Francis Ford Coppola bet more than $100 million on his legacy. Now what?

On a golden July day, Coppola’s building looks like a wedge of white cake rimmed with green frosting. Each layer is an example of his reflexive way of mixing art with entrepreneurship. On the sidewalk level is Cafe Zoetrope, a European-style bistro named for the film company Coppola launched with George Lucas and other insurgents in 1969. On the middle floors, former American Zoetrope offices are being renovated into sleek hotel rooms, soon to receive guests at the seventh property in a string of boutique resorts Coppola owns in Argentina, Belize, Guatemala, Italy and Peachtree City, Georgia.

On the top floor is Coppola himself. He looks the part of the pooh-bah auteur in his loungewear—a marigold-color áo bà ba, a pajamalike outfit from Vietnam. His office, devised by his production designer Dean Tavoularis, is an art deco roost that seems to vibrate with the zigzags and curves in the woodwork and carpeting.

This penthouse, too, will become a hotel suite, but for now it’s a time capsule of creations past and possibly future. The desk has notes for Distant Vision, a concept for a live film people would watch in real time as it’s made. “If I live long enough, I’ll do that," he says. There’s a shadowy side room that once glowed with state-of-the-art editing gear. “I cut the end of Apocalypse Now myself in there. Night after night, trying to find the ending," he says. That 1979 fever dream of the Vietnam War drove him toward mental breakdown and financial ruin, then paid off in posterity.

Now Coppola has opened another act in his film career with a project as audacious and polarizing as anything that came before. It also arrives at a time when the world is more indifferent than ever to movies, much less to movies with grand statements to make. Megalopolis is an Imax-scale allegory that depicts New York as ancient Rome—New Rome—complete with chariot races and laurel headgear. In a republic lousy with greed and complacency, the hero is a controversial artist trying to build a utopia. Coppola wants viewers to ask themselves, “Is the society we’re living in the only one available to us? How can we improve it?"

With its Shakespearean soliloquies and retro effects and undiluted earnestness, the film bears no resemblance to anything Hollywood is making. Or ever has made, really.

That’s not the only reason Megalopolis is the most gawked-at movie of the year. Like other Coppola opuses, the picture became inseparable from its origin story. Plans for it had fermented in the filmmaker’s brain for decades. In the face of false starts and rejections, Coppola went all in to cover the cost of making the movie himself—a tab that would eventually hit $136 million, according to a person involved with the project. That the film’s writer, producer and director was also on the hook for its budget added drama to tales of turmoil behind the scenes.

A group of disgruntled art designers quit the movie. There were also accounts from the set (and later, leaked videos) of the director kissing actresses while filming a disco bacchanal, interactions he played down as innocent. The film’s distributor, Lionsgate, released a trailer featuring quotes from respected film critics of the past who supposedly panned classic Coppola films, suggesting that some of today’s critics are getting it wrong about Megalopolis, too. The cheeky marketing backfired when the quotes were discovered to be fake, causing Lionsgate to retract the trailer and apologize.

To Coppola, all of the above—including the controversies, the boondoggle potential, the notion of an octogenarian movie legend defying industry norms, yet again—promises to make Megalopolis a spectacle in theaters.

“People want to see for themselves whether it’s a mess or a masterpiece," he says.

Either way, the Megalopolis experience isn’t easily described. Adam Driver plays Cesar Catilina, a genius of architecture who invented a wonder substance called Megalon, a do-it-all building material that behaves like a living thing. Obsessed with constructing an ideal society, Cesar clashes with most everyone, chiefly Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a servant of the status quo. The mayor’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) is a brainy socialite who falls in love with Cesar.

Megalopolis has shades of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker and Caligula. Shia LaBeouf’s character is a villain in drag who whips up the masses with MAGA-style rhetoric. Jon Voight plays ultrarich Hamilton Crassus III, and Aubrey Plaza is a power-hungry celebrity named Wow Platinum.

“F— your stupid Megalopolis!" Wow shouts at Cesar—an inside joke for Coppola: “I always thought that was the way I would review the picture," he says.

Coppola even threw in a way to break the fourth wall. Prerelease screenings of the two-hour-and-18-minute film have included a scripted interlude in which a person stands up in the theater and asks Cesar a question during a press conference the character is conducting on-screen. (It’s still unclear how many theaters will feature this interactive moment when Megalopolis opens this month.) The original idea for the scene was way more ambitious: Coppola says he’d recruited the engineering team that developed Amazon’s Alexa assistant to devise a way for Cesar to field a range of questions from real-life viewers.

“Who burns calories on that?" says filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, a younger peer of Coppola’s who is known for innovations in film tech and format. “I like trying shit," Soderbergh says, “but Francis makes me feel very conservative."

When asked for his input on Megalopolis, Soderbergh emerged from his private screening with a question about marketing. “How are you going to explain to people how to watch it?" Soderbergh says. “Because it’s just a different grammar." That promotion problem could turn into a plus, Soderbergh adds. “When I was growing up, movies that got people talking about them were just as valuable as if they were monster hits. This, to me, is one of those."

It was a coup attempt from 63 B.C. known as the Catiline conspiracy that got Coppola thinking: Why not use the once-mighty genre of the Roman epic (Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Julius Caesar) to tell a story about the modern American republic? The idea took root in the early 1980s and would have Coppola filling pages and folders with script grist for years to come.

But his priority back then was resurrecting his career, his finances and himself. The crucible 1970s that yielded four masterpieces in a row—The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now—had been followed by the rolling calamity that was 1981’s One From the Heart. Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios eked out the lavish, experimental musical love story on credit, using a crazy quilt of loans that left the filmmaker about $30 million in the red when the film bombed. He had to sell the studio and put up family properties as collateral against his debts. He then spent a decade directing movies for paychecks, including The Outsiders, Peggy Sue Got Married, The Cotton Club and The Godfather Part III. A major hit, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which grossed $216 million worldwide in 1992, helped him emerge from the hole.

His gamble on Megalopolis rides on very different—and less precarious—stakes, thanks to the Coppola family’s California wine empire. That business started with 1,500 acres and a mansion in Napa Valley that the director bought in 1975 with his wife, Eleanor—an artist, author and filmmaker who died in April, at 87, and after 61 years of marriage. Their vineyards on the historic Inglenook estate were the foundation for an operation that expanded exponentially after the Coppolas’ 2006 purchase of a property in Sonoma County. It became the Francis Ford Coppola Winery, a theme-park-level destination and a ubiquitous brand in stores.

In 2021, Coppola merged the winery business bearing his name with that of another Napa-based family company, Delicato Family Wines, in an equity deal that Coppola says was worth about $650 million. He held on to his original Inglenook estate in Napa, land of the Coppola family home.

Following the winery deal, Coppola explains, “I went to the bank and said, ‘How much can I borrow?’ " He borrowed $200 million against his ownership stake in Delicato to fund Megalopolis and pay for projects at Inglenook and the Sentinel Building.

Roman Coppola, 59, who spent his youth embedded on film locations with his family, says nobody blinked at the patriarch’s liquidation plan. “That’s just what we grew up around," he says. “To use that wealth to make something he cares about is thrilling, I think, because it’s just a great example of how to lead your life."

True to form for Coppola, his investment in the movie begot other business moves. For more than $4 million, he bought a Days Inn where he and his team lived while making Megalopolis in Georgia. He converted it into a hotel geared toward cinema buffs and the many film crews working in the area, with in-house editing suites and screening rooms. By building a production facility, now operating as the All-Movie Hotel, Coppola says he boosted the tax incentives he received from the state of Georgia. These subsidies brought Coppola’s production expenditure down to about $107 million, according to the person involved in the film.

Lionsgate agreed to release Megalopolis in domestic theaters, but Coppola is covering most of the distribution and marketing costs, a layout of up to $17 million, according to that person.

Coppola talks about the movie’s prospects with an inveterate gambler’s confidence.

“I’ll make you a bet that we have a very, very auspicious opening with the picture," he says—then points out that his big money is already riding on that bet. “Time is on my side, and I feel for sure on Megalopolis it is."

If not, and it fails, there’s a contingency plan that could include a “very useful" tax write-down, Coppola says. “I’m very old so it all goes into an estate plan."

The closest Megalopolis came to fruition in the past was in 2001. There were script readings by potential cast members, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Paul Newman and Uma Thurman, and some prep footage was shot, but after the 9/11 attacks, Coppola shelved the project.

In the fall of 2022, production officially began, yet Megalopolis didn’t stop morphing. Coppola’s filmmaking method has long been driven by rehearsal, revision, improvisation and experimentation, a rolling and communal process instilled from his days as a wunderkind in the Hofstra University drama department. “If you listen very carefully, the film tells you how to make it," Coppola says. “At every turn, you’re seeing things with your colleagues."

But his theater-troupe practices led to culture clash at Trilith Studios, one of the biggest factories in today’s Hollywood industrial complex. The nearly 1,000 acre spread outside Atlanta is where much of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been birthed. Some Megalopolis crew members had just completed Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 there, including production designer Beth Mickle. Coppola says he wanted Mickle because of her work in conjuring a version of 1950s New York in Motherless Brooklyn, a 2019 neo-noir directed by Edward Norton.

There was a disconnect from the start, Coppola says, between his mental images of Megalopolis and the concepts proposed by Mickle and her art team—including fantastical tableaus where a superhero might feel at home. To Coppola the designs looked predictable and expensive. As tensions increased, Coppola relied on a simpatico concept artist, Dean Sherriff, to draw up visual templates for the more organic, theatrical world Coppola envisioned.

“The art department got very frustrated because I was essentially designing the look of the picture without their participation, so I could show it to them," Coppola recalls. “I even said, ‘I’m the only person in this group who knows what the director wants!’ "

Coppola says he fired some people. Others quit, including Mickle, who declined to comment for this article. Production resumed after the New Year, 2023, minus most of the original art team. “After they resigned there was only the one," new production designer Bradley Rubin, “and it went much better," Coppola says.

“I don’t want to say I saw it coming," Roman Coppola says, but the rebellion by staffers expecting a more methodical process “didn’t surprise me." Roman, a longtime collaborator, helped his father implement some old-school cinematic effects similar to those they used in 1992’s Dracula. To illustrate justice and other ideals being under threat, they invented a sequence in which actors dressed as statues swoon and crumple; to make them appear huge, Roman filmed the human sculptures in perspective against a miniature cityscape.

Such effects might look anachronistic to viewers accustomed to computer-generated sci-fi worlds. “I know it’s a big movie, but I wanted it to feel handmade, and it does," the director says.

In January 2023, the Hollywood Reporter broke news of the art department exodus. This May, just before the Megalopolis premiere at Cannes, the Guardian quoted anonymous sources from the crew (“Has this guy ever made a movie before?") in an article that included reports of Coppola trying to kiss background actresses. Variety later published videos that seemed to show Coppola mingling on the nightclub set and kissing several women on the cheek. In response, one female extra spoke up in Coppola’s defense, calling him a gentleman; another extra who was involved took issue with that description, saying she was shocked by the director’s actions.

When these reported interactions come up in an interview before the leaked videos went public, Coppola describes his behavior in terms of paternal affection, invoking his 53-year-old daughter. “Anyone younger than Sofia is a kid in my mind, and I love kids in the way that you should love kids." People involved with the film’s production say the director had been trying to foster a New Year’s Eve atmosphere and that there had been no complaints from the set. Earlier this month, Coppola sued Variety for libel over its published report, seeking at least $15 million in damages.Penske Media Corporation, which publishes Variety, says it stands by its reporters.

Headlines about a troubled Coppola passion project felt to him like history repeating itself. Apocalypse Now was dogged by coverage of a cursed production in the Philippines. The crises were also captured by his wife in film diaries that formed the basis of 1991’s Hearts of Darkness, an Emmy-winning documentary whose subtitle says it all: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.

When asked about a report from the Megalopolis set—that he smoked marijuana in his trailer—Coppola says he doesn’t do it on the clock, adding that he’s been avoiding cannabis because it makes him eat, a no-no after he shed some 80 pounds about seven years ago.

Though weed isn’t part of his work methods anymore, Coppola says, it once helped him conjure an iconic moment in one of his most celebrated works. “True story," he says: The flashback ending of Godfather II was supposed to include a scene between Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone and his father, immortalized in the first film by Marlon Brando. James Caan and other alums from the original movie had also agreed to appear in the flashback. (“They all wanted a lot of money because they hadn’t gotten a lot of money" for the first Godfather, Coppola says.) But then, on the day before the scene was scheduled to be shot, the director got word that Brando had turned down the deal, scuttling his plan for a final father-son moment in the movie.

“I didn’t know what to do, and I smoked a joint, and I said, I’ll just write the scene," Coppola recalls, “and I wrote the scene the way it is in the movie," with young Michael sitting alone in the Corleone dining room, ruminating at the table as his family sings to his father in a different room off-screen.

“That was all a save, thanks to the focusing," he says. “I’m very competent when I’m stoned. It gets me to think very clearly."

Coppola tends to approach conversational topics from oblique angles, deploying a bottomless supply of arcane references along the way: Russia’s interest in fusion technology, Major League Baseball’s pioneering role in streaming video, creation myths in India and literary references ranging from Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks to Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man.

“I have a very geometrical mind," he says. “I always see the whole picture, out of focus, but I’m not good at one, two, three, four, five."

Megalopolis is full of clocks and the sounds of them ticking. The film’s hero has the power to pause them, freezing the world temporarily thanks to his abilities. That’s what Cesar does in the film’s first scene, teetering on a ledge outside his art deco garret in the Chrysler Building.

“Art controls time, it always has," Coppola says. “From the moment someone first painted a picture, they were stopping time."

In his own penthouse sanctum in San Francisco, Coppola sits under a depiction of his own work frozen in time. It’s a 360-degree mural painted in 1976 that covers the domed interior of the cupola on the Sentinel Building. The mural features a menagerie of characters and images from Coppola’s films, plus friends (George Lucas) and family members (Eleanor Coppola, positioned behind Fredo Corleone—a placement that bugged his wife, the director says with a chuckle). A younger version of Coppola, with bushy black beard and glasses, can be found standing close behind his eldest son, Gian-Carlo. The painting was created years before Gio was killed in a boating accident at age 22. At the time of his death, in 1986, he’d been working with his dad on the film Gardens of Stone, which deals with a father in mourning.

Coppola marvels at that awful synchrony and the countless other ways his life has permeated his work, and vice versa.

“I’m starting to think that this thing called my life is a movie I’m making. I’m going to write the ending of it shortly," he says, “but I don’t know what it’s going to be."

Grooming, Elise Bigley.

Write to John Jurgensen at John.Jurgensen@wsj.com