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“Don’t let the now destroy the forever.” That is the philosophy preached by Cesar Catilina, an architect played by Adam Driver in Megalopolis, the messy magnum opus from director Francis Ford Coppola that hit theatres this fall. The main idea: To create a utopia, you must dream big — and knock down anything in your path.

A still from the Francis Ford Coppola movie Megalopolis shows a man dressed in all black hanging on a steel beam, holding a woman who he is kissing, in front of an orange-tinted skyline with the architecture of a modern city.

In the Q and A that followed the movie’s Toronto International Film Festival screening, Driver said that he based his performance in part on Robert Moses. In one early scene, Catilina goes rogue and demolishes a building without the proper approvals. (The movie’s setting is a bizarro version of New York dubbed New Rome, reaffirming that the male obsession with the Roman Empire was no passing TikTok fad.) As...

Architecture, Creativity and Power Collide in “Megalopolis”

Francis Ford Coppola’s new movie follows an ambitious architect. But is he the hero the industry deserves?

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