Aubrey Plaza found the speculation surrounding Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis “kind of funny”.

The Godfather director is gearing up premiere his $120 million (£95 million) sci-fi epic at the Cannes Film Festival later this week. Speculation has been swirling around the film, which he funded himself, due to its lack of distribution and a muted response to its one-and-only press screening.

The Parks and Recreation star, who plays journalist Wow Platinum in the movie, admitted that she was amused by the gossip.

“I thought it was kind of funny,” she told Deadline. “I would defend Francis all day long, but he doesn’t need my defence. I think when you’re on the inside of it, and you know what’s really going down, it’s almost like, ‘Let them make up their stories and let them cause a big ruckus about it. Why not? Drum up some more attention for the movie.’ I think it ends up, in my mind, all working for the movie.”

Plaza claimed that people want the film “to be a disaster” because of the “mythology” surrounding Coppola’s work, such as the notoriously tumultuous production on his 1979 film Apocalypse Now.

“People want that, especially with him, with all the stories about Apocalypse Now. They want it to be a disaster, they want some big epic… whatever,” she stated. “Knowing Francis like I do now, I would think that it wouldn’t bother him at all, that he would love the tales that are being told about the film, like, ‘Go on, make up all the stories you want.'”

Elsewhere in the interview, the Ingrid Goes West star revealed that she didn’t know Coppola had hired director Mike Figgis to shoot a making-of documentary until a week into production.

“I didn’t know that it was a real documentary being made or that Mike Figgis, no less, was operating the camera, until he introduced himself, I’d say a week into shooting, maybe even longer than that,” she shared. “I don’t know what’s going on in that documentary, but I hope I have approval over all that footage.”

Megalopolis, which also stars Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel and Giancarlo Esposito, will premiere at Cannes on Thursday.

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