I Filmed Coppola’s $120 Million Megalopolis With One Camera

Mike Figgis on Leaving Las Vegas, Timecode, and why the best creative work comes from stripping everything back.

Mike Figgis shot Leaving Las Vegas in three weeks on Super 16 with a skeleton crew and no permits on the Las Vegas Strip. Nicolas Cage won the Oscar. The film cost almost nothing. That was the point.

Figgis has been making this argument for 50 years, from trumpet in Bryan Ferry's pre-Roxy band in Newcastle, to getting booed off stage in Hamburg by a diehard blues crowd, to Timecode, his real-time four-screen film written on music paper as a 95-bar string quartet.

This is a wide conversation that earns every turn. The story of the first Roxy Music rehearsal, Figgis standing in the room thinking it would never work, sets up everything that follows about being wrong in interesting directions. The worst test screening in Hollywood history, which left him sitting next to Richard Gere feeling oddly happy, is one of the best anecdotes this show has had. And the Coppola story at the end, one small camera following $120 million of someone else's vision, lands the argument the episode has been building toward: the people who invent the system are sometimes the last ones to escape it.