EXCLUSIVE: The 85-year-old, five-Oscar-winning director Francis Ford Coppola spends the days before Christmas not wrapping presents, but the international launch of Megalopolis. This week he’s giving interviews as the film opens in South American markets, but he took time to comment on a movement that’s gaining momentum to limit vaccinations as Donald Trump prepares to reenter the White House.

The USA continues gross Megalopolis was low for the more than $100 million he spent making the film, but Coppola said the experience was largely satisfactory — aside from a barrage of negative stories that he believes were attempts to sabotage him. Finding out who was behind them in the discovery phase was largely why he sued Variety. This mechanism certainly proved fruitful for actress Blake Lively, as she found evidence of a smear campaign laid out in emails in the dispute with her This ends with us Director Justin Baldoni. The actress/filmmaker was just dropped from WME after it became clear the agency would lose her and her husband Ryan Reynolds if he stayed. Coppola said he put a lot of effort into finding out who was spreading negative stories before every step he took on the film. Additionally, Coppola said he was happy with the film’s outcome. It cost him a share of a windfall that came with the sale of some of his wineries. He did this primarily to ensure that his businesses could continue to operate effectively even after his death, without being a burden to his children and grandchildren, most of whom are busy making films themselves .

“I like it because it remains extreme (polarizing); People say it’s the worst movie ever made and it’s the best movie ever made,” Coppola said. “I love that. People don’t realize that it’s a film made for controversy. I always knew that. Obviously I know the difference between a picture of this budget made without any sense of risk and a picture with this budget that was never made. This is the first film that was ever made as an indie film that had just enough budget for everything. I think it was money well spent did exactly what I wanted.”

That means stimulating discussion in warmed-over portions, long after he’s gone, just as he did Hearts of Darkness The Vietnam-set epic did. He predicted a catastrophe when he caused it, Apocalypse now grew in appreciation. Coppola, who recut the film several times before finding a version that reflected what he really wanted to say, said he made more money from it than any other film because it was his. The only reason he owned it was so no one else would support him.

“I feel that Megalopolis will go the way Apocalypse now in that regard,” he said. “I’m working on linking it to New Year’s Day so that every New Year’s Day we show the picture and ask the question in the society we live in, the only one available to us, and have a good, healthy discussion. “ I know when people talk about it every year they come up with great suggestions on how to improve things. I am committed to our human family; We are all a unique and wonderful family in the world. And as my picture expresses at the end: Let’s use our deep genius to make the world a better place for our children. That’s all I’m saying.”

His film’s thesis that a utopia is all about making informed decisions is relevant here as Donald Trump prepares to become president again. He has selected a number of controversial Cabinet nominees. It sent shivers down my spine when I read a Washington Post story last week about the vaccine skepticism expressed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the incoming commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Services. and how his top adviser Aaron Siri petitioned the government in 2022 to reconsider approval of a widely used polio vaccine. I remembered Coppola’s experience with the disease. I asked Coppola to revisit the scariest time of his life, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell did in a recent interview, to counter the threat of undermining public trust in the polio vaccine could become. So far, Trump has indicated that it will take a lot to get him to change his polio policy, but it is still alarming if eradicated viruses give even the appearance of returning.

“People don’t understand that polio is a fever that only affects you for one night,” Coppola told me. “You’re only sick for one night. The terrible effects of polio, such as the inability to breathe, requiring one to be in an iron lung, or the inability to walk or be completely paralyzed, are the result of the damage done in that one night of infection . I remember that night. I had a fever and they took me to a hospital ward. It was so full of children that there were stretchers stacked three or four high in the hallways because there were so many more children than there were beds in the hospital.

“I remember the children in the iron lung, whose faces you could see in the mirror, all crying for their parents,” he said. “They didn’t understand why they were suddenly in these steel cabinets. And I remember being more afraid for those kids than for myself because I wasn’t in one of those things.”

It quickly became clear that he wouldn’t just escape the nightmare.

“I looked around and then when I tried to get out of bed I fell on the floor and realized I couldn’t walk,” he said. “I couldn’t get up. And I stayed in that ward for about ten days before my parents were finally able to take me home.”

There was no clear course of treatment.

“It only became clear to me when they took me to a doctor, a French doctor. I remember who said that I should become a soldier and that I could live a long life and be very active and do anything I wanted. But then he added, although always in a wheelchair. And that’s when I realized what I was dealing with. And that afternoon we all went out for Chinese food and I cried, even though it was my favorite meal, because he told me I would always be in a wheelchair.”

Coppola was saved by his father’s refusal to accept the diagnosis. Carmine Coppola was a composer who won an Oscar for scoring several of his son’s films, but perhaps his greatest achievement in his son’s work was going against the grain and ensuring that Francis Coppola was given a real chance at life .

“My father didn’t trust the opinion,” he said. “There was a strong opinion that the cure or therapy was to pin you in your bed and make you immobile. It didn’t sound logical to him. So my father went to what was then called the March of Dimes. It was the charity that helped children with polio. And they told him there might be a second way to deal with it, which came from the Australian nurse Sister Kenny.”

Elizabeth Kenny, later played by Rosalind Russell in a film about her exploits, was a self-trained nurse in the Australian bush who spread the gospel that the best treatment for children with polio was to regenerate the muscles. Other treatments involved placing limbs in casts to ensure immobility, and these patients ended up in a wheelchair or worse, their muscles atrophied beyond repair.

“Their method was kind of a light exercise,” Coppola said. “And my father, thank God, thought it made more sense to take a paralyzed person than to immobilize him. The idea was that being immobile wouldn’t cause more damage to your muscles. They sent me this wonderful lady, I remember her name, Mrs. Wilson. She was an older lady with white hair. And she would come to me four days a week and do these very gentle exercises where she would lift her limbs and whatever. And this lady gradually, over the course of four or five months, gave me back the ability to move my left arm. And I’m totally grateful and know that the fact that I can walk at all today is thanks to the Sister Kenny System, which was a revolutionary idea back then. Everyone believed in the immobility theory. So that’s the big story, but the horror is that I saw a hospital full of screaming children, and that was finally over, thanks to the miraculous Salk vaccination that came just two or three years later.

“Both doctors who developed the Salk vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, donated the patents of their vaccines to the public, unlike what is happening today where the companies own them,” Coppola said. “To see (polio) disappearing, there are so many stories about the vaccine, how many lives it saved in an epidemic that just kept expanding…It makes the idea so absurd that now they’re talking about a U-turn on would think about the vaccines.” .”

Coppola said he will make a musical next, and this time he hopes the modest budget and European locations will lead to financing opportunities abroad.

“I’m looking forward to it because hopefully it’s a film I can have fun with,” he said. “But I always say that.”