“Happy New Year. For me, this is a dream come true,” said Frances Ford Coppola, surveying the audience that had come to see his passion project, “Megalopolis,” at an American Cinematheque conversation-and-screening event to kick off 2025. The dream part of it, for him, was the chance to spend 100 minutes talking not very much about his passion project itself, but rather using it as a springboard for an infinitely widespread discussion about about political, economic and social ideals.

“Megalopolis,” as anyone who’s seen it will know, is largely about lending credibility to utopian ideals that politicians and numbers-crunchers would view as cynical. And Coppola’s own personal vision of a utopia involves Q&As in which film fans aren’t asking questions about budgets or box office or critics or even filmmaking minutiae but, rather, engaging him on the subjects he said he’d rather be talking about, in this “interactive” discussion.