Francis Ford Coppola has revealed in an interview with Rolling Stone that he intentionally set out to cast “canceled” actors for his self-funded sci-fi epic Megalopolis, which he didn’t want to be a “woke Hollywood production.”
This included outspoken conservative and avid Donald Trump supporter Jon Voight and Shia LaBeouf, who has barely worked since being accused of sexual assault in 2020.
“What I didn’t want to happen is that we’re deemed some woke Hollywood production that’s simply lecturing viewers,” Coppola said. “The cast features people who were canceled at one point or another. There were people who are archconservatives and others who are extremely politically progressive. But we were all working on one film together. That was interesting, I thought.”
Coppola also admitted working with LaBeouf could be challenging at times. “Shia [LaBeouf] really took to it. I had no experience working with him prior to this, but he deliberately sets up a tension between himself and the director to an extreme degree,” the filmmaker said. “He reminds me of Dennis Hopper, who would do something similar, and then you’d say, ‘Just go do anything,’ and then they go off and do something brilliant.”
The Megalopolis rollout has been beset with controversy, some of which was tied to Coppola himself. In May, The Guardian reported he tried to kiss female extras to “get them in the mood” for a nightclub scene. Variety followed up in July by publishing videos of Coppola kissing the extras.
While disputing The Guardian report as “totally untrue,” Coppola told Rolling Stone, “The truth of the matter is, they were looking for some sort of dirt. The young women I kissed on the cheek, in regards to the New Year’s scene, they were young women I knew.”
Earlier this month, Lionsgate pulled the trailer for Megalopolis after discovering it used fake quotes from movie critics that were almost definitely pulled from ChatGPT.
Megalopolis stars Adam Driver as an idealist architect with the power to control time who dreams of building a utopian city from the ruins of a New York-like metropolis. It also stars Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Laurence Fishburne, and Dustin Hoffman. It’s currently set to open in theaters on September 27th.