By CAROLYN BROWN
Staff Writer
Francis Ford Coppola’s latest movie — his first in over a decade — is a passion project he’s been working on for 40 years.
Even more exciting? An actress from Northampton is in it.
CONTRIBUTED photograph
Actress Caroline Bloom, who grew up in Northampton, with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola at his home studio in California.
Caroline Bloom will make her most prestigious screen credit to date in “Megalopolis,” which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May and was released in theaters today, Friday, Sept. 27. Bloom, who grew up in Northampton and is now based in Los Angeles, plays the secretary to Cesar Catilina, an architect who can stop time, played by Adam Driver.
The movie casts the United States as a modern-day Roman Empire and follows Catilina in his quest to rebuild New York City into Megalopolis, “a city people can dream about.”
Besides Driver, the movie’s star-studded cast includes Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Jason Schwartzman, and Dustin Hoffman.
Coppola, who is best known for directing “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now,” had been working on “Megalopolis” since the 1970s; the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks forced him to stop what would have been a much earlier production of the movie. (“Here I’m making a movie about utopia and the world in which we achieve this breakthrough that I am so hopeful about, and then a huge terrorist attack happens. I couldn’t write my way out of it,” he told Rolling Stone. “So I abandoned the project.”)
Even so, Coppola said that the film’s ending is optimistic and provides a good starting point for discussions about fixing the country:
“This movie won’t cure our ills. But I honestly believe that what will save us is the fact that we’ve got to talk about the future … And all I want is for this movie to start a conversation. You can’t have a utopia without a conversation.”
In Bloom’s scene in the film, she and another secretary are signing autographs for Cesar Catilina before Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel, best known as Missandei in “Game of Thrones”) walks in, hoping to meet Catilina face-to-face. Cicero’s father, the mayor, is Catilina’s rival, but Cicero and Catilina end up developing a star-crossed romance.
The two secretaries sign in sync, “like a musical tempo,” a synchronicity that took several tries to establish. Coppola’s insistence on “bringing a theatricality to a film set” impressed Bloom. “He really cared about the choreography of the scene,” she said.
In directing the scene, Coppola referenced the mirror technique, in which two performers follow and match each other’s movements. It’s something actors learn very early on in their training — and something that Bloom first learned in Northampton.
As a child, Bloom was immersed in the local performing arts scene through organizations like Commonwealth Opera, New Century Theater, the Northamptones, and the Hackworth School of Performing Arts. She grew up speaking French and English (her mother is a retired professor of French at Mount Holyoke College) and now identifies as trilingual, which she says has been a boon to her career.
BN PHOTOGRAPHY
Actress Caroline Bloom, who grew up in Northampton, appears in “Megalopolis,” Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus and first film in over a decade. It will be released in theaters Sept. 27.
As a student at Northampton High School, which she graduated from in 2005, Bloom was part of the drama club and got lead roles in shows like “Cabaret,” “West Side Story,” and “The Music Man.” Though she went to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for her undergraduate education, she was able to take classes at Smith College as a high schooler, and she was involved with the Smith student theater group Leading Ladies, now known as Duct Tape Productions.
One of her most significant early influences was local acting teacher Kathy Mellen, who said that Bloom’s talent was obvious, even as a child.
“She understood everything intuitively. I do believe that some people just have natural talent, and she definitely had that. But beyond the natural talent, she also had, I think, a real love for doing it. She immediately took anything — put her in a part, have her learn some lines, and throw her on stage — anything that you might ask a student to do, she always did it with great gusto. But it’s a combination of enthusiasm and love as well as, I think, natural talent, and that’s what I saw in her.”
Bloom also got her first professional acting gig when she was a child: she played the character Peter Pan at an event for Peter Pan Bus Lines in Springfield, which Mellen recalled was “to the delight of children, and I think a lot of adults as well.”
“She just nailed it,” Mellen said. “There were no lines. It was all improv. It was all just being the character.”
While her role in “Megalopolis” might be among her most prestigious yet, it’s not her first time being on the big screen; her other TV and movie credits include “The Idea of You,” starring Anne Hathaway, and “The Staircase,” starring Colin Firth. She also does voiceover work for video games, including the “Resident Evil” and “Medal of Honor” franchises; as a commercial actor, she’s represented brands that include Walmart, Toyota, Skype, T-Mobile, and Spectrum, among others. She’s also written and starred in three short films of her own: “Common Decency,” “Baby Face,” and “Da Capo,” the latter of which was selected for 13 film festivals.
Now that she’s done with “Megalopolis,” Bloom has a number of other projects either underway or in post-production, including a female friendship comedy with her writing partner Stephanie Drake (best known as Meredith on “Mad Men”) and “a new take on the vampire horror genre,” among others. She also did English dubbing for two French feature films — though she can’t disclose the titles just yet — this summer.
“It’s a lot of irons in the fire,” Bloom said, “and I’m excited to see what this year brings.”
Kathy Mellen is excited for Bloom’s future, too.
“She’s putting the time in and the work, and she has the talent, and I suspect she’s just going to keep soaring.”
Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.
