Francis Ford Coppola on Books That Influenced “Megalopolis”
“Megalopolis,” Francis Ford Coppola’s four-decades-in-the-making epic of a decadent society, was released last week. It stars Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina, an aristocratic polymath who has a controversial proposal to revitalize the city where he lives. Coppola drew his story from antiquity—Driver’s character is based on a Roman politician, Lucius Sergius Catilina (who lived from 108 to 62 B.C., and is known in English as Catiline), who tried to take over the Roman Republic and failed. “Megalopolis” transposes Catiline’s story to a future version of New York City and reimagines him as a complicated visionary with a genuine wish to serve the public good. A few days ago, Coppola talked to us about some of his literary influences, from Virginia Woolf’s exploration of consciousness and perception in “To the Lighthouse” to David Graeber and David Wengrow’s counter-history of early societies, “The Dawn of Everything.” His remarks have been edited and condensed.
Over the last fifteen years or so, I’ve gotten in the habit of trying to choose something to read that’s totally not like what I’m working on, to sort of have a rest. But what happens when you try to do this is that it merely bends what you’re working on to be more like what you’re reading. This is a Chinese book, which is also sometimes called “The Story of the Stone.” In a nutshell, it’s about a family in eighteenth-century China who were a little high up: they had some wealth and status, and one of the main character’s sisters had become a consort of the emperor. The protagonist, who is kind of based on the author, was a boy raised with all these girls—sisters and cousins and the handmaids they had in those days. The author thought that the women he grew up with were so wonderful that he wanted history to know that they existed. I read it while I was working on “Megalopolis” after having read all of Proust (which also influenced everything). The book is really beautiful. And one thing about it I took is that, when you’re reading, you’re not only in the story but you’re also in the characters’ dreams. I thought, Why can’t I do that?
