Francis Ford Coppola said Friday he does not plan to stop making movies and is already writing his next one, just hours after his divisive epic “Megalopolis” had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

The 85-year-old US director spent decades working on passion project “Megalopolis”, which stars Adam Driver as a fiercely ambitious architect determined to rebuild a decaying city into a utopia, at seemingly any cost.

Asked at a press conference whether he may be tempted to re-edit the film later, as he did with his previous Palme d’Or winner “Apocalypse Now”, Coppola said he hopes to be back at Cannes “in 20 years.”

“If there’s a way I can make the film a little better, I will try,” he said. “But I know I’m done with it because I’ve already started writing another film. That’s how I know I’m finished.”

Reviews of the wildly ambitious and experimental “Megalopolis” have been mixed. Critics in the US were largely enthusiastic, while European outlets were markedly less convinced. The inability of even the most powerful and visionary men to stop the passage of time is a central theme of the movie.

Driver’s character in the film, Caesar Catalina, insists “I’m not concerned about my place in history, what I am concerned about is time”, and bemoans that there is “still so much to accomplish, but is there time?”

Coppola appeared to be driven by that same sentiment at his press conference on Friday. “There are so many people who, when they die, say, ‘I wish I had done this, I wish I done that.’ When I die, I’m going to say, ‘I got to do this,’” he said.

He continued: “I got to make every movie I wanted to make.”

“And I’m going to be so busy thinking about all the things I got to do that when I die I won’t notice it.”—AFP