While working on his latest film, MegapolisFrancis Ford Coppola had an idea: What if viewers interacted with the film itself? He had microphones placed in the audience at each screening, so that anyone who wanted to could ask the characters a question at a predetermined moment – and someone would respond on screen. It would bridge the gap between fact and fiction. It would prove that a visit to the cinema can really be a unique experience.

And it would have worked, the director told me earlier this month at the Toronto International Film Festival, if he had found someone to help make the technology work. Coppola had done everything else to create the experience: He had come up with questions he expected people would want to ask – like how the characters felt or what they wanted to do next – and he had put together different answers to each question. . He then had his cast filmed reciting the responses he had written. He even started working with the programmers behind Alexa, Amazon’s AI assistant, on a mechanism that would process audience members’ questions and play a clip with the most appropriate answer. “If you went to the movies every day for a week and saw it seven times, every time would be different,” he said. “That was the original intention, and that’s how we filmed it.”

But producing the now infamous scene, as film festival goers can attest, didn’t go to plan—and not much else, either, when it comes to Megapolis‘s rollout. Lionsgate, which signed on to distribute the film weeks after its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, had to pull a trailer with made-up quotes from critics about Coppola’s best-known work, such as The godfather And Apocalypse now. In July, Variety reported allegations of his on-set misconduct, including trying to kiss extras. (Coppola denied the allegations and has since filed a defamation lawsuit Variety.) Box office analysts have predicted the film will flop. And Amazon abandoned the project during production, leaving Coppola no choice but to reduce the interactive theater component to a single, scripted exchange.

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When we spoke, Coppola didn’t sound shocked by the wide gap between his ambitions and their implementation. Instead, he viewed such obstacles as inevitable for an idiosyncratic filmmaker. “Cinema is something that is constantly changing,” he said. “But every time you try to change it, everyone says, ‘Well, that’s not how it should be.’ So we have to accept much more that we see films that are different from the films we are used to.”

Megapolisalthough, is a lot accept. The film, out in theaters today, imagines 21st century New York City as a retro-futuristic Roman Empire, in which a visionary architect, Cesar Catilina (played by Adam Driver), attempts to transform New Rome into a utopia using a space-time altering material he invented called ‘Megalon’. The town’s mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), doubts Cesar’s ability to pull this off, but his socialist daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) sees promise in Cesar’s work. Built on ideas that Coppola first conceived in 1977 and began developing into a film in 1983, Megapolis The aim is to map out how a decadent civilization on the brink of collapse can be saved by ideals. The result is a maximalist mess that deals with too many disparate themes – such as the dangers of technology, the domination of wealth, the amorality of celebrities and the importance of preserving artistic legacies. Characters speak in non-sequiturs and platitudes. Storylines are introduced and discarded randomly. By the end of my screening, I had filled my pages of notes with question marks.

But despite all its shortcomings, Megapolis is unapologetically candid and delivers an earnest plea to imagine a better future. Perhaps that sounds as banal as the underwritten dialogue, but Coppola’s intention, he explained, was to inspire his audience to think like his protagonist – to create, innovate and even break the rules of cinema by to ask Cesar a question directly. “Every day in the news you see a heartbreak that isn’t necessary,” he said. ‘Nothing bad happens these days must be… We are capable of solving any problem we face.” That’s why he covered Megapolis with tributes to ‘every movie I’ve ever loved’ – including works by Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa and Alfred Hitchcock – to emphasize the value of art. And after having to delay the script until 2021, when production began in earnest, Coppola coped with his own heartbreak by self-financing the $120 million passion project.

What he has accomplished is too scattershot to be considered a masterpiece, yet too sincere to be dismissed as self-indulgence. And if the audience doesn’t fully understand what he stands for MegapolisCoppola admitted, at least he thinks they’ll have a good time. “The movie,” he shrugged, “isn’t boring.”

About half way MegapolisCesar and Julia meet on top of a tower overlooking the city. They have fallen in love, and as they kiss, Cesar stops time. The bouquet of flowers Julia had dropped freezes in midair. The scaffolding they are standing on stops swaying. They are locked in an embrace, suspended over New Rome. It’s a delicate, physics-defying scene to behold: two bodies on a motionless platform supported by wires descending from an invisible place. For the viewer there is simply an endless, golden sky.

Megapolis‘s best moments convey Coppola’s taste for groundbreaking playing. What if, in addition to an audience member standing up and talking to Cesar, Cesar wondered, reciting Hamlet’s entire soliloquy, as Driver did during rehearsal? What if Driver and Emmanuel’s tug-of-war continued into one take? “I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that films are the children of the theater, and how they relate to each other,” Coppola told me. “When we play together, we are most creative.”

The film falters when it tries to reconcile that whimsy with its more serious goal: to draw clear parallels between its setting, a city crumbling under corrupt leadership, and modern America. In the final act, Cesar gives a speech about how building a perfect society requires debate. But at best the message comes across more like a digestible slogan – and Megapolis struggles to clarify how Cesar will prevent the end of the New Rome, and whether Coppola himself has any leadership for the salvation of democracy.

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What the director does have are theories about human potential, a topic Coppola enthusiastically discussed during our conversation. He asked if I remembered Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellarand then chuckled as he expressed his belief that – like an idea about the transcendent nature of our relationships that the spacefaring epic puts forward – love itself is a force made up of particles like photons. He suspected, he said, that every human being has the capacity to “solve the problems we need to solve in order to live sensibly on this planet.” And he told me how, while making it Megapolishe tried to rewrite what happened in 1936 Things to comea science fiction film written by HG Wells that he considers formative. It is the story of a group of people building the city of the future, but their efforts last generations. “I never liked that,” Coppola explained. Instead, he saw room for improvement. “I said, ‘Well, my movie, if they’re building the future, I want them to build it faster.’” After all, artists control time, he told me, echoing a line from Megapolis. “They always have.”

But this control does not extend beyond the contours of an artist’s work. At my screening, shortly after the live Q&A portion, the film froze on Cicero’s face, the colors blending together. I wasn’t sure if this was intentional, and it didn’t seem like anyone else was either. “This could all be part of it?” someone wondered out loud as theater staff rushed to restart the projector.

It wasn’t, but it felt like it could have happened. Megapolis imagines a universe where a man can hold memories in his hand; the command “Time, stop” really works; and characters can hear their viewers from beyond the fourth wall. Yet none of these experimental swings quite land, because the thing Megapolis What Coppola needed most was what Coppola couldn’t imagine: enough years before the technology would be able – and change public opinion in his favor – to implement his most daring ideas.

Perhaps the key to understanding MegapolisSo it is both unnerving and striking, the 85-year-old director’s gruesome, epic attempt to manipulate time itself at the expense of narrative logic. Coppola had so much at his disposal to bring his would-be fable about America to life: a renowned career that allowed him to hire a top-notch cast and crew; money from independent sources to finance a significant part of the costs; and enough experience weathering other difficult productions to handle this one with confidence. But what he ultimately created is not the realization of his ambitions; it is an unfinished work, waiting for our reality to catch up with its fantasy.