Adam Driver is Francis Ford Coppola’s latest muse.

In the upcoming sci-fi drama from the screenwriter and director Big cityIn “The 40,” the 40-year-old actor plays an idealistic architect who wants to rebuild a dystopian city. As a newly released trailer proves, this is the first science fiction story from the Oscar-winning Godfather Filmmaker, 85.

“A Roman epic fable set in an imagined modern America,” says the synopsis. Big city Nathalie Emmanuel also stars as Driver’s lover, the prominent daughter of a corrupt mayor, played by Giancarlo Esposito.

The film features an all-star cast including Aubrey Plaza, Laurence Fishburne, Jon Voight, Grace VanderWaal, Shia LaBeouf and Dustin Hoffman.

“The city of New Rome must change, leading to conflict between Cesar Catilina, a brilliant artist who wants to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opponent, Mayor Franklyn Cicero, who remains committed to a regressive status quo and upholds greed, special interests, and partisan wars,” the synopsis continues.

The book concludes: “Torn between them is the well-known character Julia Cicero, the mayor’s daughter. Her love for Cesar has divided her loyalties and forced her to discover what she believes humanity truly deserves.”

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Coppola’s sister Talia Shire and her son Jason Schwartzman also star in the film, Apocalypse now The filmmaker has hinted that it is a deeply personal project that he has been working on for years.

“The seeds for Big city were planted when I was a child reading HG Wells’ Things to come“, Coppola said in a statement in April to Vanity Fair“This Korda classic from the 1930s is about shaping the world of tomorrow. It has always been with me, first as the ‘young scientist’ that I was and later as a filmmaker.”

He continued: “Having made many films on many different subjects and in many different styles, I was hoping for a project later in life when I might better understand What my personal style was … I must have rewrote it 300 times, hoping that each revision would improve it, even if only by half a percent.”

In 2022, Coppola announced that he intended to make the film with $120 million of his own money.

“The more personal I make it and the more of a dream it becomes in me to do it, the harder it becomes to finance it,” he said GQ at that time.

Big city premiered on May 16 in competition at the 77th Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the event’s top prize: the Palme d’Or. (It lost to the dramedy by Sean Baker.) Anora.)

In an Instagram post published on April 30, Coppola and Emmanuel, 35, shared the “first official image” from their film, according to the director’s caption.

“It gives me pleasure to give a glimpse into the future,” wrote the director.

Big city will be in cinemas on September 27th.