All eyes are on Coppola in Cannes. Sound familiar?

CANNES, France (AP) — Francis Ford Coppola on Thursday will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival a film on which he has risked everything, one that's arriving clouded by rumors of production turmoil. Sound familiar?

On Thursday, Coppola's self-financed opus “Megalopolis” will make its much-awaited premiere. Other films are debuting in Cannes with more fanfare and hype, but none has quite the curiosity of “Megalopolis," the first film by the 85-year-old filmmaker in 13 years. Coppola put $120 million of his own money into it.

Forty-five years ago, something very similar played out when Coppola was toiling over the edit for “Apocalypse Now.” The movie's infamous Philippines production, which would be documented by Coppola's late wife, Eleanor, was already legend. The originally planned release in December 1977 had come and gone. Coppola had, himself, poured some $16 million into the $31 million budget for his Vietnam-set telling of Joseph Conrad's “Heart of Darkness.”

“I was terrified. For one thing, I was on the hook for the whole budget personally — that’s why I came to own it,” Coppola said in 2019. “In addition, in those days interest was over 25, 27%. So it looked as though, especially given the controversy and all the bogus articles being written about a movie that no one knew anything about but were predicting it was ‘the heralded mess’ of that year, it looked as though I was never going to get out of the jeopardy I was in. I had kids, I was young. I had no family fortune behind me. I was scared stiff.”