He has just returned from the Rome Film Festival, seemingly without a wink of jet lag. And the night before our lunch date, he was up until the wee hours at Nobu (the man loves Japanese food), happily chatting up admirers after receiving an award from the Directors Guild for his contributions to American culture, specifically his vivid cinematic depictions of New York City – such as The Godfather, The Godfather Part II and the movie he now likes to refer to as The Death of Michael Corleone.

Toronto. New York. London. Deauville, France. Paris. Rome. New York. Morelia, Mexico. Sao Paulo and Curitiba, Brazil. New York. Chicago. New York.

He has no true base as he flits around the world, his family chateau in Napa a faraway afterthought, perhaps by design, because it hasn’t felt like a home since his wife of 61 years, Eleanor, died in April.

So, he goes everywhere else he can, on a welcome, ever-expanding press tour for his latest magnum opus, Megalopolis, an epic, go-for-broke passion project 40 years in the making. The film’s dedication reads, “For my beloved”.

Dreamlike and somewhat deranged, Megalopolis is set in a fictional New Rome – think 70s New York as a musical theatre set. Its plot (very loosely) centres on a Shakespearean love story between Adam Driver’s Nobel Prize-winning architect Cesar Catilina, who is trying to build a utopia out of a miraculous substance he’s invented, and the daughter (Nathalie Emmanuel) of the city’s corrupt mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) – all while ordinary New Romans live in squalor. Every actor, whether new to Coppola or a longtime collaborator – Driver, Esposito, Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Shia LaBeouf, Aubrey Plaza, Laurence Fishburne, Chloe Fineman, Dustin Hoffman, etc – seems to be making the most insane choices possible.

“I love my cast,” Coppola says. “There were people on this side of the present political thing, and that side. People who had been cancelled, people who should have been cancelled.”

By now, you’ve seen it or read the reviews calling it “a spectacular catastrophe” or “wonderfully out there”. Your perspective may depend on how mad you are that a very rich octogenarian leveraged part of his family’s wine empire to fund the film’s US$120 million ($205m) budget, with no regrets. And young people on TikTok and X love it. So what if it only pulled in US$11.5 million ($19.7m), worldwide, at the box office?

When asked at the Cannes Film Festival how his family felt about his leveraging assets to make a very expensive avant-garde art film, Coppola replied, “My children, without exception – Sofia, Roman and my granddaughter Gia – they have wonderful careers. They don’t need a fortune.”

Coppola, after all, was forced to declare bankruptcy three times and sell his film studio Zoetrope, after the flop of his glitz musical tribute to Eleanor, 1982’s One From the Heart. What are a few grapes?

“My dad’s attitude was always pretty consistently optimistic,” says Roman Coppola, 59, a writer and producer, “and I share that. Maybe it’s genetic, or maybe learned.”

When the chips are down, Roman Coppola says, his father will often belt out the show tune (You Gotta Have) Heart, from Damn Yankees.

“He’s just willing to go for it, and I think it’s very admirable,” Roman adds.

Coppola sees Megalopolis as a warning to Americans that they are on track to lose their republic, just as Romans lost theirs. And his track record for prescience precedes him. Apocalypse Now dived into the damaging psychological effects of war on soldiers in Vietnam. The Conversation, about a hired eavesdropper, which he conceived in the 1960s, predicted the surveillance state 10 years before Watergate and decades before President George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act.

“Making movies without risk is like making babies without sex,” Coppola says. “You can do it. It’s possible, but it’s not very fun.”

Alfonso Cuarón, Oliver Stone and Steven Soderbergh all wrote to tell him they loved Megalopolis. (He didn’t hear from “Marty” Scorsese – but “maybe it’s not his kind of movie”, he allows.)

Plaza, who stars as a gold-digging television journalist, Wow Platinum, recalls being terrified to watch the movie alongside Spike Lee, the Coen brothers and Robert De Niro at the New York Film Festival in September but then feeling an electric energy in the room.

“They were so happy to watch someone who is so iconic take a big swing on such a big scale,” Plaza tells the Washington Post. “That’s what’s exciting and inspiring. It’s more important than if people think the movie is good or not. Like, who cares?”

No one gets honoured at the Kennedy Centre, as Coppola will be tomorrow, by playing it safe.

He’ll come to D.C. from Thanksgiving in North Carolina with Roman, then head off to Christmas in an undisclosed location with his family right after – just a pit stop on his sharklike quest to keep so busy mortality never finds him. Then he’s moving to London to make his next film, a “’30s-style strange musical” based on the 1922 Edith Wharton novel Glimpses of the Moon. He also wants to film another epic, Distant Vision, based on Thomas Mann’s 1901 novel Buddenbrooks, which will follow three generations of an Italian family and be centred on the invention of television. (He’s been doing experimental workshops on the concept since 2015.) In between, he hopes to re-edit his smaller movies, like 2007’s Youth Without Youth and 2009’s Tetro. Righting movie wrongs is his thing: In 2019, he revisited his 1984 film The Cotton Club to correct cuts he was forced to make. “I mean, who would suggest to cut 30 minutes of black people tap-dancing out of a movie about black people tap-dancing? Now it’s balanced. It’s beautiful,” he says.

But mainly, the move to London will be one of escape, a fresh start.

“I want to live somewhere where I didn’t live with my wife because I’m always looking for her. Where is she? I have to talk to her. Then I realise, Oh, I guess I’m not going to talk to her.”

Books have been written about Coppola, who acted as a bridge between old and new Hollywood, and his legacy. The actors whose careers he helped launch: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Laurence Fishburne, Harrison Ford and Richard Dreyfuss (as a producer of American Graffiti). His pioneering of electronic editing, extensive rehearsals with actors and attempts to create antiestablishment film distribution. Name a famous director – George Lucas, a protege who partially based Han Solo on Coppola because of his swashbuckling approach to the film biz; Scorsese, a lifelong friend; mentors and idols like King Vidor, Billy Wilder, Jean Renoir – and chances are, he has a story about that person.

Ask him about The Godfather and he’ll tell you how Paramount Pictures fought him all the way. They didn’t want Marlon Brando or Pacino. They didn’t want it to be a period movie because it cost too much. Then it was a massive hit, and they wanted another one. “They said, basically, ‘Francis, you’ve made Coca-Cola. You’re gonna stop making colas?’”

He tried everything he could to get out of making another one. He acquiesced to writing the script, but suggested an up-and-coming director, Scorsese. They wouldn’t have it. He asked for US$1 million ($1.7m) – a crazy fortune in 1973. They gave it to him. He told them he wanted to name it The Godfather Part II, an idea he’d gotten from the Russians who’d done Ivan the Terrible in two parts, at a time when no one had done a numbered sequel in Hollywood. The studio thought he was nuts, that people would think it was the same movie they’d already seen. But Coppola threatened to walk off the project if he didn’t get his way.

“So I’m the jerk that started numbers on movies,” he says. “I’m embarrassed, and I apologise to everyone.”

But when he talks about his proudest accomplishments, it all comes back to that huge, remarkable Italian family.

He met Eleanor on the set of his feature directorial debut, the low-budget 1963 horror film Dementia 13. She was three years older than him and working as an assistant art director.

He always wound up with women who were a few years older than him. Getting girls had never been easy, as someone whose gravitation toward theatre and movies came from growing up sickly with polio, lying in a hospital bed unable to move and having to create entire worlds in his imagination. He was a shy kid and spent his childhood moving constantly to follow his father’s career as an orchestra-hopping flautist. He got his first taste of making art with others directing plays at 17 at Hofstra, before his lucrative early career writing screenplays in LA, where he arrived “penniless”.

Also, his mother taught him that it was disrespectful to make passes at girls, so he had to wait for the ones who were confident enough to approach him. Eleanor turned out to be one of those.

They were friends at first – she had a boyfriend, a cameraman who was a friend of his – but eventually the pull was too strong. Within a few months of dating, she was pregnant with their first son, Gian-Carlo, or “Gio,” and they were getting married in Las Vegas.

Any time Coppola would be gone for longer than 10 days, they’d take the kids out of school and the entire family would come with him. During Apocalypse Now, Eleanor made a video diary she never intended to show the world that would become the celebrated 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness.

“In a way, we were not unlike a family of Chinese acrobats, and we were throwing the kids around, and so they all learned how to do that,” Coppola says. On the Apocalypse set in the Philippine jungle, Roman, then 11 or 12, spent all his time in the makeup department and would come home with fake eyes he’d drop into his dinner. (He has since co-written or produced many of Wes Anderson’s films and worked in visual effects or headed up second units for his father’s films, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula). Sofia, then 4, went to a Chinese school and would call “cut” whenever Francis and Eleanor were arguing too much in the car.

Gian-Carlo was often a background actor in his father’s movies and was charged with filming rehearsals for his father’s Gardens of Stone in Annapolis, Maryland, when he was killed in a tragic speedboat accident at just 22. His daughter, Gia, was born six months later.

“I think everyone really pitched in,” says Gia, 37, “And given the tragedy, it was a little light at the end of the tunnel for them to have a baby to distract from grief.” Gia recently premiered her film The Last Showgirl, starring Pamela Anderson.

Over summers in Napa, Francis and Eleanor would put the kids in what they called “creativity camp” – staging plays, making short movies, writing songs. It was when Sofia directed her cousin Jason Schwartzman in a one-act play based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story called Bernice Bobs Her Hair – in front of an audience of 100 family members and neighbors – that Coppola says he saw the inklings of someone who’d go on to direct Lost in Translation, The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette.

Later that summer, a friend of Sofia’sasked if she knew an awkward, quirky young man who’d be good as the lead for his sophomore feature, Rushmore. “And Sofia said, ‘Well, I’ve got this crazy cousin. He’s not an actor, but he’s really funny,’” Coppola says. And that’s how Schwartzman, who’s the son of Coppola’s actress sister, Talia Shire, got started. Coppola also gave Nicolas Cage, his older brother’s son, some of his early breaks in Rumble Fish and Peggy Sue Got Married.)

Coppola had known for 10 years that Eleanor had thymoma – a tumor in her lymphatic system. But she decided not to treat it with chemotherapy, choosing instead to keep up her energy. She made two movies during this period, Coppola says, proudly – the romantic comedies Paris Can Wait and Love Is Love Is Love.

“It’s hard to be married for 60 years and then suddenly not have her,” he says.

“I think grief is the price we pay for love. It’s worth it.”

Plaza can remember clear as day the moment she met Coppola, over Zoom, to audition for Megalopolis. She was in Sicily filming The White Lotus, and as she turned on the camera, midmorning LA time, there he was, in a tuxedo.

“I was looking at him going, ‘Wow, Francis, you didn’t have to wear a tuxedo for my audition. I can’t believe you got so dressed up for me,’” she says. “And he was like, ‘Well, my dear Aubrey, I am getting honoured at the Academy Awards after this Zoom meeting.’ And I realised, my God, it’s the day of the Academy Awards, and this man is still doing a Zoom audition with me. I was like, ‘You do not have to be doing this right now.’”

Hours later, he’d be onstage with Pacino and De Niro for the 50th anniversary of The Godfather, but he spent that whole morning with Plaza – asking her to pick a line from one of her movies and directing her how to say it 50 different ways. “He would say things like, ‘You’re holding your dying son in your arms. It’s the last thing you’ll ever say to him. Go!’ And then he’d be like, ‘You’re onstage. You’re the most famous stand-up comedian in the world. This is the joke you’re ending on. Go!’” she recalls. “I was like, ‘This is the craziest audition I’ve ever had.’”

That sense of play carried over to the Megalopolis soundstage in Atlanta. She’d arrive at work, and Coppola would be blasting circuslike Fellini soundtracks while the crew got ready. They’d all be balancing on swaying scaffolding while doing their lines, and then Voight would show up dressed like Robin Hood.

Coppola’s directing style – he does extensive rehearsals to give actors sensual experiences so they can react intuitively – goes back to the first day of The Godfather, when he set up a dinner with the cast so they could feel, rather than be told, the hierarchies of the family. “Everyone was scared about meeting Marlon Brando, me included,” he says. So he decorated a restaurant to look like the Corleone homestead and sat Brando at the head of the table with Pacino on the right and Caan and Duvall on the left, with Shire, who’d be playing their sister, serving them, and asked them to just talk and improvise. By the end of the dinner, they were like family.

On Megalopolis, he’d film games – such as asking Driver and Emmanuel to pretend to be drawn together on an imaginary rope – and eventually would shoot a normal take, “like a regular movie”, he says. “But when we looked at it, we said, ‘Let’s do more of the weird ones’.” The imaginary rope stayed in.

This chaotic approach didn’t always go over well. Before the movie came out, the Guardian ran a long exposé of crew complaints (which mainly seemed to boil down to Coppola doing whatever he wanted with his own money). More troubling were controversial reports of shooting conditions for the movie’s Bacchanalian club scenes. Several female extras accused Coppola of being “unprofessional” and kissing them without consent while they were topless. One filed a lawsuit against the production. Coppola, in turn, has filed a US$15 million ($25.7m) lawsuit against Variety for defamation for printing the accusations. “To see our collective efforts tainted by false, reckless and irresponsible reporting is devastating,” Coppola said. He declined to say more to the Post because of ongoing litigation.

The controversy is evidence that Coppola may no longer be in tune with the world of movies. He insists that “Hollywood doesn’t want me anymore” and feels out of step with an industry that is forcing all its creative young people to make movies whose main purpose is to meet studios’ debt obligations.

He’s a firm believer that doing work for money leads only to failure and dissatisfaction, but if you do what you love, fortune often follows. He bought a vineyard because of stories about his family making wine in the basement during Prohibition. He wanted to be comfortable and to have a place for family to visit during the two years of prepping and shooting Megalopolis outside Atlanta, so he built a movie-themed boutique hotel. (You know, as one does.)

“My wife used to tell me all the time, ‘Give your brain a rest’,” he says. “And the truth of the matter is, I don’t know how to. The only way I give myself a rest is to start another project.”

Gia went to visit him while she was five months pregnant and recalls how ridiculous it was that he was building this thing, and living in it, while filming the movie he’d been dreaming about her entire lifetime. “I think he just thrives in chaos,” she says. “It was really funny to be in this hotel under construction and have holes in the wall and people hammering and stuff as you’re trying to get up and go to visit set.”

He has so much more to do, which is why he entered a five-month residential weight loss programme at Duke University four years ago to learn about nutrition and lost 25kg. “I realised that you don’t see a lot of 85-year-old 300-pound [135kg] men walking around,” he says. He now fasts regularly and (horrors!) sticks to just one glass of wine a week.

He believes that Megalopolis will find its audience eventually, that it’ll “play for 40 years”. He dreams people will watch it on New Year’s Eve and ask themselves the film’s fundamental question: “Is the society we’re living in the only one available to us?”

Remember, almost all of his films were derided or considered flops or drove studios to anger at the time they came out. “I was almost fired on all of them,” he says, holding on to my arm for a little support as he exits the restaurant.

“The lesson is that the same things that they fire you for are the same things that later they give you lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.”