On Saturday morning, May 4, legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola dropped a tease to his decades-in-the-making, mostly self-funded epic Megalopolis.
In the snippet, apparently from the movie’s opening moments, one of the movie’s many stars, Adam Driver, playing a man named Caesar, emerges from a window atop what appears to be New York City’s Chrysler Building.
Dressed in a black suit and shirt, he shakily makes his way to the ledge, taking in the view, before he takes a fateful step off.
However, he’s heard screaming “Time stop!” and sure enough, Caesar is paused mid-step, his body leaning over to the point where gravity would have logically already taken him. There’s a dizzying zoom of the height of the building from his perspective, from where we can see traffic has been stopped in its tracks, too.
Impossibly, Driver leans back onto the roof, and snaps his finger, and time and traffic resumes, and he seems to gaze at the city before him with fresh eyes. The teaser then cuts to black as ominous music plays for nearly 10 seconds until it ends.
Megalopolis reportedly centers on the rebuilding of a New York-like city after a disaster. The Oscar-winning filmmaker’s cast includes Driver, Shia LaBeouf, and Coppola’s sister and Godfather and Rocky franchise star Talia Shire, as well as Oscar winners Forest Whitaker, Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman; Oscar nominee Laurence Fishburne; Emmy nominee Giancarlo Esposito; Licorice Pizza’s Isabelle Kusman; Saturday Night Live’s Chloe Fineman and Fast and Furious series star Nathalie Emmanuel.
Megalopolis is set to premiere at the 77th Cannes Film Festival on May 17.
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