“I’m not sure what happened”: Francis Ford Coppola responds to ‘Megalopolis’ “fake review” controversy

Entertainment Tonight asked legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola about the “fake review” controversy that surrounded the trailer to his forthcoming epic, Megalopolis.

As reported, a now-deleted trailer seemed to spin the lukewarm reception the film got from critics at the Cannes Film Festival by trying to claim other critics years ago hated his classics like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now.

However, the apparently AI-generated quotes from real-life reviewers were fake, and the marketing company behind the campaign was dismissed by Lionsgate, which apologized.

For his part, Coppola alleges he had nothing to do with it. “You know, it was a mistake, an accident,” he said. “I’m not sure what happened.”

It’s also open to interpretation what the filmmaker meant when he said, “I know there were bad reviews, I’m the one who said they were bad reviews.” It’s not clear if he meant he’s his toughest critic, or if he’s the one who flagged the phony blurbs.

Coppola also mentioned that the pet project — for which he gathered a who’s who of stars, like Academy Award nominees Adam Driver, Shia LaBeouf and Laurence Fishburne, and Oscar winners Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman — was finally a chance for him to make a film that was truly his.

Coppola sunk a fortune of his own money into the movie.

He expressed, “When I made John Grisham‘s The Rainmaker, I took off, and I quit. And I just said, ‘I wanted to study, and … to learn what my kind of film is, whatever that might be.’ And after 14 years of that type of experimentation, I then came out and made a film that was my kind of film. So it’s not like anything you’ve ever seen.”

Megalopolis hits theaters Sept. 27.