Francis Ford Coppola is sharing his opinions on Donald Trump’s proposed movie tariffs.
During a Friday profile with GQ, The Godfather director addressed the “uncertainty” surrounding the tariffs the president announced Sunday. He said that implementing these tariffs would be “like slamming the door closed” on potential monetary gain for the United States.
“All it does is create uncertainty. People don’t understand that the economy in the previous administration? There was world inflation, there wasn’t [just] inflation in America,” Coppola said. “The entire world was going through a serious inflationary trend. But the country that did the best with it — and which other countries were jealous of — was the United States. So, the United States really banked a lot of money previous to this new administration, and there’s a lot of money in the country, and these tariffs are like slamming the door closed on what was a very prosperous situation.”
Coppola revealed that since Trump’s reelection, “people are selling out screenings of Megalopolis,” his film which compares the fall of the Roman Republic to the future of the U.S. He said that when the movie released in September 2024, “it was so prophetic or prescient to say America is like Rome — it’s going to maybe lose its republic,” adding that its recent surge resembles that of the 1979 war film Apocalypse Now.
“It’s just like what happened with Apocalypse Now. Apocalypse Now was a big flop, it got terrible reviews, everyone said it was the worst movie ever made. And yet people never stopped going to see it,” Coppola explained. “The same thing is now happening with Megalopolis.”
Ahead of the film’s release, Coppola elaborated on his inspiration to create “a Roman epic set in modern America as Rome” at the New York Film Festival. “Today, America is Rome, and they’re about to go through the same experience, for the same reasons that Rome lost its republic and ended up with an emperor. It was very prescient to do a movie about America as Rome because it’s going to happen in a few months,” he said.
“And it was the same reason; the Rome of that time was so prosperous, Rome is making lots of money so the senators were actually very interested in their power and their own wealth, and they weren’t managing the country,” he added. “Well the same thing has happened here. Our senates and our representatives are all wealthy and manipulating their own power rather than running the country and then we’re in danger of losing it.”
Notably, Megalopolis is not available to stream online, with the director deciding to take the film on tour in theaters instead. An insider previously told The Hollywood Reporter that Megalopolis wasn’t streaming because “[Coppola] wants it to play in theaters, the way it was intended,” which he reiterated in the Friday interview.
The five-time Oscar winner said that his 2024 drama, which he poured $120 million into, isn’t streaming “because the film is still being shown in theaters” combined with the note that he doesn’t “want anyone to own it.”
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