Francis Ford Coppola to spend his own $120 million on passion project Megapolis

Francis Ford Coppola says he is going to put $120 million dollars into his passion project Megapolis, which he had reportedly written sometime in the 80s.

Variety writes that Coppola had wanted Oscar Isaac, Forest Whitaker and Cate Blanchett to star but no major studio would take the project forward owing to the mammoth budget required in its making. 

In an interview with GQ, the filmmaker said that while Hollywood executives were keen to listen to his pitch, but they were unwilling to attach themselves to it. The same was the case with the 1979 Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now, the rights of which he now owns, he revealed.

To raise the budget of the film, Coppola has sold a significant piece of his wine empire so that he could use a percentage of the sale as collateral for the line of credit to finally make the film."

When asked whether Megapolis would be a flop, and he would suffer financially like he once had after making the 1982 musical drama One From the Heart, Coppola sad: "I couldn’t care less about the financial impact whatsoever. It means nothing to me."

GQ described Megapolis as "a love story that is also a philosophical investigation of the nature of man." According to Variety, Coppola had said that the film will be told like a "Roman epic" that takes place in a "utopian version of New York City called New Rome."