Francis Ford Coppola has been working on his epic sci-fi fantasy drama Megalopolis since the early 1980s. Fresh off the success of Apocalypse Now, Coppola became fascinated by the story of Lucius Sergius Catiline, who in 63 B.C. sought to forcibly overthrow the consuls of the Roman Republic, co-led by Marcus Tullius Cicero. This attempted coup d’etat is known as the Catilinarian conspiracy. 

Coppola wanted to set the conflict of two ambitious men with very different ideals in modern New York, so that he could draw parallels between the beginning of the end for the Roman Republic and the contemporary United States.