The 'Megalopolis' Art Department Fallout Has a Lesson for Every Director

Production designer Beth Mickle got an email from Francis Ford Coppola and was so stunned, she immediately took a photo of her laptop screen to send to her parents.

"Nobody could believe it," she says in Megadoc , Mike Figgis' behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Megalopolis.

Mickle, whose credits include Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 , The Suicide Squad , and Motherless Brooklyn , had earned the call on the strength of her work and took the job with real excitement. What followed is one of the more instructive production stories to come out of Hollywood recently.

The thing is, even Mickle could sense some trouble from the jump.

"We are still circling around what Mega looks like and how we're going to approach it," she said in Megadoc.

With a film literally called Megalopolis , tasked with conjuring a version of New York that doesn't exist, that uncertainty wasn't a minor detail. Mickle described it as "equal parts exciting and distressing."

And yet, production moved forward. About a month into shooting in Atlanta, Coppola parted ways with his VFX team, and Mickle and supervising art director David Scott departed shortly after, leaving the film with no art department.

The Hollywood Reporter broke the story in January 2023, quoting a source who called the set "absolute madness" and drawing comparisons to Apocalypse Now.

The story landed internationally. Adam Driver made a public statement saying he'd been on some intense sets, but this wasn't one of them. Coppola went on the phone to push back.

For a hot minute, the story of Megalopolis was the production of Megalopolis.

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Hire for Alignment, Not Just for Resume

Coppola told Empire Magazine that he was drawn to Mickle after seeing her work on Motherless Brooklyn , specifically how it seemed to "span time" rather than lock into a single period. He explained the rift (via Screen Rant):

"Ultimately, Beth and I really didn't share the same vision. We [later] disagreed to a degree that it was decided that the best thing would be if I hired a concept artist and came up with frames that showed what I wanted, which I did. The art department was frustrated because they felt I was evolving the look of the picture independently of them. They wanted giant sets and images. I wanted other elements like costumes and live effects to do some of the work and have it not all be art-department-centric. So, there was disagreement along those lines."

Mickle's resume also included large-scale Marvel productions, and she brought the infrastructure that kind of work demands. Coppola, who self-financed Megalopolis to the tune of $120 million and sold off wineries to do it, wanted a leaner operation.

These were fundamental disagreements about how to make the film.

As a director, understanding what your collaborators expect from a production is part of the hiring process. Someone whose best work required significant resources may struggle to thrive in a stripped-down environment, not because of talent, but because of a mismatch.

Before you bring a department head on board, talk through not just what the film looks like, but how you expect to get there.

Abstract Vision Needs Concrete Translation (and Fast)

Coppola's ideas weren't landing with the art department. He ended up communicating his visual ideas to a concept artist through stick-figure sketches. That breakthrough happened during production, not before it.

Production designer Bradley Rubin was brought in.

"I think, throughout this film, Francis struggled, and he’d be the first to tell you that it’s more about the idea of what Megalopolis is,” Rubin told IndieWire. “And I think, for him, knowing he had to create a visual, he found himself back towards what [designer] Neri [Oxman] had started: the flora and the fauna and basically applying photosynthesis to architectural design."

If your collaborators are building sets and developing a look, and you're still working out what the world should feel like, you're working at cross-purposes.

As Mickle reflects in Megadoc , "I've wondered if we missed the signs earlier on that he wanted to approach the movie differently. I do wonder if he didn't communicate it as clearly."

She adds, "Knowing what I do now about how Francis prefers to work, I really do feel like we would have built this film very differently."

It's a good idea to have reference images, keyframes, concept sketches, even the kind of stream-of-consciousness emails that cinematographers send production designers after a scout. Anything that externalizes the vision can help the production stay on track.

The director's job is communication, and the earlier that communication starts, the less expensive a course correction becomes.

Budget Disagreements Are Creative Disagreements in Disguise

In Megadoc , Coppola is seen talking on the phone to manage the fallout. He says, "Well, you know, it basically [was] cost overruns. In other words, the art department of the film, the last film they did was Guardians of the Galaxy."

It was a detractor, in this case.

When Coppola wanted to cut an art director to run a tighter operation, the department stood firm and then walked away.

Coppola's position, as he told Empire, was that he knew what the director had in mind and didn't want to be told he had to maintain a large department he didn't want.

"I didn't want to economize. I wanted to get the art department to be smaller, and they didn't want to be smaller. They wanted all the other departments to be smaller. I said, 'Let's face it, I'm the only one who knows what the director has in mind. I don't care what you think.' Also, I'm not only the director—I was also putting up the money. So, to be told that I had to have a huge art department that I didn't want was absurd to me."

The art department's position was that you can't build a world of this scope on the fly with a small team.

Both things can be true. But the moment that disagreement is happening in week four of a shoot, it's already too late.

If you want to rely more on costumes and practical effects than on large-scale sets—which, per Coppola's own account, was part of his approach—that has to be part of the conversation while the department head is still deciding whether to take the job.

Did you see Megalopolis?