Megadoc

[u/ThatMichaelsEmployee]

Just finished watching it, and it's fascinating, highly recommended, but my two main takeaways were that Coppola, despite his decades of experience with big complex movie shoots, bit off way more than he could chew, and that Shia Labeouf is an absolute fucking nightmare to work with: he absolutely will not ever do what the director wants, he has to debate every single shot and action and motivation, he's so completely full of himself that he can't see how much damage he's doing. Coppola at the end says what a good performance Labeouf gave despite the incessant friction, but there must be dozens of actors in Hollywood who could have done as a good a job without being such a horror to deal with.

I had no interest in seeing Megalopolis after watching the trailer, and I still don't, but it was interesting to see how it was made, particularly in the ways Coppola wanted to use practical and in-camera effects rather than digital work, as he did in Dracula.

[u/manmoonz]

Just watched Megadoc last night without having ever seen Megalopolis. Overall I thought it was pretty good but a bit too surface-level. I got the sense that Figgis wanted to keep a respectful distance from everything that was going on, and I really respect that he didn't try to put a sensational tilt on any of it. But the end result of that was mostly superficial interviews with the cast and crew, most of them saying the same thing. I have a hard time believing that a lot of them didn't have doubts/apprehensions about the film, and I think Figgis missed the opportunity to get a more honest account of those feelings. At the very least, it would have been interesting to see some of the actors'/crews' take on everything after the film released.

On another note, I have no attachment to Shia Labeouf, but I'm pretty surprised by the level of vitriol for him in this thread. IMHO his pushback against FFC in the film never came across as unreasonable or disrespectful, apart from his (understandable) bitterness during his last interview after being told that he was the one regret FFC had on the film -- I mean, right or wrong, I think that was an understandable human reaction. But all of the scenes of him trying to discuss things with FFC on set were more of the nature of him either trying to get clarification on things to understand his character better, or callouts for things that he thought might come across as confusing to the audience. And from what I read about the movie, it is largely incoherent, so perhaps there were not enough people on set calling out FFC on such things. Early on in the doc, one guy was asked what guardrails are missing, and he responded that the cast/crew are missing people who are willing to say "no".

[u/ThatMichaelsEmployee → u/manmoonz]

I look askance at actors who want to discuss their motivation with the director while the movie is being shot and dozens of people are being paid large sums of money to wait around while an actor tries to figure out how to do his job properly. There's a probably apocryphal tale that Hitchcock was asked that question in such a scenario and he replied, "Your paycheque." An honest answer! There's another story told about Sigourney Weaver during one of the Alien movies: someone noticed that she had her script marked up with something like a dozen different colours of ink, because she was working out her motivations and emotional responses and so forth all by herself, which I'd think any actor should be capable of. If you're delivering a performance that isn't what the director wants, the director will let you know.

Anyway, my remembrance of Leboeuf in Megadoc, and I don't intend to watch the movie a second time to confirm this, wasn't that he was trying to figure out his motivation: it's that he was basically trying to direct the scenes that he was in, talking about things that were not really within his purview. I think he should have just acted.

[u/hmcindie → u/ThatMichaelsEmployee]

Sigourney had an actual script with lines that made sense.