Megalopolis

Today on Art of the Cut, editor Cam McLauchlin discusses working with legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola on his film Megalopolis.

Cam’s previously talked with Art of the Cut about working on Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley. Cam was also an associate editor and music editor on del Toro’s Shape of Water. His TV work includes The Girlfriend Experience and Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. 

Let’s start with how you got this job and what Mr. Coppola saw of your work that made them want to work with you.

I got a call from my agent about meeting with Francis. It was a classic, “You’ll never guess who wants to meet with you.” I never would’ve guessed Francis! He had seen Nightmare Alley and he was a fan of Guillermo’s.

Guillermo and George Lucas tried to develop an adaptation of the Count of Monte Cristo with Francis many, many years ago.

I happened to be in LA working on something and I would’ve gone to any mountaintop really to just meet the guy and hang out and be with him and talk. I got there and he’s so pleasant. He’s so gracious and so warm and charming and intelligent.

What I thought might be an hour turned into five hours. He showed me a lot of archival footage that he shot because this project had been in gestation for quite a while. At one point - just before 9/11 - he had the great cinematographer, Ron Frickey, in New York to shoot. Frickey had shot Koyaanisqatsi.

I LOVE Koyaanisqatsi!

And Samsara. So Francis hired him, and Ron had shot a bunch of digital footage on the Sony F-900 in and around New York. After 9/11 though, the film clearly was gonna shut down because of the subject matter and reflecting on what just happened.

So we looked at that footage and we just talked and talked. He’s just a very curious fellow. He’s not precious or particular. He just wants to get to the truth of anything as quickly as possible. There’s not a lot of ego involved with Francis.

That’s something that people might think - because he’s made these films - but his humility and humbleness is really something to admire. 

At one point he asked me, like, ask me anything, so I just said, “Why isn’t Walter Murch going to edit this picture?” Walter has his own path and trajectory at this moment in time. I was fortunate to meet him and he’s writing a book that’s coming out this fall: a two-parter.

Walter wasn’t really enthralled by the script itself but he had given Francis some notes and ideas, and those made their way into the film. I couldn’t say no. Just to even be in the same vicinity… even though the script was very hard to decipher. We did talk about the script.

I tried to dance my way around talking about it ‘cause I couldn’t understand it or my interpretation of it was something probably very different from what he was interpreting, but we hit it off.

I left the meeting and he just said, “Give me your phone number.” And it wasn’t even like a “you got the job” kind of thing! Then we just started talking about casting, then he started sending me scripts. I met him in early March 2022, then in November of 2022 we went to camera.

Every week or so I’d get a script. It wasn’t in FinalDraft, so I’d have to go through Adobe Acrobat and do a change list sort of thing to understand where things shifted or moved because it was constantly in flux, but it was all in his head. So at that point I think it was valuable because I was beginning to learn his creative process and mind.

I was able to start to speak freely and could shoot an email off and I would reread it and edit it and think, Okay…I’m gonna send this bomb of ideas! whether he likes them or not, or can use some of this stuff…." It was just a place to get familiar and create an openness and safe space to discuss ideas. So that was kind of like the incubation period.

You mentioned seeing the script and maybe not being quite sure you understood it. That’s a brave thing or a scary thing to have to admit: “I’m not sure if I get this.”

I think I skirted it because initially there’s lots of scripts you read but you have faith in the director. Sometimes a script isn’t a laundry list or a grocery list but it’s a collection to build something.

A great script is really rare, but a lot of the times even just the evolution of making a film from script to shooting to editing, it’s one of these impossible adventures that if it all comes together it’s somewhat of a mini-miracle in a way. So I tend to have a lot of faith.

How much did the script evolve in post?

Oh, a lot. It evolved a lot up to the shoot. Then once the shooting began, it didn’t change a lot. It changed day by day within a scene because of a location issue or some other issue, but it tended to track with the script at that point. Then definitely in post it evolved into a whole other beast.

Structurally?

Structurally. Tonally. Something that doesn’t come off the page is tone. This film has sort of been marketed as a sci-fi drama that’s very serious, but when you watch it, it’s sort of satirical and comical and goofy and there’s things that you wouldn’t expect based on the marketing treatment. The film is a different thing to experience as a piece.

Were those tonal differences or tonal shifts or changes difficult thing to navigate?

There’s so much of Francis’ personal biography in this movie. There’s so many things that are an homage to other cinema that he’s collecting and giving respect to. He’s 85 and of course there’s a ticking clock on him… and all of us. I’m not saying that he made a picture to say goodbye to cinema, but the way he was expressing it was like a love letter at times.

It was all also baked into this bigger plot and idea that Rome and modern Western civilization is sort of following a path that history is repeating itself. I’m Canadian, but clearly if America sneezes, sometimes Canada catches a cold.

Paying attention to the current climate politics, there’s something to be said about the timing of the film. Of course some of it’s very obvious and blatant - like who John Voight’s Hamilton Crassus character is and represents.

So it is not meant to be like any of Francis’ earlier films like The Godfather, where it’s a story about a family, or Gene Hackman in The Conversation, which is a character study. It’s really just a global take of the pulse of current politics and but baked into a fable - like a bedtime story. That’s why things kind of can veer and be a little tricky. So it was definitely challenging.

You mentioned that this was kind of like a love letter to cinema from Francis. Did he have you watch certain films or did you feel like you needed to? Or did you ask, “Hey, should I watch something?”

I’ll ask questions of directors, but with him, he referenced certain things. For example, Abel Gance’s Napoleon, which used triptychs, which we used. So that was a visual reference. The material all comes from actual real events, like the  Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BC.

The murder trial is from the Sonny Von Bulow case in New York, which the woman was apparently being poisoned or the husband was accused of poisoning his wife. And then he was later found out to be innocent. Robert Moses was sort of the architect of New York and he went up against the city kind of trying to rebuild the city.

So in a way, Caesar Catalina was an amalgamation of Julius Caesar and Robert Moses, and also very much to be included in that is Francis himself. It’s very personal and biographical as well. Francis is an architect in many ways.

Francis Ford Coppola and editor Cam McLauchlin, CCE

You mentioned the Catilinarian conspiracy. Is that something you bothered to read about?

Yeah. There’s a Hardcore history about it with Dan Carlin.

Oh yeah, I love Hardcore History.

I re-listened to that. But all you have to do is ask Francis anything. He’s a history buff and he’s very well read, so in between  cutting or having lunch and whatnot, we would talk about stuff. Another odd thing about the making of this film is that while he was shooting the film, he had also purchased an old Days Inn hotel just outside of Atlanta in Peachtree City called the All Movie Hotel.

He was building a hotel while making a film, so it very kind of meta in a way. We all stayed at the hotel. They’re doing construction. There’s drills coming through the wall and banging and you’re trying to watch dailies with your headphones on and concentrate. Francis would come in and we’d watch dailies every night.

Glen Scantlebury, who is the other editor, he and I built the framework of Megalopolis together. We would screen dailies in the morning and then Francis would come back after shooting and mostly he would show up with Roman, his son, who was shooting second unit. We would watch all the footage again.

Glen and I would watch everything in the morning. We’d both cut the scene. I’d see this sort of pathway, and Glen would see another pathway. We’d both cut it to be mentally up to speed with the material. They finished building the hotel a month or two after shooting was over, so it kind of calmed down.

I stayed in a room around the corner from Francis. In the morning, on my way to the edit suite, I’d stop by, have a coffee with him, talk about politics or what we’re reading or watching. Some nights he’d watch the film the night before.

So we’d talk about his feelings because he wasn’t in the edit suite 10 hours a day. He’d pop in and out during the director’s cut. He would definitely spend like a four hour session, but once we got past the director’s cut, he liked to kind of push things a little bit and see what we’d come up with and then come and look, then he liked to kind of have some distance.

We would dig into certain things where I’d say, “Francis, I need you here. You can’t leave me.” Other times I’d say, “Okay, I know what you want. It’ll take a little time. Let me figure it out.” Then maybe I come up with a couple versions or something and I’d show him the next day or we’d give him a little hard disk and he could go to his room where he had a nice projector and he could check it out and then either text me or email me at night or see him in the morning.

I wanted to ask about a couple of specifics. Early on there’s editing of a building explosion and a section before the building explosion.

The opening of the film used to be more documentary-style where we’re coming from the past - and it still has lingering moments of that - with the Laurence Fishburne narration: “When does an Empire die?” And comparing the new world to Old Rome, but then Francis said, “All my movies have these openings that everyone recalls and they’re spectacular.”

So as we went down the timeline and looked at it, the first thing that really jumps out is introducing the film with our main character and Caesar Catalina - Adam Driver-  and him stopping time. Of course it’s tricky because that whole notion of stopping time isn’t something that is completely fulfilled as an answer.

I can give you Francis’s sort of idea of it and my idea of it, but it’s also just something for the audience to kind of trip out on because of course this movie is sort of the talk of the town because it’s understated, it’s mysterious, it’s sort of bewildering and confusing, but also sort of fascinating at the decision-making process.

So I think having the film start with time is something of his own personal biography. It is a personal film in many ways, and I think time is something that you could say is obviously universal, but for him at his state in his career is something that he’s considering.

But he’s also dealt with this in Rumble Fish where Tom Waits has a similar sort of speech as Laurence Fishburne does in the film - talking about: you can’t buy time. So it’s somewhat of a metaphor. My wife watched the film.

She hadn’t seen it until the premiere at TIFF and she thought, “Oh, this sort of feels like a superhero film, but in a very art house way.”

If it had been a more Hollywood style film, it would’ve received a lot of notes and rewrites and probably would’ve whittled things down to, “It’s about time and it’s about Megalon and mMgalopolis,” but Francis wanted to insert a lot of ideas into the film, so it was wrangling this beast with a lot of different heads.

The idea of time and Caesar is also illustrated with Julia when she’s on top of the scaffolding and they kiss, after he is released from jail. It explores the idea that architects freeze time with their buildings and musicians play with time, so it’s not really a literal thing, it’s more of a metaphor or figurative thing. Even the set design in that scene, doesn’t really make sense.

She’s on a little clock and then they’re on some scaffolding beams. It’s just meant to be more sort of metaphorical, but also sort of more beautiful and not really a traditional thing.

So Francis is departing from a lot of things where audiences perhaps are not used to dealing with, given the amount of times we depart from traditional storytelling in a way, even though the film isn’t impossible to track, but it just keeps you guessing and changing gears so that you start to wonder, “Where is this all leading to?”

So it was always a matter of trying to make sure we could track the film as much as we could explore sort of the artistic adventure that Francis wanted to take.

You mentioned the voiceover. How much did that evolve throughout the edit?

The voiceover is interesting because Adobe had teased the idea that there’d be a program where you could kind of punch in text and they would spit out VO that matched a voice. Our apprentice editor Dana, became like the AI expert and we uploaded a lot of Laurence Fishburne audio books and scenes from movies. We developed a database that AI could then extrapolate a performance out of the narration that Francis was writing. So we didn’t have to go after Laurence every time to get him to re-record something and we could play with it. The timing and the performance were close enough that you knew it was gonna be okay once he recorded it for real. His voice is so incredible that you definitely had confidence that it would land. It was just a matter of the amount of dialogue and what it’s saying. So we utilized that a lot.

And how much did it evolve as you watched the entire movie - in context after the editor’s cut or after the director’s cut? What was happening with that narration? Were you finding you were using it more, trying to shorten it, trying to spread it out?

I think we were trying to use it a bit more. There’s consistency of certain visual language with plaques but it’s always jumping from one thing to the next. So to have the spine of Laurence Fishburne’s narration cement in some sense, “Okay, we’re back in the hands of the narrator.” It wasn’t really a crutch, it was just something to kind of layer in as another part of the storytelling.

There’s a nighttime driving scene through the city fairly early in the movie in a black Citroen. Talk about editing the tension of that.

Francis shot the performances and Roman, his son, shot everything else. It was like a tonal shift. For that section of the film, Francis referenced a film called Ugetsu, a Japanese ghost story film (1953). He wanted to have this supernatural feel to it, to kind of match the idea that Caesar’s wife mysteriously died, but we don’t really know why.

We sort of begin to understand as the film progresses. But he wanted to have that kind of ethereal ghost-like quality to it, to kind of heighten the sadness and loss, but also just the yearning for his wife.

Do you remember having to create tension throughout that section of the movie?

Yeah, it’s coming from the opening catwalk sequence when the mayor whispers into his ear that something happened and you see her face flash and then again you see her later when he’s trying to work with Megalon in his apartment in the Chrysler building. He again has a flash of her and that sort of motivates him to go off and deliver flowers to her.

You think she’s in this hospice but when Julia’s character arrives, the room’s empty. It had these spooky vibes to it. The music helped a lot and it was another little mini sequence within the film. It’s something that Francis wanted to explore and have and the statue’s crumbling - Lady Justice and sort of the values from the past that are sort of being destroyed.

What about the editing of the wedding fantasy montage?

That actually was given to another editor, Chris Donaldson, and he broke the back on it and did an incredible job. Francis likened it to the helicopter sequence for Apocalypse Now. Chris really created a structure to it, after which it kept evolving and moving.

Hats off to Chris. There was a sequence with Julia and Caesar kind of pulling this imaginary rope. He’s on drugs and he kind of pulls out an imaginary knife or scarf and he slashes the rope and he falls and kind of disappears.

That was something that was born out of old theatrical games for actors to sort of workshop and build trust or develop a playful environment. Francis just did that on the spot.

Glenn and I responded to it when we watched dailies, “Oh this is interesting. This feels right for Caesar because while Caesar can “stop time” (or can he?) he’s like an Elon Musk-type character. He’s also like Francis. He’s constantly moving and evolving and creating.

Did you re-watch Francis’ previous films once you knew you were gonna be working with him?

No. Dracula is one of my all-time favorite movies. Apocalypse Now? A hundred percent. His classics will stand the test of time. They’re just incredible films. I’ve recently watched some of his more experimental films like Twixt and Youth Without Youth, which is a little less experimental. And then Tetro.

After he left the Hollywood system with the Rainmaker he sort of departed into wanting to go back and reexamine sort of what it meant.

I think the way I re-read it was how he wanted to be a filmmaker and what he really wanted to get out of it. ‘cause I think he got to a point where he thought, “Well where do I go? I can’t go back and make Godfather 4.” He was financially a little comfortable to make smaller films and have total control.

This film’s just a continuation of that, but on a much obviously much grander scale. He developed and wrote a book called Live Cinema. It was taken from a personal script that he wrote which is about his family growing up.

But he did record a 45 minute or hour-long version of a live TV event where it was all like live sports switching. He’s traversing or trying to sort of pave and give people the idea that there there are more options that just the studio system to make a film. We can keep pushing the format and medium. 

I think for all the people that don’t like the film or have issues with it, I totally get it. I’ve read every review and watched every YouTube video because I’m so fascinated to hear what people say about it because the fun part of this process is really understanding what they take away from it because it’s so crazy and all over the place at times.

So to sort of understand how people take it in is really nice. Ultimately Francis is trying to say something beautiful in that there is hope in the future and his movie is intended to give that hope in more ways than you just watch in the first go.

I think if you wanna be cynical about the film, it’s easy to just kind of pick it apart, but at the same time this master is taking one big swing again and how can you not really respect that?

Avid timeline screenshot

Amen. The score is really interesting. There’s old Roman score but then there’s modern stuff. What was your temp library like?

Osvaldo Golijov was the composer and his collaborator Jeremy Flower was kinda like me. He was a young more into the electronic stuff. Osvaldo and Francis were the classical companions. I like to temp a lot. Sometimes I like to keep it dry.

Francis is someone who’s used to having four tracks of audio channels. So when he started listening to my cuts, he said, “Whoa! This is intense! Take it easy! I just want to hear the dialogue.” But eventually we started leaning towards into Calligula and Cleopatra and the classics.

But at the same time, because it’s new Rome and it’s sort of modern times, let’s play with artists like Fred Again and have more contemporary electronic stuff to sort of balance out and give the world a little more spice and resonance and it’s not just the same thing over and over.

So it took some time ‘cause the film’s so tricky that the music has to ride and sort of underscore so much that you can’t do with the regular tools that you just have as a picture editor and sound designer.

There’s a graphic chiseled in stone about nobody trusting the Senate and you pre-lap out of that into a protest. Can you talk about why you used a pre-lap out of that or why you use pre-laps in general.

I remember having that conversation with Francis. We were using these plaques. The Laurence Fishburne character was literally just reading them in that certain situation. I think we just wanted to get to the shot of the camera rising - kind of get to the juice.

You could argue that we didn’t need to have a plaque there and you could just have sound design. It was something that Francis liked: giving the audience these plaques or breaks where we’re gonna go into another sort of chapter of the film.

You mentioned he was kind of surprised at some of your sound design or more having more than four tracks, which I can relate to. Walter Merch can probably relate to that. Did that change the way that you presented material to him or were you always just trying to do the same kind of sound design and music work that you would normally do?

I think it was more of a learning experience for both of us, but Glen and I were cutting simultaneously through the director’s cut and Glen was more accustomed to having less tracks and I was used to having like 24 tracks.

But that’s only because that’s kind of what I grew up with and he grew up with that. I think there’s something to be said about clarity and having just dialogue to shine through, especially in an assembly version of the film.

Because Glenn had worked with Francis on Dracula and Godfather III, he already knew the program, whereas I was probably trying to over-impress or show him “Oh look! Here’s a scene that has all this stuff.”

I’ve worked with Guillermo and he has that same mentality of “Gimme the scene. I want to feel the scene complete so I can better judge it.” I think there’s something to be said for that as well. It’s like watching a rough cut versus watching something that has a little more polish.

You don’t want to over polish once the car gets out of the assembly line ‘cause it’s like, “Let’s see what the car is first, before I’m impressed by all the shininess.”

There was a great quote from Dan Lebental, ACE in my book where he said, “If you do the perfect cut on day one in the assembly all you’ve done is precluded that cut from existing, because this is a collaborative process, so I have to play a bit of a game with myself to not tighten the lug nuts too much during the early cut.”

Yeah. And that’s something that Francis and I would joke about because I like to sort of slap things together. Especially if a director walks in and you’re cutting, you’re kind of just shaping the clay. You can make the cut work but you just want to quickly understand the dynamic of the scene and see how it’s coming together rhythmically.

But working with Francis he’s used to having it sort of be a little loose outta the gate. I found that a little refreshing. It wasn’t as tense as presenting your Michelin-star entree. You’re kinda like, “Well here’s the IDEA of the Michelin star duck confit.”

I thought it was interesting you mentioned The Rainmaker because you were talking about that one scene that was an actor’s exercise and if you watch the DVD of The Rainmaker, there’s a whole DVD extra of Francis doing those exercises with actors.

Oh really? That’s interesting. I did not know that. Francis and I were traveling a lot together and hanging out and having dinners, talking about what was different for him about the process of making this film. Because for Godfather and Dracula he would have these massive books  - I think he’s published a book about the making of Godfather with all his script notes, very detailed.

But with Megalopolis it was more of a sort of free-wheeling collaboration with all these actors and it was more of a map. So he used these theatrical games and what you described in the Rainmaker to develop a process to then carry on to the screen as far as the storytelling goes.

So his biggest change or shift in filmmaking on this has just been his willingness to really - as an artist - venture into something of the unknown - to go back to that quote that Caesar in the film says he really took his art and put it up there on a massive scale.

You mentioned the triptychs - these three, side-by-side split screens basically. Is there a trick to editing those, not only juxtaposing images in time but in space across the screen?

Glenn and our assistant editor, Gretchen built the beginning of it and it was great. I think we just sort of tweaked it thereafter. But there has to be a harmony between the screens and we had a nice piece of temp track from Ben Hur I think, and then Osvaldo took it to the next level.

You have also worked with Francis’ granddaughter. Could you tell us a little bit about that project and that collaboration?

I met Gia and Robert Schwartzman, Francis’ nephew, at their Easter getaway in Napa. The film had been assembled and then they asked me to take a look at it and I sort of gave feedback, then, ‘cause I was still working on Megalopolis and we hadn’t even gone to Cannes yet and wewere still cutting.

I said, “I would try this and this and this” and then they asked if I could take a look at it. It’s a great film and I think Gia and everyone involved in that project were incredible. It’s really cool to see Pamela Anderson kind of get her due.

It’s called The Last Showgirl, is sort of like Mickey Rourke’s character in The Wrestler. You could compare it to something like that. It has like a meta quality where you almost think that Pamela Anderson’s been preparing for this film all her life.

There’s something about the Coppola spirit and the family. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. They work together all the time. They’re all involved in filmmaking at some point. They all look after each other. So it was really special experience for me to see that world and get to kind of play in their sandbox with them.

Any other thoughts on the collaborative process with Francis or things that he taught you or things that you feel like you picked up and learned through this collaboration?

Yeah, for sure. I think overall there were moments where you work with him and he says this classic line saying, “Do you wanna hear a crazy idea?” He would say that at least once a day when we were rolling in the edit. I would always say, “Of course I wanna hear a crazy idea!” One of which led to the live performance.

There was a moment where at the conference with Adam Driver and there’s an offscreen question from a reporter asking about the state of the future of New Rome. He’s sort of looking down, screen right and at the Toronto Film Festival, we actually had a performer walk up with the microphone and the house lights would come up.

So it was sort of a crazy moment for an audience to wonder, “Is this an accident? What’s going on?” Then all of a sudden they realize, “Oh, it’s part of the story.” So that was one of his “do you want to hear a crazy idea” moments. And for me I thought, “I don’t know if that’s too crazy, but it turns out to be something that people talk about a lot.”

And it sounds like he was open to you saying, “Do you want to hear a crazy idea?”

Yeah, I think we had such a nice collaboration. We could just speak freely and I would always speak my mind to him. Always, always, always, always. I think any editor should do the same with a director with the level of respect that they deserve because it’s their thing. But also if you respect them, you should be honest with them and open.

They hired you for a reason. I think when you do speak up, you always have a reason to speak up and say something. Even if it’s a gut feeling about something, but the best you can articulate your response, the better.

Sometimes it might take a while to kind of get into their head because you do see the footage very clearly compared to them and you don’t have - in this case - 30 years of table reads and all these things that he developed to get to that point.

So my skin in the game is different than his. You always try to look out for their best interest but he always collaborated with such grace and such a good spirit. You never felt like you were afraid to say anything.

The idea that people would think that Francis is intimidating because of the films he made is preposterous to me because he would’ve never made them without being who he is. And who he is is just this open-minded person.

And if the idea is good, he is gonna use it. He’s a collector of ideas and I think that’s why he has more editors than just one on a project.

There’s so much footage and so many options that he likes to know that he’s using the best of the best and then he gets inspired by new ideas of the material that he didn’t think of. Then he takes that and comes up with something else.

His collaborative nature is a great place to end this interview. Thank you so much for being on Art of the Cut and discussing this film with us.

Thank you Steve. It’s always a pleasure. Thank you for your time.