Francis Ford Coppola wants to set the record straight. So much has already been said and written about his film Megalopolis, a project allegedly 40 years in the making, at a cost to him personally of $US120 million, and a story of such massive and unwieldy ambition that some wags have dubbed it Megaflopolis or Messalopolis. But he insists that much of what has been said is wrong … or at least, not quite right.

The story that he sold his winery to make it?

“No, it’s not accurate at all,” he says bluntly.

Coppola, 85, is speaking from his home on the grounds of Inglenook, the Napa Valley winery he bought in 1975 with proceeds from The Godfather and which he still owns, along with another in Portland, Oregon. (The top-of-the-range Rubicon sells for $US300 a bottle and, like his movie, is inspired by ancient Rome.)

The properties he sold are further south, in Sonoma, and pitched at the mass market. But sell is the wrong word, he insists; it was a $US500 million merger that leaves him with a 25 per cent stake in one of the largest wine producers in the US.

“I have two living children, and they love to be in the wine business, but it’s mainly so they can give gifts for Christmas. They don’t want to run it,” he explains. One of Coppola’s sons, Gian-Carlo, died in a boating accident in 1986 and his remaining children, Roman and Sofia, are also filmmakers. Given their reluctance to enter the wine business, Coppola says, he “began to realise I needed someone who could run it after my leaving”.

But if he didn’t actually sell his wineries to finance Megalopolis, is it at least true that he paid for the movie himself?

“Totally self-funded,” he confirms. “The only filmmaker who’s ever done that in the history of cinema is the great French director Jacques Tati. When he was an older man, Tati borrowed on all his successful films to make one last big film that no one wanted him to make, and it was a big flop. And so he lived in poverty until he died, with friends helping him.”

That movie was Playtime and, says Coppola, it is now considered Tati’s masterpiece.

The question is, will Megalopolis, which grapples with the decline of America, drawing explicit parallels with the fall of Rome, eventually be seen in the same way? Or will it be forever viewed as a sad final chapter in the storied career of one of American cinema’s most talented auteurs?

The film debuted in Cannes in May to a seven-minute standing ovation, some walkouts, and a muted response from critics. Audiences were as baffled by its hotchpotch style and tone as by its storyline, which interweaves politics, economics, philosophy, science and romance in a plot that seems to be about everything and nothing at the same time.

Leading man Adam Driver plays visionary architect Cesar Catilina, a character who could have stepped straight from the pages of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead if not for the fact he is also a social reformer. At one point he delivers an extended section of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech; at another he teeters on the brink of leaping to his death from the top of the Chrysler Building, only to discover he can stop time; at yet another, he has his face rebuilt using the miracle element he has created, Megalon, a substance that exists somewhere between nature and technology, and seemingly offers humanity’s best hope for survival.

Little wonder people don’t quite know what to make of it.

What does Coppola himself make of it? What is this movie about?

“What I’m really trying to say is that the people of the world, we are one human family. [But] the Earth is filled with unfulfilled, unsatisfied, unhappy people because advertising is the business in which you sell people happiness, and you can’t sell happiness to happy people. The population, in my opinion, is deliberately kept unhappy so they are susceptible to the $3 trillion advertising industry, and that is an artificial construct.”

By nature, he believes, human beings are joyous and creative. All the best things, and all the great advances in civilisation, come from play, and play comes from childhood, and adults interacting with children. “Our greatest ability is the act of playing, that is what makes us so creative, so we should play and enjoy and create. And in doing so, we’ll solve all these terrible problems of our Earth, which we are destroying, stupidly.”

So, is he suggesting that the true villain of Megalopolis is advertising, the selling of unhappiness?

“Yes,” he says. “We’re not even selling products, we’re selling customers identity. ‘I want to be that kind of person, I’ll buy those kinds of clothes’, which is selling brands, which is to say we’re selling identity. And identity is ours. It already belongs to us. How can you sell me something that’s already mine?”

Hearing him freewheel like this, I feel I’ve been granted a little glimpse into the interests and influences that fuel the ever-curious Coppola mind. But I suspect I’ve also been given a little sense of what it might be like to be on a set where a couple of hundred people are standing around expensively, waiting for him to focus and make a call.

Even before it debuted, claims emerged of a shoot that spiralled out of control, with the director sacking his art department, continually changing his mind on the day, and – according to claims published in The Guardian and Variety – trying “to kiss some of the topless and scantily clad female extras” on set in a bid to “get them in the mood” for a party scene. Coppola is now suing Variety  over its reporting, and is seeking $US15 million in damages.

I treat any girl who’s younger than my daughter as a child, because Sofia is a child in my mind.

Francis Ford Coppola

Perhaps understandably, distributors were reluctant to come onboard with the finished film. When Lionsgate eventually agreed to take it on, it did so on the basis that the writer-director-producer also cover the costs of marketing, a highly unusual move.

Coppola wants to set the record straight on some of the above charges. He had wanted to get rid of one of his five art department heads, he explains, because he felt their working methods were more suited to a Marvel movie than his production. But the other heads gave him an ultimatum: “They said to me, ‘if you fire one of them we’ll resign’. I did fire the one, and they resigned.”

The story about him kissing girls, he says, “was absurd. Not at all anything in my entire career was like that. You know, I treat any girl who’s younger than my daughter [Lost in Translation director] Sofia, and she’s 52, as a child, because Sofia is a child in my mind.” (He did admit to Rolling Stone recently that he had given a few pecks on the cheek, but insisted “they were young women I knew”.)

He puts these stories down to “disgruntled” former employees. “Most, if not all, of the negativity we’ve suffered comes from unknown sources,” he tells me. “And you know, I’m not fazed by it.”

As for the freewheeling approach on a day-to-day basis, actor Jon Voight – who plays the mega-wealthy Hamilton Crassus III, a character clearly modelled on Donald Trump, has explained it as simply business as usual for the five-time Oscar-winner.

“Francis said, ‘The script is just the bones, and we’re going to have to find out what it is’,” he has said. “That’s the way he works. There’s a lot of improvisation. He sees what’s on the screen, and he’s right there on the set and he’ll change course and say, ‘Let’s go in this direction’.”

At any rate, Coppola is no stranger to this kind of response. He’s had bad reviews for many of his movies – The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in particular. In time, they have been reappraised and mostly lauded as masterpieces.

That’s a point that was made recently in a trailer that featured quotes from some negative reviews, with Laurence Fishburne – who was just 15 when he was cast in Apocalypse Now, and plays a double role in Megalopolis, as Adam Driver’s chauffeur and as the movie’s narrator – sonorously intoning that “true genius is often misunderstood”.

The trouble is, the lines from the reviews were fake. Within 24 hours, the trailer – paid for out of Coppola’s own pocket, and created by a company owned by his nephew Robert Schwartzman – was pulled.

It was a huge embarrassment, though I did wonder (half-seriously) when writing about it if it was a deliberate ploy and a stroke of marketing genius rather than a snafu.

“It would be a stroke of genius if it was intended, but no, it wasn’t. It was an accident,” says Coppola.

He was “shocked”, he says, by the stuff-up, putting it down to a communication breakdown, in which his paraphrased recounting of some of the bad reviews was treated as if it were verbatim quoting.

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“The trailer was sort of true,” he says. “Apocalypse Now got some of the worst – ‘the biggest disaster of Hollywood in the last 40 years’ – even Godfather got some terrible reviews, and certainly Dracula did. We could make that same trailer with accurate reviews, but now the cat is out of the bag and they decided not to do that.”

Coppola takes comfort from the parallels with Apocalypse Now in other ways – particularly the fact he also owned the earlier film outright, because self-financing (via loans guaranteed against pretty much everything he owned) was the only way to get it made.

It means he could lose his money, of course. But it also means that if Megalopolis makes any kind of return, he will keep the bulk of it. “I’ve taken all the risk,” he says. “My feeling is that the movie will go on earning money over the next 30 or 40 years, just as Apocalypse does, and in the end, the estate will survive one way or the other.”

What saved him with Apocalypse Now is that people went back to see it multiple times. “And I think one thing that is helpful with Megalopolis is that it may be many things, but one thing it isn’t is boring. In other words, you can sit through it, and when you’re finished, you say, ‘What the hell did I just see? I want to see it again’.

“There are a lot of ideas in the film that you get on a second viewing,” he adds. “So I think that will probably be good. I am optimistic and hopeful.”

At 85, it’s understandable that Coppola is focused on his legacy. But he isn’t prepared to retire his director’s chair just yet. He admits to being a little lost since the death of Eleanor, his wife of 60 years, in April. But that’s also spurring him on to his next project.

“I confess [her passing] is more traumatic than you can imagine, because everything around reminds me, ‘Oh, I have to ask her, oh, I have to check with her, oh, I better ask her opinion, what does she have to say?’ And I don’t have her any more. So I’m thinking of making a fun musical film in London, because I’ve spent very little time in London, and never with my wife, so I don’t associate it with her.”

As we’re talking, someone brings him a script for this very project, Glimpses of the Moon. “It’s based on an Edith Wharton novel. It’s wonderful.”

He has a second project in mind too, a wildly ambitious film that’s actually a live performance, based on Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks. Age has not wearied him and neither, it’s clear, have the critics.

“I think I have two more films in me,” he says. “I’m feeling pretty good.”

Megalopolis opens in cinemas on September 26.

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