It was a mystery that moviegoers and hardcore fans of Francis Ford Coppola had been trying to solve for a long time, because it is a subject where the filmmaker is quite discreet. However, during our Video Club, the director confirmed it to us: the images shot 20 years ago in New York by Ron Fricke were used in the current version of his Megalopolisdespite all the changes made.
To make it short, Megalopolis is, as you know, a project that the filmmaker has been working on for 40 years. A script that has had more than 300 different versions, that has cost a fortune (Coppola took 120 million out of his own pocket to finance it), and during this period of preparation, for a while, photographer and cinematographer Ron Fricke shot more than 30 hours of footage in New York for the B team. The project having fallen through, Fricke left the project, and Coppola was only able to restart the machine in 2022, with a new director of photography, Mihai Mălaimare Jr., in Atlanta.
So the question of these images shot by Fricke, who had earned a reputation for being sublime, remained unanswered – one only has to look at his work, as director of photography for Godfrey Reggio or as a director, to realise this. Until today.
In his Video Club event released this Saturday, September 21, during a change of section, the filmmaker passes in front of the DVD highlighted by us from Koyaanisqatsi, the prophecythe Reggio documentary in which Fricke offered some of his most beautiful images, the director stops and tells us, quite simply:
“Koyaanisqatsi, the prophecy. In fact, one of the cinematographers on this film, Ron Fricke, shot a lot of second unit footage to Megalopolis.”
Light, certainly. Is the sentence ambiguous? Perhaps. But if he had meant that Fricke had, at one time, shot for the film before throwing the images in the trash, he certainly would not have formulated it in this way. From there to thinking that there are in the current montage numerous traces of these rare and fantasized images for decades, there is only one step – which we will gladly take.
A form of confirmation that fans will appreciate; in the middle of a half-hour of cinephile exchange.
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