exist MegacityFrancis Ford Coppola’s box-office flop, Futuristic Developments was the wild utopian vision of Adam Driver’s protagonist Cesar Catilina, He was a controversial urban planner who invented a new building material called Megalon. To shape the film’s striking biomorphic cityscapes, the director collaborated with Neri Oxman, a 48-year-old Israeli-American interdisciplinary designer acclaimed for her work on ” Known for his practice in the field of “material ecology”.
Oxman, whose work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Center Pompidou, has previously collaborated with Björk to create a 3D-printed mask that externalized the singer’s musculoskeletal system during performances. On her website, she says she drew inspiration from Manhattan’s utopian cityscape. In Coppola’s film, the extradimensional municipality has been renamed New Rome.
Francis Ford Coppola and Neri Oxman attend the premiere of Megacity in New York City.
Dominique Bindel/WireImage
Oxman did not respond hollywood reporterPhoto with Coppola on the New York red carpet on September 23, in response to a request to discuss her work in the film Megacity Premiere. (A few years ago, when she was a tenured professor at MIT, paparazzi targeted her after famed architecture buff Brad Pitt came to visit her lab; photographers thought they “Much of Dr. Sheila and the science behind Megalon were left on the cutting room floor,” her husband, billionaire activist investor Bill Ackman, later said on social media. wrote.
Ackerman is a well-known critic of DEI initiatives and a self-proclaimed big creative, himself a big figure in Coppola’s “New Rome.” His campaign to oust Harvard’s then-president over plagiarism accusations faced backlash this year, with Oxman apologizing for citation errors in his doctoral thesis. Earlier, Oxman was in long-running trouble over accepting a donation from sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to her MIT lab, as Ackerman privately tried to push the envelope on the issue. Cover-up for her academic bosses was made public.
While it’s unclear when Coppola joined Oxman on the project, it’s unlikely that she and her husband’s recent run-ins with scandal bothered the director — perhaps quite the opposite. He made it clear before the game Megacity The release said he intentionally chose to work with people on projects that he considered “cancelled,” noting, “What I don’t want to happen is that we’re perceived as some woke Hollywood production.”
