All eyes are on Coppola at Cannes. Sound familiar?

CANNES, France – Francis Ford Coppola will premiere a film in which he risked everything at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, which arrives clouded by rumors of production turmoil. Sound familiar?

On Thursday, Coppola’s self-financed work “Megalopolis” will make its long-awaited debut. Other films are debuting at Cannes with more fanfare and enthusiasm, but none have the intrigue of “Megalópolis,” the 85-year-old filmmaker’s first film in 13 years. Coppola invested $120 million of his own money into it.

Forty-five years ago, something very similar happened when Coppola was working on editing “Apocalypse Now.” The film’s infamous Philippine production, which would be documented by Coppola’s late wife Eleanor, was already the stuff of legend. The launch originally planned for December 1977 had already taken place. Coppola himself invested about $16 million into the $31 million budget for his Vietnam-set narrative of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”

“I was terrified. On the one hand, I was personally responsible for the entire budget – that’s why I became the owner of it,” Coppola said in 2019. “Plus, at that time the interest rates were over 25, 27%. So it seemed that, especially given the controversy and all the false articles written about a film that no one knew anything about but predicted would be “the announced mess” of that year, it seemed that I would never make it out of the danger I was in. I had children, I was young. I had no family fortune behind me. I was very scared.

Gilles Jacob, Cannes’ general delegate, traveled to visit Coppola, hoping to convince him to return to the festival where the director’s “The Conversation” won the Palme d’Or in 1974. In his book “Citizen Cannes: The Man Behind the Cannes Film Festival”, Jacob said he found Coppola in the editing room “plagued by financial problems and struggling with 20 miles of film”.

In the spring of 1979, Coppola had put together an edit that he showed in Los Angeles – just as he did recently with “Megalopolis.” When Jacob heard about the screening, he scrambled to secure it for Cannes that year.

“Already considered an event before it was even shown, ‘Apocalypse Now’ would be the festival’s crowning glory,” Jacob wrote. He added: “Ultimately, I knew it was the Cannes setting – more than commensurate with his own megalomania – that would convince him to come.

But Coppola wasn’t so sure. The film was unfinished, there were no credits yet and he still wasn’t sure of the ending. But after some back and forth and debate about whether “Apocalypse Now” would be shown in or out of competition, it was decided: it would be shown as a “work in progress” – in competition.

At the Cannes premiere, Coppola carried her daughter Sofia, then 8 years old, on her shoulders. The response to the film wasn’t immediately overwhelming.

“’Apocalypse Now,’ one of the most heralded films of the decade, drew only a polite response at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday,” the Herald Tribune wrote.

At the press conference, Coppola was defensive about the bad press the film received and the attention paid to its budget.

“Why am I, the first to make a film about Vietnam, a film about morality, so criticized when you can spend so much on a gorilla or an idiot who flies in the sky?” asked Coppola.

But “Apocalypse Now” would end up being considered one of Cannes’ most mythologized premieres. The president of that year’s jury, French author Françoise Sagan, preferred another entry about the war: “The Tin Drum”, Volker Schlondorff’s adaptation of the novel by Günter Grass. .

“Megalópolis” will also debut in the competition on Thursday.

The day after the Cannes closing ceremony in 1978, Jacob recalled meeting Coppola at the Carlton Hotel as he was leaving.

“A big black limousine was about to leave. The back door opened and Francis came out,” Jacob wrote. “He came up to me, held out his hand and, as he took a large cigar between his teeth, said: ‘I only received half the Palme d’Or. ‘”