00:00The great artist and scientist Goethe once said architecture is frozen music
00:05and I always thought what a beautiful idea.
00:11Time stop!
00:15All artists stop time and control time and they have from the very first
00:20little painting that someone did on a cave wall because
00:23when you do a painting you are taking an instant of reality and freezing it.
00:27My name is Francis Coppola. Today I would like to talk about architecture in my movie Megalopolis.
00:37Megalopolis is basically a fable and like a Roman epic but it's set in modern America.
00:43There are two principal characters who are in opposition.
00:48One is a mayor of the city named Cicero and of course he's an evolution of the famous
00:53Latin consul and writer Cicero and his opponent is a sort of an amalgamation of modern people
01:00namely Robert Moses and Walter Gropius who came here with his Bauhaus art school and his first
01:06name is Caesar and he is the artist architect of the story. In the first frame I was trying to pose
01:13those principal elements which would then go on to unveil itself in the story of Megalopolis.
01:20This is Grand Central Station. Of course we see the Roman columns and the clock and the issue of time
01:26is a big factor of this movie and then of course we see modern times as reflected in the
01:32Arctic co-tower of the Chrysler building which is a unique building. It was a men's club in the days
01:38when men's clubs were gentlemen sitting around reading newspapers and I got the privilege of
01:46seeing it. It was so beautiful it had a giant mural up there and it was a heavenly space and then the
01:53Chrysler building was sold. I went recently to look at it and whoever had bought it had dismantled
01:58the cloud tower and I have no idea what happened to those murals. So basically juxtaposing the cloud
02:06tower with the time element in Grand Central Station and the Romanesque nature of the building
02:11In the first frame I was trying to pose the one exotic notion that America is essentially the historical counterpart of the Rome Republic.
02:26We have these golden images of the top of the beautiful Chrysler building and my character
02:31at the beginning of the picture. I designed the film along with a fabulous concept artist named
02:37Dean Sheriff and in this one of course it's obviously not the real Chrysler building. This is
02:42in movie talk is called the volume. In other words it's really only part of it actually built and on
02:48the real Chrysler building the ledge is not really horizontal enough to be able to stand on it so I
02:54took some liberties but he steps out on the ledge and you don't know why at the beginning of the
02:59picture is he going to in some way test his own ability as an artist and he does in fact stop time.
03:11All artists stop time and control time. Filmmakers move back and forth freely in time so that theme
03:17of the artist's natural ability to manipulate time to move and combine time and space I thought
03:23was fascinating. And let me just say a little bit about the settings of movies which is of course a
03:31place which is architecture. In more adventurous movies and plays those settings might be secondarily
03:37not only the place where the action happens but a metaphor for what's happening and I decided
03:42at Megalopolis that I would enjoy doing that. This scene where they're walking around 5,000 feet above
03:48the ground and obviously one slip is death. Of course they discuss the notion of how artists stop
03:54time and everything I spoke about earlier but at one point they do stop time together and they kiss.
04:06And the reason I wanted it to take place 5,000 feet above the ground a certain death is because
04:13when you kiss someone in a serious way it's very dangerous because your life and the life of
04:19everyone you love is about to change. I believe that when you make art risk is an essential part
04:26of it. When you leap into the unknown you prove that you're free because you've leapt into something
04:32that you have no idea what's going to happen. What they're doing is going to change their lives.
04:37Rome conquered half the known world. They went as far as Great Britain but basically a lot of money
04:42came into Rome but the money didn't go to the people. It went to providing what they called
04:48bread and circuses to keep them busy and we all know about the Colosseum. I wanted to do the
04:54modern version of the Colosseum. It would have been logical and my production designer wanted
04:59it to be a circular theater that she had found and I said you know no I want to do it in a
05:04stadium and the reason I want to do this stadium because as a child I went to Madison Square Garden
05:10to see the circus and it was this Madison Square Garden because there's been four Madison Square
05:16Gardens and between Penn Station which looked like the Roman Baths of Caracalla and the New York
05:22Public Library and the post office a whole section of New York was Rome. New York and America not
05:30was Rome. New York and America not only based itself on Rome it built itself to look like Rome.
05:37Penn Station was the ultimate construction but they destroyed this magnificent landmark
05:44that doesn't exist anymore as with a lot of great things in New York it's torn down for reasons
05:50that only bankers can explain. I mean if I could rebuild Penn Station on film I would do it. I
05:56didn't have the the opportunity nor the need but I did with this Madison Square Garden. As a kid
06:02Madison Square Garden that building had like five floors and on the other floors there were lots of
06:07other things. It was sort of like carnival freak shows where you saw the two-headed woman and the
06:13snake child or places where you could buy baby salamanders and there were bowling alleys and
06:19bars and it was a whole carny world of five floors of Madison Square Garden and then at the
06:26top was the arena and so I had such strong emotional ties to that experience in Madison
06:33Square Garden that I really wanted to set it there and it was very emotional to see
06:38these things I loved in New York.
06:40Caesar, the main character, Adam Dravich, he's a man of the present but with a vision of the future.
06:47Time, show me the future.
06:54Both these images are three screens and you're seeing some glimpses of the architecture and to
06:58understand the architecture let's go to Barcelona and talk about Gaudi. He made these extraordinary
07:06structures. They were stone or they were then later reinforced concrete and other materials,
07:11steel, but Gaudi, his architecture looked as though they had grown and I said how do you
07:17collaborate with nature? In other words a Gaudi vision made of something more durable than steel
07:24which is life, which is living material. So there is this unique idea pioneered by a number of
07:31people including Neri Oxman, a scientist at MIT but also an architect who proposed that
07:36architecture could be actually living plant material and that we would like it and that not
07:42only would it do things for us like provide an abode that would be a dream place to live in
07:48but we could do good things for it. So it's like living in a flower or living in a natural thing
07:53and that's there's many of these forms in the architecture here that reflect and are
07:59here that reflect an architecture that you don't build but that you encourage to grow.
08:08This is an artist's view of what the city would look like when it was transitional. In other words
08:15obviously if you were going to grow a new city right in the middle of New York there'd be a
08:18transition period where a lot of the old buildings, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building
08:23are kept but there's the beginning of these more vegetable type architectures happening.
08:29And one movie that I actually loved as a kid was made by H.G. Wells who wrote the script
08:35and the Korda Company was called The Shape of Things to Come and you see them build the world
08:40of the future but you know it takes time to build the world of the future so that when you get to
08:44the future it's all about their grandchildren. So I said when I do it in my future movie I want there
08:50to be some amazing new architectural medium or invention which he invented which lets you go
08:58build the world of the future fast enough that you don't have to be your own grandchildren in the
09:03story. And then you know as these things work in your mind in this script it began to be this
09:10material called Megalon and that was sort of a material that was not dissimilar to what
09:16Neary Otzman that was the sort of scientific advisor of this called mediated material. Rather
09:22than be built we can work on them on an atomic level. Nature and humanity as a collaboration
09:30liking each other and I saw that whatever world I wanted to present for people in Megalopolis
09:36you had to say well I like to live there and maybe I'm nuts but I'd love to live in a flower
09:40especially one that liked me.
09:46you
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