Francis Ford Coppola felt a sense of “relief and joy” when his passion project Megalopolis received a seven-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday.

The Godfather director, who invested $120 million (£95 million) of his own money into the long-gestating project, became emotional as he received a seven-minute standing ovation after the film’s world premiere.

Reflecting on the reaction at a press conference on Friday, the 85-year-old filmmaker said, “You become filled with relief and joy… It was a crowning joy after all these years of having an idea and building it over different time(s) and abandoning it and then saying, ‘No, I shouldn’t abandon it.’ It was a beautiful feeling.”

Despite the standing ovation in the cinema, his sci-fi epic has drawn mixed to negative reviews from critics, with one calling it “the craziest thing” they’d ever seen and others describing it as “disaster” and “megabloated and megaboring”.

At the press conference, Adam Driver told reporters that he expected the film to be dissected by viewers.

“I don’t think that there will be something that imaginative on that scale again. I do think it’s a one-of-a-kind thing that will be dissected,” he shared. “I’ve seen it a lot of times and last night, it really moved me and I saw it in a different way than I had before and I think it’ll just get richer and richer.”

His co-star Giancarlo Esposito, who originally read for Megalopolis 37 years ago, revealed that he “came to tears” during the premiere because he “got” the film “all of a sudden”.

The trio was joined by cast members Aubrey Plaza Nathalie Emmanuel, Laurence Fishburne and Jon Voight, among others.

Megalopolis, Coppola’s first film since 2021’s Twixt, is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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