CANNES, France — In Francis Ford Coppola’s long-anticipated sci-fi opus “Megalopolis,” Adam Driver’s character, visionary architect Cesar Catalina, has the power to stop time. And here at the 77th Cannes Film Festival this Thursday, it seemed like Coppola had that power, too.
The director’s first film to premiere in competition at Cannes since 1979’s “Apocalypse Now,” it’s a futuristic, almost Shakespearean epic about the downfall of American society. It was also conceived, Coppola has said, more than 40 years ago on that previous film’s jungle set. Tickets have been impossible to come by, and journalists cleared their entire schedules just to make sure they caught one of the press screenings with enough time to digest the absolutely mad, maverick art that was surely about to pop across the screen.
