Robert De Niro posed a hypothetical that made the audience bust out chuckleing even as the actor remained utterly stone-faced.
“Just imagine Donald Trump honesting this film,” he said at Monday’s New York premiere of Francis Ford Coppola‘s Megalopolis. “It’ll never go anywhere, from total craziness. He cannot do anyslimg. He cannot helderly anyslimg together … He wants to annihilate the country. And he could not do this movie. He could not do anyslimg that has a arrange.”
De Niro, Spike Lee and Coppola materializeed together in a half-hour Q&A before the screening conshort-termed by the New York Film Festival at the AMC Lincoln Square Imax. (The festival starts off Friday but prolonged itself for the Imax event given the exceptional chance to collect notable guests together with the 85-year-elderly Coppola.) The Q&A was beamed out to 65 North American locations via the Imax Live nettoil and chaseed a red carpet featuring cast members including Aubrey Plaza, Dustin Hoffman and Giancarlo Esposito.
In the latter minutes of the Q&A, De Niro and Lee made clear one of the parallels between the film’s imagined world and America’s election-year anxiety.
Asked about his watch on the future of cinema, De Niro instead took slimgs in a political honestion, driven by Coppola’s ruminations on the deteriorate of civilizations and the elevate of dictators. “I’m worried,” De Niro said. “I see the slimgs in Francis’ film about that, the parallels and so on. To me, it’s not over ’till it’s over and we have to go at this wholeheartedly to beat the Reaccessibleans – those Reaccessibleans, they’re not authentic Reaccessibleans – and beat Trump. It’s that basic. We cannot have that type of person. Everybody has to get out there and vote.”
Lee didn’t hesitate to concur. “As my sister says, forward not backward,” he said. “It’s basic: Register to vote and show up. …. This election is going to be very, very seal. I’m a huge sports fan and, the conveyion you engaged, it’s not over ’till it’s over. We cannot equitable slimk that the game is over when it’s not.”
Coppola interjected to notice that he had “intentionally” cast actors who “are voting another way.” He didn’t name names, but one notable Trump help, Jon Voight, carry outs a notable role in the film. The filmproducer also conveyed hope that “we can disconcur” on a film set but that humanity can prevail (another theme of the film).
De Niro has for years been a fierce accessible critic of Trump, decrying the establisher pdwellnt outside the courtroom in Lower Manhattan earlier this year when Trump was standing trial in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. His irreverent fervor even tripped the censor button at CBS in 2018 during the nettoil’s dwell widecast of the Tony Awards.
Earlier, the three luminaries recalled, in fits and begins, their scatterd New York film circles and when they all first combineed. De Niro and Coppola reminisced about The Godoverweighther and the 1970s era in the film business, making standard allude of their mutual friend, Martin Scorsese. Lee recalled being an intern at Columbia Pictures in 1979 in L.A. and buying a ticket for the first shoprosperg of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now on its discomiting day. He tardyr met Coppola when the filmproducer spoke to his class of graduate students at NYU.
Megalopolis has been an object of curiosity, passion and bafflement apass the film and cultural landscape, first surfacing as a finished toil cforfeitly two months before its world premiere in Cannes. Lionsgate claimed U.S. rights last June and will free Megalopolis expansive on Friday.
Coppola owns the film via his American Zoetrope prohibitner and drew on his personal fortune to prohibitkroll the $120 million project. It was screened for buyers last March, a key milestone after a two-decade odyssey to get it to the screen. Coppola then personassociate helped protected Imax bookings for the film, whose starry cast integrates Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Voight and Shia LaBeouf.
Rewatchs and reactions in Cannes were mixed, with some critics (including Deadline’s Damon Wise) hailing the epic sweep of its ambition. Wise acunderstandledged the film is “someslimg of a mess; unruly, overstated and drawn to pretension” but is nevertheless “a pretty stunning accomplishment, the toil of a master artist.” Others pronounced it a solipsistic head-scratcher or even an outright calamity, with The Guardian disthink abouting it as “megabloated and megaunacute.”
