Francis Ford Coppola compares the fall of Rome to American politics

Francis Ford Coppola talks politics while discussing his new film huge city Monday, suggesting that the upcoming presidential election could reflect the fall of Rome.

In conversation as part of the New York Film Festival — which also streamed to 65 theaters across the U.S. and Canada with support from Imax — Coppola was joined by Robert De Niro and Spike Lee to talk about his long journey in making “a Roman epic set in modern America as much as Rome,” as he described it.

The film follows the conflict between Cesar (played by Adam Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian future, and his rival, the city’s mayor Franklin Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to the reactionary status quo.

“People would always say to me, why would you want to make a movie about America as a clone? Well, today America is Rome, and they’re about to go through the same thing, for the same reasons that Rome lost its republic and ended up with an emperor. It was wise to make a movie about America as a clone because that’s going to happen in a few months,” Coppola said. “And the reason was the same; Rome at that time was very prosperous, Rome was making a lot of money, so the senators were really interested in their own power and their own wealth, and they weren’t running the country. Well, the same thing happened here. Our senators and our representatives are rich and they’re playing around with their power instead of running the country, and then we’re in danger of losing it.”

“In Rome, did they eat cats and dogs?” he said to me with a serious face, referring to Donald Trump’s comments about immigrants in the last debate.

Coppola also explained that he “deliberately had different people make this movie. I mean, there are actors in the movie who sound different, there are people who were eliminated… and we’re all happily and creatively working together in the movie,” apparently referring to co-stars Jon Voight, Shia LaBeouf and Dustin Hoffman.

“I didn’t want them to say, ‘Oh, it’s a conscious movie, it’s just a political thing.’ I thought we were above politics in making the movie, and yet we still all loved each other and shared and made this movie together,” he continued. “So I’m optimistic that we can work even with people who disagree with us.” [achieve] The director added that the film specifically invites the audience to have a discussion about the future, “and I want everyone to be involved in this discussion. I don’t want anyone to be allowed to ask any questions.”

Elsewhere in the conversation, the group touched on how they each met, how Coppola sold his family’s wine company to self-finance the film, and his insistence on contacting The Godfather sequel The Godfather Part II: “I’m the idiot who started this by putting numbers after movies. So I apologize.”

He revealed to me that he had done the test. huge city “My brother still amazes me,” he told his students at New York University about the film, “with his courage, like he would do what he had to do to get the job done, bottom line.”

De Niro noted that he did a table read of the film, along with Paul Newman and Uma Thurman, decades ago when Coppola was working on another version of it, and continued the night’s political theme.

“I’m concerned. I see things in the Francis movie about this, the parallels and all that,” he told the crowd. “To me, it’s not over until it’s over, and we have to do everything we can to defeat the Republicans — these Republicans are not real Republicans. Defeat Trump. It’s that simple. We can’t have this kind of person running this country. Everybody has to get out and vote, and we have to make it very clear what America is about.”

As Coppola briefly mentioned that he went to military school with Trump—“I was poor so I was a tuba player in the band, and he was rich, so he was in headquarters where they could keep the lights on after Taps”—De Niro doubled down: “Just imagine Donald Trump directing this movie… He wants to destroy the country, and he can’t do this movie. He can’t do anything that has structure.”

huge city It will be shown in cinemas on Friday.