Shawdesh Desk:

One of Hollywood’s most mythologised directors, Francis Ford Coppola, returned to the Cannes Film Festival with the almost impossibly hyped ‘Megalopolis’ on Thursday.

He has been in this position before, 45 years ago, when the shoot for ‘Apocalypse Now’ turned into now legendary mayhem and looked destined for disaster.

Instead it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, became one of the most celebrated films of all time and burnished the reputation Coppola had made with ‘The Godfather’.

Will history repeat itself as Coppola, 85, returns to the French Cote d’Azur to premiere ‘Megalopolis’, a $120-million project he self-funded by selling part of his California wine estate and which has been gestating for some 40 years?

It is billed as an Ancient Roman epic transplanted to modern-day America with Adam Driver as a visionary architect seeking to rebuild a crumbling city.

The trailer’s portentous voiceover intones: ‘When does an empire die? Does it collapse in one terrible moment? No, no, but there comes a time when its people no longer believe in it.’

Coppola — who also won a Palme d’Or in 1974 for ‘The Conversation’ — shows no worries that his own imperial reputation is crumbling.

In a statement to Vanity Fair, he gave a list of 40-plus influences for the film that included Voltaire, Plato, Shakespeare, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Kurosawa, ‘Moses and the prophets all thrown in’.

But tales of crew walkouts and complaints over Coppola’s maniacal behaviour — as well as worried reactions from Hollywood execs over the final results — are already legion.

The cast includes Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf and Dustin Hoffman, but the film has been in production so long that some actors who read for roles are long dead, including Paul Newman and James Gandolfini.

‘I wanted to make a film about a human expression of what really is heaven on Earth,’ Coppola said at the Lumiere Festival in Lyon back in 2019. ‘I would say it’s the most ambitious film (I’ve worked on) -– more than ‘Apocalypse Now’.’

Although Coppola has created several duds since his 1970s heyday, many still believe in his genius.

‘Cannes is important to him and he is important to Cannes. He comes as an artist,’ said festival head Thierry Fremaux.

‘Megalopolis’ is one of 22 films competing for the Palme d’Or, facing a jury led by ‘Barbie’ director Greta Gerwig, who will announce their verdict on May 25.

Other entries include a Donald Trump biopic, ‘The Apprentice’, and new films from arthouse favourites David Cronenberg (‘The Shrouds’), Italy’s Paolo Sorrentino (‘Parthenope’), as well as ‘Emilia Perez’, an unlikely sounding musical about a Mexican cartel boss having a sex change from French Palme d’Or-winner Jacques Audiard.

The competition started strongly on Wednesday with ‘Wild Diamond’, about a fragile teenage girl desperate to find fame on social media and reality TV.

Movie magazine Variety said it ‘announces the arrival of a major filmmaker’ in first-time French director Agathe Reidinger.

There were also great reviews for the other early entry — ‘The Girl with the Needle’ — one of the grimmest stories ever shown at Cannes.

The bleak Danish-set period drama about a factory worker who desperately tries to get an abortion after becoming pregnant by her boss — with a serial killer twist — was described as ‘a poetic and dark fairytale’.