Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis

Mike Figgis has been shooting a behind-the-scenes documentary for the past 18 months about the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. It’s called Megadoc.

Figgis told me Monday that it’s been edited but there’s allowance for the fact that the film played in competition here at the Cannes Film Festival. He recorded an interview with the cinema titan the other day.

Figgis, who was introduced into the Coppola clan back in the mid 1990s after directing Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, told me that the documentary is “very much a fly-on-the-wall” and also features conversations with various cast members — Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Dustin Hoffman, Shia LaBeouf — and Coppola’s wife Eleanor Coppola, who shot the footage and directed her own study of her husband’s work for the acclaimed Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, about the making of 1979s Apocalypse Now.

He will go back to Megadoc to include the sad fact that Eleanor died last month at age 87.

It’s a duty he will repeat a second time because Fred Roos, the casting director, producer, executive producer and almost like a consigliere to the Coppola family for more than half a century, died on Sunday, Figgis told me.

“Fred was 89 and was like a teenager. He had become a close friend,” and he was producing the two movies “I’m trying to raise money for here. I emailed him on Saturday night.

“I salute him. I met him obviously on the set of Megalopolis and I interviewed him for the documentary. He was a producer of Megalopolis and also, of course, the casting director,” Figgis explained.

He recalled how he and Roos would have “a regular Monday night conversation and tonight’s the night,” Figgis said as we conversed on the sidewalk late Monday outside Fred L ‘Ecailler’s restaurant, where Charles Finch was hosting A Rabbit’s Foot culture magazine dinner with Lanvin honoring Valeria Golino and Paul Schrader. Other guests included Slow Horses‘ Gary Oldman, who stars in Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope which premieres in Cannes tonight; filmmaker Abel Ferrera; Cate Blanchett; producer Gaby Tana; and director Karim Aïnouz, who also has a film in the festival, called Motel Destiny.

“I suddenly got a message saying the meeting was cancelled. That was very sad.”

We both paused a moment to remember Fred.

“And now with Fred just passed, I would want to go back and include Fred a little bit more in the documentary.

“Ellie also passed and I want to go back to that. So two major characters have passed.

“I owe it to honor them in the documentary,” he told me.

Making Megadoc has been “a year and a half crazy ride,” said Figgis.

I asked what the terms of engagement are with Coppola.

“I think Francis accepted the fact that by inviting me in, I’m not doing a behind-the-scenes puff piece, you know? It has to be honest, and finally we arrived at an agreement,” he stated.

I probed further and asked whether there had been interference of any kind; were changes or cuts demanded? Figgis, who also made Stormy Monday and The Browning Version, a heartbreaking adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s play starring Albert Finney and Greta Scacchi, emphatically denied that Coppola had censored the documentary.

“Look, I’m not making a gotcha documentary, and obviously I start from a point of respect. Come on, this is Francis Ford Coppola. My privilege was knowing him through Nicolas Cage 30 years ago.

“He never said, ‘You can’t be there or leave the room.’ And he had a microphone on him at all times.

“There are tense moments where he got rid of certain crew members and his relationship with the Marvel Universe mode of filmmaking. I mean, he got into bed with Marvel and at the end of the day he wants to get back to the things that gets him out of bed in the morning.

“Francis does not want to be at the mercy of an industrial kind of system.”

Figgis noted that Coppola “bankrolled everything because he wanted to have that independence. And I think he wanted me to have that independence too. Our discussions were more discussions about the balance of the film and I persuaded him that the balance was okay. It’s fly on the wall and all that entails,” he said.

Apparently, pretty early on in the documentary, Coppola is shown coming up against technology, “like this is how we shoot it in the Marvel Universe. He wanted physical props as well. At that point it became difficult for everybody because the world has changed.

“The way the Marvel Universe functions is like you pre-plan six months before, you storyboard. Francis is not that kind of a filmmaker,” Figgis explained.

George Lucas was also interviewed by Figgis.

“What fascinated me was that I’m talking to two giants who invented most of this technology themselves and you suddenly get this poetic irony of, ”Ok we invented this stuff but it works for us, we didn’t work for it.” That is the poetic message of my documentary,” he told me.

“I’m pretty much set with my structure and Francis is more or less happy with it and I will now go back and just adjust the dynamic a little bit,” he added.

Figgis said the film’s looking to launch at one of the big fall festivals. “And then I hope it will have a cinematic release and then it will become a platform film and there’s enough material to do a six-part series of 30-minute episodes.

“So there’s a two-hour cut and a series, there’s a lot of material.”