s been a kind of stunning arrangement, to get to work directly with someone of his stature on something like this. And for me, as a huge fan of not only Jacob’s colour work on the Ed Brubaker/Sean Phillips graphic novels but certainly also the amazing art and colours on his That Texas Blood series, getting to work with Jacob while he’s on such a creative roll is also a thrill. Gonna be fun to build this particular corner of Francis’ new city.”
Coppola had earlier described the story as: A woman is divided between loyalties to two men. But not only two men. Each man comes with a philosophical principle. One is her father who raised her, who taught her Latin on his lap and is devoted to a much more classical view of society, the Marcus Aurelius kind of view. The other one, who is the lover, is the enemy of the father but is dedicated to a much more progressive one. Let’s leap into the future, let’s leap over all of this garbage that has contaminated humanity for 10,000 years. Let’s find what we really are, which are an enlightened, friendly, joyous species.
Some of the top actors included in the movie are Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Forest Whitaker, Laurence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman and Shia LeBeouf. The film is said to use advanced virtual production technology Prysm Stage set at Trilith Studios in the US and Megalopolis is likely to release in 2024.