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Francis Ford Coppola Compares Fall of Rome to Current American Politics: “Lost Its Republic and Ended Up With an Emperor”

The filmmaker was joined by Robert De Niro and Spike Lee at a screening of 'Megalopolis,' as he noted it was "prescient to do a movie about America as Rome because it's going to happen in a few months."

At a conversation as part of the New York Film Festival — which was 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 to making “a Roman epic set in modern America as Rome,” as he described it. The film follows a conflict between Cesar (played by Adam Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian future, and his opposition Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo. De Niro noted he had done a table read for the film, alongside Paul Newman and Uma Thurman, decades ago when Coppola was working on another iteration of it, and continued the night’s political theme.

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