It doesn’t matter if you were one of those who hated or one of the few who loved Coppola’s Megalopolis, or even if you didn’t see it at all, you will be fascinated by Megadoc.
This is an intriguing and often compelling look at a director still putting creativity at the heart of the filmmaking process, and, who wants it to be fun (though it rarely looks like it is). So committed to his vision, he puts up his own money for the $120 million passion project of a film (thirty years in the planning), and, ironically for a filmmaker known for going wildly over budget, when it’s his own money, slowly begins to panic about the film’s bulging costs.
Making his second documentary director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, Internal Affairs) knows both that that the best film documentaries are about disasters and that he is in the company of people with an intimate knowledge of how to make a classic one such as Eleanor Coppola who shot and co-directed Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.
While Figgis goes looking for the first — and while there is certainly something of a disaster looming (Megalopolis took less than $15m at the box office) and Figgis presciently does document the eye-watering costs of much of the film’s departments — what he finds is a Coppola still intellectually and verbally adroit and most charmingly a cast of characters committed to working with the great director. This commitment is both because of Coppola’s stature and for personal reasons – the very genial Dustin Hoffman (because he never approached me before and James Caan is dead),  Shia LaBeouf (trying to come back from being totally cancelled and then being a method actor from hell) and Jon Voight,  once an actor of great regard and now known for public crazy but surprisingly wise on set while the immensely charming Aubrey Plaza is both full of insight and the kind of girl you want to watch arm-wrestle.
Figgis also documents the experiences of the crew particularly special effects now so computerised they live in a different filmmaking universe than Coppola.