“What I want to do this evening is a leap into the future.” Thus the director Francis Ford Coppola opened the interactive debate during the preview of the twenty -two edition of the Magna Graecia Film Festival, which this year will take place from 26 July to 2 August in Soverato and who has chosen the Oscar -winning filmmaker, author of Milestones of International Cinema as “Il Padrino”, “Apocalipse Now” and “The boys of the 56. Street”, as a forerunner of the new edition.
Spectators and fans were able to ask questions about the themes covered by his latest film “Megalopolis”, released on 16 October and which aroused many controversies for his complex and ambitious character based on futuristic and dystopian themes by blending an apocalyptic vision of the city of New York to that of ancient Rome. A film that Coppola has started to sketch more than forty years ago and that he carried on with great obstinacy so much that he decides to self-close it with an expense of 120 million dollars, perhaps precisely because behind Cesar, the architect-relevant protagonist played by Adam Driver, there is perhaps the same coppola that among the skyscrapers of the Big Apple sees the future-utopian or distress? – of contemporary society that lives between power games, political betrayals, vices and decadence.
And if the title and imagination of the film can partially resume the 1927 cult film “Metropolis” by Fritz Lang, on the other the “Megalon” of Coppola refers to a moral construction of a world now so dissolved in its complexity and which becomes difficult to deconstruct and re -enroll. And the phrase “you are obsessed with the future and too owned by the past” resonates not only as a reproach, but precisely of the desire to make the society in which he lives better.
Thus, the questions that leaves the ending of the film open, if the society in which we live and we can change our future is truly right, managing to find an antidote to the abyssal poverty of values of today, they could only be the themes at the center of the debate, “How To Change Our Future”, in the Soverato supercinema room.
The very young in the room were able to ask the director questions about the issues concerning the uncertain future and the possibility of resorting to some remedies, contrasting corrective, or perhaps hopes or illusions, to the catastrophic vision of Coppola.
Through a blackboard, the director wanted to trace some keywords on the future with ten guys on stage “to understand how we can contribute to improve the future of our children. We know we are governed by a series of concepts that have existed for millennia. I think it is necessary to talk about things that govern our lives for thousands of years ».
Moving from the theme of time and taking in reference the watch of the scenography of the film as “means that marks the time and our days, our work, our life making every day overwhelming and overwhelming” we then talked about work and two types of work, “what we love and what we do not like: what we do as” play “and as a game, instead to what we call as” hard work “that becomes a massacre. In a utopian world we will do what we like, while what we don’t like will delegate it to robots ».
And in the society based on productivity and on the principle for which everything corresponds to a precise monetary value, the reference to the money could not be missing: «I believe that in an utopian world every citizen should receive a fair consideration from the state. This is not a communist but right vision, which would teach us equality ».
On the role of governments he expressed his point of view by saying that in one of his Baconian “new Atlantis” he would see “politicians without compensation because this implies an ambition in terms of career”, also making a connection to the struggle for power in terms of patriarchy and as in the past this form was only a way of saying “I am your king and you all are my slaves”, given that instead “the companies were run by a matriarchal system”.
There was no lack of personal questions from the younger spectators about his youth, to whom he replied: «As a boy I was very alone and for this I went to the cinema. It is from there that my passion was born. I felt very unsuitable and out of place, but when you do the thing you love, this changes totally ».
Finally, a last appeal to the audience in the room: “Do what you love” and the sudden release from the stage, while the spectators awaited the official announcement on his next film – which, according to what the president of the Calabria Region Roberto Occhiuto had announced in recent days, should be shot in Calabria – and the award of the Colonna d’Oro prize that the director did not want to collect.