Francis Ford Coppola Rings in the New Year at American Cinematheque With an Epic Salon About Money, Politics and Power

variety.com:

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic “Happy New Year. For me, this is a dream come true,” said Frances Ford Coppola, surveying the audience that had come to see his passion project, “Megalopolis,” at an American Cinematheque conversation-and-screening event to kick off 2025.

The dream part of it, for him, was the chance to spend 100 minutes talking not very much about his passion project itself, but rather using it as a springboard for an infinitely widespread discussion about about political, economic and social ideals. “Megalopolis,” as anyone who’s seen it will know, is largely about lending credibility to utopian ideals that politicians and numbers-crunchers would view as cynical.

And Coppola’s own personal vision of a utopia involves Q&As in which film fans aren’t asking questions about budgets or box office or critics or even filmmaking minutiae (a few were asked, and answered glancingly) but, rather, engaging him on the subjects he said he’d rather be talking about, in this “interactive” discussion.

Which included: remaking government from the bottom up; a universal basic income; undoing the patriarchy; aligning urban architecture with the lessons of nature; and making “work” a thing of the past in favor of “play.” In other words, the discussion was as heady as the movie — or maybe 10 times headier, if you can imagine that.