Francis Ford Coppola wants people to watch Megalopolis annually like It's a Wonderful Life

Francis Ford Coppola is one of the most famous American directors alive. After winning Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for 1972's game-changing gangster film The Godfather, Coppola made subsequent masterpieces like The Conversation and The Godfather Part II (both, incredibly, released in 1974) in addition to Apocalypse Now in 1979. More than one of these titles is regarded among the best films of all time. But if you ask Coppola, as journalist Zach Baron does in a rich new profile for GQ magazine, the director thinks his best work is still ahead of him.

Megalopolis is the name of a passion project Coppola has wanted to make for years. Now, at 82, he says he's finally going to try to do it for real, and use his own fortune (generated by his vineyards as much as his films) to do it.

The cast is rumored to be massive: Deadline reported last summer that Coppola was in talks with Oscar Isaac, Forest Whitaker, Cate Blanchett, Jon Voight, Zendaya, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, and even his old Godfather collaborator James Caan for possible roles in the film. In the new interview, Coppola told Baron that the film will take "easily three years to make." So what exactly is Megalopolis about, you ask? Apparently, it's difficult to explain.

"It's a love story," Coppola told Baron. "A woman is divided between loyalties to two men. But not only two men. Each man comes with a philosophical principle. One is her father who raised her, who taught her Latin on his lap and is devoted to a much more classical view of society, the Marcus Aurelius kind of view. The other one, who is the lover, is the enemy of the father but is dedicated to a much more progressive 'Let's leap into the future, let's leap over all of this garbage that has contaminated humanity for 10,000 years. Let's find what we really are, which are an enlightened, friendly, joyous species.'"

According to Coppola, Megalopolis is above all about utopia, about the possibility that a better world could be created. Though it sounds dense and cerebral, Coppola told Baron he wants it to be like It's a Wonderful Life — a movie that people will watch once a year forever.

"I know that Megalopolis, the more personal I make it, and the more like a dream in me that I do it, the harder it will be to finance," Coppola said. And the longer it will earn money because people will be spending the next 50 years trying to think: What's really in Megalopolis? What is he saying? My God, what does that mean when that happens?"

Read the full story at GQ.

Related content:

• Watch Francis Ford Coppola pull you back in with trailer for new cut of The Godfather Part III
• Francis Ford Coppola talks Apocalypse Now on Blu-ray
• Miles Teller battles gangsters and Hollywood to make The Godfather in The Offer trailer