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A slew of new towns promised as part of a UK housing revolution will not drop “magically” from the sky, but require a radical approach to planning and funding infrastructure, the chair of the government’s New Towns Taskforce has warned. 

Sir Michael Lyons, a former BBC chair and local council chief executive, said that he expected construction to increase from the end of the current parliament, with possible locations for the new towns identified by the middle of next summer.

“This is about a big, bold statement of the ambition of growth and a much larger-scale response to the housing crisis. We need an additional 5mn homes by 2040 and we’re not going to do that by incremental change,” he said in his first national interview since being appointed in August.

Lyons and a board of expert advisers have been given 12 months to deliver a report to housing secretary Angela Rayner identifying locations for the new towns and setting out the mechanism by which they can be built.

It is a decade since Lyons delivered his last housing report for Labour — the Lyons Review into how to kick-start housebuilding after the financial crisis — but he said he was determined that it will not be “just another report”.

As inspiration he cited the fact that Lord John Reith, the first director-general of the BBC, took only a year to compile his own “seminal” Commons Committee report in 1945 that gave birth to the original postwar new towns such as Milton Keynes and Stevenage. 

Lyons, who recently held meetings in Cambridge where the previous government announced plans to build more than 100,00 new homes, added that it was too early to say where the 21st-century versions would be built, but the focus would be on high-productivity areas.

“This isn’t about magically dropping these towns from the sky,” Lyons adds. “What is important is that they are long-term plans, with infrastructure up front, and that we pick places with good growth and employment prospects.”

Delivering the new towns was one of the most ambitious and potentially controversial pledges in Labour’s election manifesto. When setting out the government’s housebuilding targets in July, Rayner warned MPs that local communities would have a say only on “how to deliver new homes, not whether to”.  

The official remit asks Lyons to identify sites for new communities of “at least 10,000” homes “built on greenfield land and separated from other nearby settlements”, with 40 per cent in the “genuinely affordable” social rent category

Exact locations will be identified via what Lyons called “detailed and fine-grained spatial analysis”. Some would be entirely new sites, others, “urban extensions” of existing towns, but many would be more than 10,000 homes, he added.

As for the timescale, Lyons said that realistically the new projects “will gear up five years from the point at which the report lands”, taking them beyond the current government’s term.

Lyons said he had not reached definitive conclusions about how the new towns would be delivered or funded, but was clear that independent Development Corporations would be central to driving projects forward, with necessary infrastructure delivered up front.

As well as visiting Cambridge, Lyons has consulted executives at London’s Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation, which is overseeing the delivery of tens of thousands of new and affordable homes in a site near the HS2 railway development.

A report published last month by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge university, whose co-director Dame Diane Coyle is on the task force, cited examples of projects such as the Grand Paris Express and the expansion of the Swedish city of Gothenburg as potential models.

Labour has said it intends to strengthen compulsory purchase power introduced by the previous Conservative government in order to enable public bodies to assemble land for public development without paying overinflated valuations.

Lyons said the ideas in the Bennett Institute report were “congruent” with those being explored by the New Towns Taskforce, including securing land at “best value” and putting infrastructure in early. “When it comes to the discussion of how that’s funded, well I think that’s intriguing,” he added.

The UK would also need to radically improve the co-ordination of infrastructure so that all the elements needed to support new towns — water, power and transportation — could be delivered together, Lyons said.

Asked what would provide the ‘carrot’ for local authorities to accept the new developments, Lyons said that aside from the prospect of new affordable homes helping councils cut their reliance on temporary accommodation, they would be offered new levels of certainty.

“First clarity about the areas; secondly a clear commitment to early investment in infrastructure, both physical and social, well ahead of the pace of development of housing and thirdly the governance arrangements that bring strong leadership for that development,” he said.

RUMOURS have been swirling on social media that the McDonald’s McRib burger is set for a comeback after 10 years off the menu.

So when I was invited to a secretive press event by the fast food chain earlier this week – with no details on what it was about – I was very intrigued and expected something big.

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A couple of hours after arriving, my anticipation finally ended as Maccies workers started dishing out box upon box filled with the iconic burgers, first launched in the UK in 1981, from the back of a van.

The pork-based patty, which is lathered in smoky BBQ sauce, pickles and onions and encased in a homestyle bun, is back on menus for a limited time from October 16.

It will be on sale for £4.49 as an individual item or £6.19 as part of a medium extra-value meal deal, which means it comes with fries and a medium drink.

But I, alongside a host of other journalists and social media influencers, got an early taste of the fan-favourite item, which was last seen on UK menus in early 2015.

While I am old enough to remember the McRib being on menus, I never actually tried it at the time.

And I must admit, I was buzzing to give it a go, especially after all the clamour about it online in recent weeks.

How did it taste?

After opening the box, the burger looked pretty plain and unspectacular, while its rectangular shape made it hard to hold, to be honest.

But I was pretty impressed when it came to the flavour and texture.

The pork patty melted in my mouth and was super tender – definitely better than other burgers I’ve tried.

The pickles and onions added a nice textural contrast to the soft bun and meat as well, while adding a slight sour kick.

But one thing I would say was that after eating an entire burger I did feel a bit sickly due to the abundance of the BBQ sauce, which was too sweet for me personally.

At 509 calories, the burger is more calorific than a Double Cheeseburger, McChicken and Bacon Double Cheeseburger as well.

But overall, I’d definitely choose to get a McRib again on my next trip, especially as it’s only on menus for a limited time.

OTHER MCDONALD’S CHANGES

McDonald’s customers are in for a busy October, with the fast food chain already having confirmed a new breakfast item is making its way onto menus.

From October 16, foodies will be able to get their hands on mini hashbrowns in a portion of five or 15, with prices starting from £1.49.

McDonald’s already sells regular-sized hashbrowns for £1.19 but these are bitesized.

Many customers have already taken to social media saying the product reminds them of Tater Tots – a popular side dish in America.

It is still unclear whether or not the morning snack will become a permanent menu item or will only be available for a limited period.

A number of items are coming off menus this month too.

Customers will have to wave goodbye to six menu items:

• Philly Cheese Stack
• Chicken Big Mac
• Mozzarella Dippers
• Galaxy Chocolate McFlurry
• Twix Caramel McFlurry
• Twix Latte

The items were rolled out across stores on September 4, in conjunction with the return of McDonald’s Monopoly.

But when the game ends on October 15, these items will be removed.

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The writer is First Deputy Governor of the Bundesbank and chair of the Central Banks and Supervisors Network for Greening the Financial System

It is clear that the effects of climate change have started to influence the monetary policy considerations of several central banks. Unfortunately, such factors will become even more relevant in the future.

Severe weather events are intensifying, and so too are their economic impacts. Tropical storm Helene in south-eastern US is just the latest reminder of the damage that can be wrought.

The annual damages on properties caused by natural catastrophes have more than doubled in real terms over the past two decades, reaching $280bn globally in 2023, according to Swiss Re. The overall impact is much larger, as acute physical effects ripple through the economy, influencing supply, demand and financial flows — and thus also monetary policy.

A new Network for Greening the Financial System report compellingly illustrates how natural catastrophes such as floods and hurricanes affect the economy. They destroy homes, local infrastructure and production sites, requiring years and enormous amounts of money to rebuild. Waning confidence could prompt companies and households to cut back on spending, further undermining economic growth prospects.

Price impacts are not spared, as severe weather events, among other factors, damage agricultural production and drive up food prices across regions. These sectoral effects can lead to an increase in overall inflationary pressures, depending on how much a drop in demand balances them out. For instance, droughts tend to exert upward pressure on headline inflation for several years, with developing economies especially affected, because of their higher dependency on agriculture.

Against this backdrop, central banks might face the complicated task of taming inflationary pressure in a weak economy. Think of a situation when rising inflationary pressure might warrant policy tightening — particularly for central banks, whose primary mandate is price stability — even though this could contribute to economic strain. The State Bank of Pakistan, for instance, in 2022 opted to continue raising policy rates after the devastating floods caused a sharp increase in food prices.

Climate change — and its uncertain outcomes — mean that central banks must focus on looking ahead and extend their horizon beyond the usual projection period. Estimates of future impacts illustrate what could be in store for the economy and the financial sector. At a global level, climate change could drive up annual food price inflation by between one and three percentage points by 2035, according to a study of the European Central Bank and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

However, most studies still fail to consider the risk of crossing climate tipping points, which can significantly accelerate climate change. According to the OECD, ignoring these critical thresholds results in a severe underestimation of the economic costs. Extreme weather events can also bring us closer to these tipping points. The current drought in the Amazon region — the most severe since systematic recording began in 1950 — exemplifies this risk. With one-fifth of the Amazon rainforest already lost, mostly due to deforestation, concerns are mounting that this carbon sponge is on the brink of collapse. That would trigger a cascade of climate events, leading to higher economic costs globally.

What is more, uncertainties surrounding the magnitude and duration of severe weather events — coupled with governments’ responses — will make the short-term forecasting of key economic indicators particularly challenging. An example is Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the subsequent landfalls of hurricanes Rita and Wilma. In the highly dynamic weeks and months that followed, staff of the Federal Reserve adjusted their estimates of output and inflation a few times, as new information trickled in. Throughout the process, the Fed remained predictable in its actions, highlighting that good communication is key.

Central banks have another side to watch, too, namely the green transition. Inflation and output may become more volatile as we undergo a transformation of the energy sector and supply chains. In the short term, carbon pricing and rising climate investments could reinforce inflationary pressures.

Intensifying climate change adds to the array of challenges that monetary policy needs to adjust to. As extreme weather events become more frequent, central banks must pay even greater attention to longer-term inflation expectations. Though the reaction of each central bank will depend on its mandate, clear communication is essential to guide market expectations and ensure that policy decisions are well understood.

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Where climate change meets business, markets and politics. Explore the FT’s coverage here.

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Being honest with your employees is key to staff retention, Cairn Independent operations director Laura Young has insisted.

She was responding to an audience question about the best way to keep people within advice businesses at the Lang Cat’s HomeGame 4 event in Edinburgh yesterday (3 October).

“In terms of retaining the team, the only constant is change,” Young said.

“People’s needs and wants evolve, and what they initially say they want might not be the same as what they desire by the end of the process.

“My focus is on understanding what that looks like for them throughout the journey.”

She said there is always a risk someone may leave for another opportunity, but “the key is to focus on what that individual wants” and whether you can offer it.

“I’ve found that being honest with the team helps,” she said. “It might not always work out, but you’re never caught off guard.”

She said maintaining regular communication is also invaluable in staff retention.

“You know where you stand, and from both a management and team perspective, that’s valuable.

“It’s about managing expectations on both sides. By having regular check-ins, you can ask, ‘Is this what you expected? If not, why? How can we adapt?’

“That kind of approach helps ensure alignment.”

Good morning, this is Sujeet Indap filling in for Rob today. Did you hear that there is a US jobs report coming today? Anyway, while you wait on pins and needles, read on for the latest in private credit financial engineering. Email me with your dream (or nightmare) lending product: sujeet.indap@ft.com.

There goes the neighbourhood

There is $35tn trapped in US residential home equity. And it deserves a far more sophisticated capital market, says Thomas Sponholtz.

A few weeks ago, I got a press release from the venerable Carlyle Group announcing the latest cutting-edge contraption in the private credit frenzy. But this particular deal being announced stood out to me. Carlyle said it was partnering with specialised finance upstart Unison, whose founder and chief executive, Sponholtz, is a former Barclays Global Investors executive. 

Sponholtz had long believed there was room for innovation in home lending, specifically in how Americans could monetise home equity. Home equity loans, home equity lines of credit and reverse mortgages were all debt products that, one way or another, had to be paid back with interest by homeowners.

But what if homeowners get liquidity by avoiding a fixed obligation and instead monetise the upside of their property? And so Sponholtz’s company, Unison, created what it called an “equity sharing agreement” where the homeowner effectively sells stock in their house in exchange for upfront cash.

But the equity-sharing agreement was just the beginning. Carlyle and Unison have now conjured their next frontier idea: homeowners also deserve a convertible bond.

House rules

So far the original equity product has about 17,000 customers and its total portfolio of homes is worth $7bn in aggregate.

Not surprisingly, Unison’s immediate cash does not come cheap. The company will buy as much as a 15 per cent interest in homes, spending between $30,000 and $500,000 per home. The homeowner will pay for an appraisal and Unison will invest at a 5 per cent discount to that appraised value. There is also a 3.9 per cent transaction fee.

And finally at the time of sale, which must happen by year 30, Unison is owed four times the proportion it put in. To put some numbers on it, imagine a deal where the firm buys 10 per cent of a house worth $1mn.

In a decade, let’s say the house is worth $1.5mn. Unison gets its $100,000 back as well as 40 per cent of the gain, or $200,000. The house jumping 50 per cent in value over 10 years reflects an annualised rate of return of 4.1 per cent. Unison’s $100,000 investment turning into $300,000 reflects a return of 11.6 per cent

(Importantly, the equity gains for the homeowner from paying down their initial mortgage are kept by the homeowner and their own equity returns are, of course, determined by the size of their initial down payment at time of purchase).

Unison says its returns have been 21 per cent annualised.

Sponholtz told the Financial Times he had grappled for years with trying to figure out how to take on equity exposure to residential owner-occupied housing but that there was no straightforward security or proxy. Housing was important not just because its gross market size, but also because it was a “dirty hedge” against inflation, the main risk in fixed-income investing, he said. 

“Home prices go up with inflation . . . you have a really interesting investment that neutralises the negative convexity,” Sponholtz said, referring to mortgage prepayments that surge when interest rates fall and fall when rates rise.

Enter private credit and Carlyle. Unison had some success bundling its equity-sharing agreements into structured products — it recently got a credit rating on the tranches created. But the pure equity product by definition comes with erratic cash flows that made it tricky to securitise. 

And so Unison wondered if it could merge housing debt and housing equity into a single product. It has, as a result, created the “equity-sharing loan” that resembles a corporate convertible bond with its fixed obligation attached to a call option.

This is how it works: a homeowner takes out a second mortgage in order to get immediate cash — but the interest rate charged on the second mortgage is lower than the market price. In exchange, Unison gets 1.5 times its proportion in the future appreciation of the house (note that this is less than the four times it is owed in the straight equity product described above).

In an example on its website, Unison said it would shave off almost 2 percentage points from a straight loan interest rate (charging 5.2 per cent annually instead of 7 per cent) in the cash “coupon” it is owed. At the end of the 10-year loan, Unison would, however, get its 1.5x appreciation share as well as the capitalised sum total of the 1.8 per cent initial cash interest rate savings (that’s the 7 per cent minus 5.2 per cent).

Carlyle estimates the all-in cost of capital of the equity sharing loan of 10 per cent to 11 per cent: 6 per cent cash interest, 2 per cent of the cash deferred “payment-in-kind” interest and 2 to 3 percentage points of kicker from the equity sharing slice.

Unison said its typical customer has a Fico score over 700 and that typical use of proceeds are home improvements or paying down credit card debt. The company says its equity-sharing product is far cheaper than getting an unsecured loan from the likes of SoFi.

Carlyle has agreed to purchase up to $300mn in such loans from Unison, which it can then place with its insurance clients. 

“We are taking high-quality assets and making them attractive, bringing private markets to bear to finance the real economy,” said Akhil Bansal, head of credit strategic solutions at Carlyle.

Sponholtz says Unison has several more products in the works, including providing financing to help with initial down payments (reminiscent of this recent Wall Street Journal story about friends buying houses together during the pandemic).

Consumer finance is a tricky balance between innovation and exploitation. Lending people money, extracting user fees and using leverage to turbocharge it all is extremely lucrative (just Google “subprime billionaires” to see for yourself).

Residential housing is equally fraught given its centrality in the lives of individuals and families. Just last month, Invitation Homes, the single- family home roll-up created by Blackstone, entered into a $48mn proposed settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission over charging renters hidden junk fees. 

A more advanced financing is supposed to grease the gears of capital formation and ultimately housing construction. Unison and Carlyle believe their mousetrap will do so, and America needs them to be right.

One good read

My colleague Andrew Jack examines New York City’s most serious current scourge: rats.

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This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Culture chat — Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is a mess worth seeing’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and this is our Friday chat show. Today we are talking about Megalopolis, the latest film by legendary director Francis Ford Coppola of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now fame. This film is Coppola’s labour of love. It took him more than 40 years, 300 script rewrites and 120mn of his own dollars to make. But despite a star-studded cast, including Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight and Aubrey Plaza, the film has been quite controversial and left audiences confused, delighted and enraged, maybe in equal measure.

[MOVIE TRAILER PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
At its simplest, the film is about an idealistic city planner played by Adam Driver, who’s trying to build a utopian city of the future on the ruins of what’s called New Rome, which is some mix of current day New York and ancient Rome. He’s fighting the city’s mayor, who’s a somewhat corrupt pragmatist, and he’s falling in love with the mayor’s daughter who’s caught between them. Today, we’re going to talk about the film and what we think this 85-year-old director is trying to say.

Let’s get into it. I’m Lilah in New York and I’m yelling “time stop” every time I want a second to think about things. Joining me from London, he’s leaping into the unknown to prove that we are free. It’s the FT’s film critic, the great Danny Leigh. Hi, Danny, welcome.

Danny Leigh
Hello, Lilah. Nice to be here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So nice to have you. And with me in the New York studio, he’s reciting Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” for no discernible reason. It’s the film critic and host of The Last Thing I Saw podcast, Nicolas Rapold. Welcome, Nick. Hello.

Nicolas Rapold
Thanks. Yeah, because it feels so good.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Because it feels so good. OK, so this is a film that a lot of critics wanted to love, but they seem pretty polarised. Danny, your review was a work of art. You called the film Coppola’s DIY fantasia. Maybe you can tell us, top line, just what you thought of the movie.

Danny Leigh
I mean, I hate to disappoint right off the bat, but it is an impossible question to answer. I mean, I saw the film quite recently. I didn’t see the film in Cannes, so I saw it in London on a kind of wet morning. And there were a couple of other critics there who were talking about the film — one who had seen the film in Cannes and one who hadn’t. And the one who hadn’t said, so listen, just before the lights go down, you know, what is this gonna be? Is this as bad as everybody says? And the critic who’d seen it before said, yeah, it’s pretty bad, but there’s stuff in it. And I kind of feel like that says it all. I just think, I came out 2.5 hours later and once I had and I have a lot to say about it, but I do also feel like it’s pretty bad, but there’s stuff in it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I think it’s right. What do you think, Nick?

Nicolas Rapold
It’s true. I mean, actually, I was going to say, I think something similar to that just because I mean, the whole expanse of it is this sprawling kind of morass of drama and scenes that don’t always connect, don’t always move smoothly. But then you’ll get these, just eruptions of emotion and passion and weirdness. I mean, the weird thing for me is that obviously this movie is hugely personal and idiosyncratic, but I saw it twice now. I saw it once in Cannes. And then glutton for punishment saw it again in New York. And the second time I had to say, what is this reminding me of? And the weird thing is that maybe it was after, Danny, after reading your review where you described it, I think like it’s a science fiction melodrama. And I thought that phrase sounds like kind of Marvel movies a little bit.

There was something about this movie where, you know, I mean, the characters are having these kind of, first of all, like in the air effectively, half the time it feels like half of Adam Driver’s conversations are like on girders high up in a skyscraper. But, you know, they’re having these, like, high-flown conversations where it’s like, what are you really talking about? It’s the end of the world, but it’s also sort of nothing sometimes. And I’m saying that I do like the movie and enjoy a lot of it, but I’m also like, for what? You know, I don’t know.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You know, I feel quite intimidated to be with two critics. So this, I feel like this is gonna sound very blunt, my opinion about it, but feel free to temper me.

Nicolas Rapold
Be blunt. Movie needs it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I just felt that this has been a year — even in the political spectrum in America — of great ageing men who should go ahead and just let themselves retire. I don’t know. I felt sort of like, you know, you’re allowed to get to the end of your career and think like, you know what, I did a good job. I said a lot. I’ve maybe said enough. I don’t need to say the last thing that I thought maybe I wanted to say. But that said, Francis Ford Coppola is like one of the greats. He went for it. It was clearly ambitious. I find that admirable always. And I had fun watching it, actually. It was like a great old, luscious, fun thing to watch. I still have no idea who I was supposed to be rooting for or what I was supposed to want. But yeah, I sort of left it feeling like in a weird way, like, if you both had come in strong to say like, this was actually brilliant, I would have been like, OK. Or have you had said, this is total nonsense, then I would have been like, OK. I just sort of felt like, sure.

Danny Leigh
Partly because you’re a perceptive person, Lilah, but also because both of those opinions are valid. And I think almost I mean, brilliant is stretching it, but there are images and there are moments in there that really stayed with me and not because I was sniggering at them, you know. So I think there is real vision and excellence in it. There’s just so much which is really quite explicitly bad as well.

I think I would be surprised and I would, you know, hand on heart, I would slightly question the judgment even of anyone, whether they were a critic or just an audience member, whoever they were, who went along and found Megalopolis dull and found it just kind of grinding and joyless because it’s . . . I just don’t think it’s that. I think it’s quite bad in places and it’s objectionable actually in a couple of other places, but it’s never dull. I mean, your point about old men is definitely valid. And it reminded me because it’s this sort of ongoing question about, you know, why did Coppola make this?

And I think it does rhyme with the situation we saw with Biden, you know, earlier in the year, if I could use that question about, you know, how hard is it actually? And I think the answer is it’s like the hardest thing in the world to step away from power and to just give . . . And particularly at that age where you are, you will be stepping away for the final time. So for Coppola to walk away from the film and leave it unmade is such I mean, I think there’s something so profoundly bleak about that. I think it had to be made and I was so, for that reason, as well as the fact that it’s sort of berserker and does have these moments of near brilliance to it, I’m also glad it exists. Because the idea that it just never got made and Coppola then just rode off into the sunset, you know, with his vineyard intact but with the film nonexistent, that’s kind of depressing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, he sold his vineyard, a part of his vineyard, famously to make this film. You’re right, it did have to be made.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

OK, so let’s do listeners a favour here and just attempt a plot description for anyone who hasn’t seen it just so they can try to visualise what we’re talking about. As you said, Danny, this film starts on the roof of the Chrysler Building with Adam Driver, this utopian stepping out and looking like he’s about to fall over and sort of saying “time stop” and freezing time and then stepping back on to the platform. And so it starts suggesting that there’s this man who has this like power that the rest of us don’t. And then where does it go? And then what?

Danny Leigh
And then he is. And then he is. And, you know, we are summarising quite radically.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes, radically.

Danny Leigh
He is frustrated by, I think I said in the review, small minds. It’s certainly at first it’s bureaucracy that frustrates him and it’s the city mayor. So it’s New Rome, which is kind of New York and also ancient Rome in one. And you have the city mayor played by Giancarlo Esposito, who . . . yeah, it’s a kind of interesting character because he’s set up very adversarially at first because he is standing in the way of Driver’s utopian visions. But then when you actually hear Esposito, his character talking, I mean, what he’s saying is, I want instead of these kind of far-flung visionary dreams, I want jobs for people and sanitation and education, all of which I think are good things. And I think, you know, I think at times we are encouraged to think that jobs and sanitation are unnecessary trivia that actually great men shouldn’t really . . . and great civilisation shouldn’t really worry about. Now it’s something that I think by the end of the film I was a little bit troubled by that. But he is anyway at first he’s yeah, I mean all of this stuff is standing in the way and that’s the major rivalry which is set up is this rivalry for the sort of hearts and minds and the Bank of New Rome between the mayor and the bureaucracy and Driver’s, you know, visionary, utopian, maverick dreamer. Then, of course, there’s this Shakespearean complication, which is that he strikes up a relationship with the mayor’s daughter, who’s played by the British actress Nathalie Emmanuel, who I thought was quite good, actually. Again . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
She was pretty good. They all seem to be working very hard.

Nicolas Rapold
Especially Shia LaBeouf.

Danny Leigh
Everyone’s working so hard, right? I mean, everyone’s just working so hard. You can see the sweat pouring.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Totally.

Danny Leigh
And it’s sort of set itself up as this sort of there’s a political intrigue, there’s also a family intrigue. Everything becomes very operatic very quickly.

Nicolas Rapold
Yeah, I mean, city politics provides a big, like, template for the movie, or at least for me, for understanding the movie. Just the kind of big personalities, you know, the way tabloid vies for like, legitimate policy issues and what you’re paying attention to. And then the fact that in the end, nothing really seems to get done anyway. Or maybe a mayor gets convicted or indicted, for example. I think it was amazing to me that this movie’s release almost coincided with the indictment of New York’s own mayor.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Right.

Danny Leigh
It’s amazing. It’s almost like Coppola orchestrated the whole thing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I know. And it does feel sometimes like we’re living in a fever dream here in New York like the film.

Nicolas Rapold
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, just in terms of like painting a word picture as it were for listeners, I mean, a big part of this movie is you’re on like a skyscraper or you’re at a party. There is always this heightened reality that you’re part of. You know, even when you’re in like ostensibly just like a quiet bedroom boudoir moment, there’s like scheming that’s going on, you know? So there’s never a point that isn’t in some way, you know, heightened.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you both touched on something that I found to be the most confusing thing about it, which is that I just really didn’t know who I was rooting for in a way, or whether the person I ended up rooting for was the person I was supposed to be rooting for. For example, as you were saying, Danny, the mayor, I actually kind of liked the mayor and I ended up sympathising with the mayor. And I thought, you know, is Adam Driver meant to be Francis Ford Coppola? And are we meant to sort of like support him in his dream for this utopian future? Because this utopian future is the future of creativity or the future of cinema or the future of people sort of being able to make beautiful things and come together and all that. Or is Adam Driver, Elon Musk? And like, he has this utopian vision, but he’s a kind of a horrible guy. Yeah, I didn’t know where I was supposed to be landing basically, ever.

Danny Leigh
Well, again, I think the answer is probably both. I mean I think certainly and without getting into the realm of spoilers, I mean, as the film plays out, actually, I think you are very much supposed to throw your emotional weight behind Driver and behind the kind of the cause of artistic freedom and Randian individual will at all costs. I mean, that seems . . . that seemed pretty open and sharp actually. (Inaudible) halfway through the movie. And the Elon Musk-ness of it, I think is part of that. I mean, it’s interesting. In using that word in the widest possible sense politically, because there’s a lot of stuff which you assume that has been kind of folded into the story in the last few years, you know, before it finally went before the cameras about populism. And I think the Trumpist kind of mindset. I mean, Coppola is not a fan and it’s kind of held up for scorn and ridicule.

But interestingly, I mean, that Muskian worldview, that becomes the centre of the film, really. And I don’t know. Yeah, I mean, I think it makes quite a lot of us feel quite uncomfortable about that idea of the master engineer. And actually, you know, probably not just New Rome itself, but the entire future of the species should best be handed over to like, a visionary engineer who has this team of kind of flunkies scurrying around. And he’ll just say in a sort of Elon Musk kind of way, we must be interconnected. And then people go off and sort of act on that. You know, it’s like, get right on that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Everybody’s just like stepping on to each other in a very literal interpretation of interconnected.

Danny Leigh
Yeah, exactly. Whereas you look, I mean, wow. I mean, you look at the history of the internet that has unfolded in the time that Coppola has been trying to get this film made. And I think you actually come away thinking, I’m not sure interconnection is what we need more of. I think possibly a bit less of that. But yeah, I think I mean, so yeah, I think it is very much Driver as a proxy for Coppola and then does run into you know, who knows whether that was explicitly going through Coppola’s mind. But you know, he does become very Elon by the end of the film.

Nicolas Rapold
Yeah. Well, it’s such an interesting question, thinking about, you know, what it might refer to, what it might be saying about now, today’s world, because what is now for a movie that’s been being made for 40 years, you know, I mean, the things that felt most now to me in the movie were comments that actually were kind of mostly in voiceover. Now that I think about the, Laurence Fishburne’s wonderful voiceover to the movie narrating it, is that people are losing faith in institutions. So that’s the kind of backdrop to the tragedy of the great man here.

It’s not just that people aren’t listening to him, but that people just don’t even believe in the democracy, that he’s kind of creating a factual physical structure for people to live in. And that rings true, you know, I mean, and that also rings true with the kind of confusion within the movie, which is that, you know, it’s not like people decide one day, you know what? I just don’t really care about democracy. It’s more just like there’s so much stuff going on, you know, there’s so much distraction.

But yeah, what is now? Because if he started at least talking about the movie in the early ‘80s, you know he would have been coming out of 1970s New York which is like kind of the classic picture of decline and fall of a city that was a template for like Tim Burton’s Batman, for example. And in that case, he’s looking ahead at like Reagan years coming ahead of him. And maybe he’s questioning that idea of empire and thinking that might eventually fall. But then he keeps at it. And then by the ’90s or 2000s, what does he think? He had footage shot a little bit before September 11th, which then, you know, kind of upends everything, the whole puzzle pieces again.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. It’s true, even his vision of utopia in the film is this sort of like giant bouquet of flowers with these like, golden moving walkways, like this is what he wants New York to be. And it really looks like some combination of like an architect’s rendering of Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland, like The Jetsons maybe, and Singapore like, it feels sort of like this funny combination, the world fair. It’s like an old version of what the future would look like. And I looked at it and I thought like, I don’t know, I kind of prefer regular New York.

Nicolas Rapold
Yeah, well, Danny, there’s another thing in your review that I really liked that you mentioned. You know, in some ways it’s like a silent film, in some of the, maybe like the style of it and obviously it’s right there in the title, he’s not just gonna do Metropolis, he’s going to do Megalopolis, you know.

Danny Leigh
Exactly right. Which is such a kind of a late 20th, 21st century take on that. So it’s like, Yeah, exactly. Metropolis but bigger, but mine.

Nicolas Rapold
Yeah, and Metropolis, you know, when you go back and watch it, it’s, yeah, it is like that. It’s like this, you know, The Jetsons kind of thing a little bit. And it has this idea of the people above and the people below, you know, I mean, one thing that is tough for me in the film is how it thinks about people, the people it’s ostensibly talking about. It has this really, I mean, this idea of like, just like the rabble.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, right.

Nicolas Rapold
And I don’t know what it is about movies maybe lately, maybe always. I don’t know. They just seem to have a problem, like visualising people or like, how do we represent the people that this movie is ostensibly a drama about, you know, affecting them, you know?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. What do you mean? What other examples do you mean?

Nicolas Rapold
You mean of movies now that have trouble with that?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Nicolas Rapold
Well, the other thing I’m noticing, and I hope to write about this, I don’t think this idea . . . is that movies just don’t have a lot of people in them now. And that’s maybe partly a pandemic thing. Maybe that’s partly still, I don’t know what, cost-cutting, but you can watch movies and something you’re like, what’s going on? Like are there no other people in this city? Why is this block empty? And I see that in movie after movie, and it’s probably maybe economic considerations. Maybe everything in the backdrop is done through digital composites anyway. So they’re kind of an afterthought. But it has a real effect because it’s like you’re not seeing people, you know, think of a ’30s, ’40s movie. You’re constantly seeing people running around. I mean a metropolis is crawling with people, for one thing. So yeah, I don’t know. I did think about this one.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You’re right. And Megalopolis is kind of . . . they’re all just like masses screaming and . . . 

Danny Leigh
Yeah, it’s so true. And it’s really . . . No, no. I’m really glad this has come up because it’s a really glaring problem with the film, I think. I mean, because what Coppola is doing is reinstating the epic with everything that comes with that. And so the epic is not this little three-hander that’s sort of shot in one apartment in Manhattan because they’re actually making it for a couple of million. I mean, this is Coppola’s world. And so it’s interesting what gets into that world. It’s like Noah, you know, what gets let in and what doesn’t.

And yeah, people, ordinary people very much don’t. And the reason it’s so glaring is because actually they’re a really important part of the story. You know, we first see Driver on top of the Chrysler Building but I think the next time we see him, he’s there blowing up all of these apartment blocks. And we suddenly realise, kind of later in the film, it’s sort of mentioned in passing, that actually those were people’s homes and he wanted them out of the way because he’s doing that Robert Moses thing of like clearing New York, New Rome to make something more beautiful and wonderful. But actually, all those people have been displaced. And again, it’s weird. I mean, Coppola makes a lot of decisions that I think are just there to keep the running time down.

And one of them . . . But genuinely one of them is that like there’s no meat on the bones of that idea of wait, like, all of those New Yorkers who now don’t have a place to live, where did they go? And it’s almost comical how uninterested Coppola is in . . . And actually and this is one of the things I like much less about the film, there is also something quite weirdly small about it. And I think it’s this, you know, I’m interested in the people in this room and I’m not really very interested at all in anybody who’s not in this room with me.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, and those are actually all people with power.

Nicolas Rapold
Yeah, right.

Danny Leigh
Yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
And so I want to ask both of you, why do you think . . . I know a lot has been written and thought about this, but I’m curious what you think. Why do you think he made this film? Like, he sold part of his wine company to finance it. He’s defended it fiercely since it’s come out. You know, it doesn’t seem like he cares whether the movie is a commercial hit or not. That’s not the point. Why do you think he’s so invested in it?

Nicolas Rapold
I mean, I think there are different ways to answer that. I mean, one is almost just a constitutional way. I think when you’re a director and your whole life, like the machine of your mind and your will has always been directed towards finishing the project, he almost can’t not. He’s like built to do that by now, and he’s gonna do that till he drops. So that’s part of it. I mean, part of it is, I think he thinks he’s making a statement, you know, about the world as it is and about, you know, inevitably about great men as well. I mean, this is a guy who actually made a movie called Tucker: The Man in His Dream, you know. Like, he’s not gonna shy away from making movies that their scope sounds almost a little hokey. You know, you have to say. But he still thinks there’s value in it. So I guess he thought it was good. I don’t think that it was just like he was just like white knuckling, I just got to get this done and then I can go back to making wine or something, you know? Yeah, I think he wants to have a say about the way the world is today.

Danny Leigh
Yeah, because I think there’s two possible projects or ideas that would stay with somebody that long and one is gonna be a biography of somebody who is just of profound importance to Coppola or whoever, whatever director this is, who spends 40 years, you know, dreaming of a film and then finally getting to make it. It’s somebody who has changed their life and they’ve always wanted to tell that story. Or over the period of time where the film is not getting made and is endlessly in development and is getting rewritten and redrafted constantly, it ends up becoming about everything and at that point, you know, you get . . . so Coppola is in his forties when he starts putting this thing together, you know, and both for him personally and for the world, you know, he keeps appropriating, you know, everything which is going on.

Everything is about Megalopolis for him. It’s the prism through which he lives, you know. So and world events are getting kind of fed into this vast machine that he’s created. Yeah. How are you gonna walk away from that? And so at a certain point and I think, you know, with the money, it did get to a point where, had he spent any more, he would have actually risked bankrupting his family. But he took it like right up to the line and said, well, the movie has swallowed him whole, essentially, you know, And so he sort of, so it has to be made.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And when you say it’s everything, where did you both land on that? Like what, I would say, what is the moral of this movie? But like, what are the morals of this movie? It seems like there are about seven.

Danny Leigh
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it feels unfair to narrow it down to one. It’s that . . . And also, I mean, it’s difficult to talk about because it’s sort of there in the for me at least in the final scene, which is at once one of the most eye-poppingly hokey, like, impossibly cheesy cornball things I’ve ever seen in my life and also weirdly moving and sort of semi profound. And without giving away specifics, I mean, I think it’s again for me, this is the best of the movie. The moral is about the future and the importance of the future, as as trite as that sounds.

And I think if an 85-year-old, of anyone of 85 talking about the future, there is a certain melancholy to that and a certain power to that, that says the future isn’t just important but is possible. And it is quite striking. I mean, when was the last time we had a vision of the future on film that was anything other than profoundly dystopian? There’s a version of the story where the wisdom resides in the grizzled, old, you know, patriarchal figure. And what’s interesting about the film is it’s, we haven’t talked about its sexual politics, which are absolutely jaw-dropping. And it’s like a deeply patriarchal film, actually, kind of like he’s a young patriarch. I mean, there is that. I mean, it’s not so there isn’t this sort of, you know, there’s this grizzled figure with tablets of stone passing them down. I mean, actually the hope of the film and the talent in the film lies with people in early middle age, you know, which seems to, which actually seems quite radical thing for an 85-year-old director to say.

Nicolas Rapold
Yeah, I would totally agree with that. I mean, there’s a sense in which the movie is kind of like a $120mn version of a dinner toast, you know, where it’s like, I just want everyone to feel better, be happy. You know, I love my family is here. You know, it’s this sort of thing. And I can’t really, you know, I can’t really begrudge an expression of hope like that because there is also like the dark flipside to it, which is, you know, like, a movie like Joker, you know, where there are people and they’re all raving maniacs and, you know, who’s to say which one is a more accurate depiction of the voting body at the moment? Maybe it is half and half. I don’t know. So yeah, I think it’s very much an expression of hope. It’s very much a faith in creativity. And sometimes I think that’s also offensive to people actually. Maybe that’s maybe an American thing, especially, I don’t know, That somehow that’s a threat. I don’t know.

Danny Leigh
I think . . . we do we do that in Britain, too! Don’t worry.

Nicolas Rapold
OK. Just to tear people down for trying that. And then there’s just people love, even whether or not they think it’s going to be one, a flop. You know, like there’s, you know, there are books, like Greatest Flops of All Time, you know, this sort of thing. So there’s like ready-made.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

My last question for both of you is just was this film worth the struggle? You know, 40 or something years in the making? Are we glad it was made?

Nicolas Rapold
I would say yes. Yes. Unqualified yes. Just because, I don’t know. I mean, you want people to go all out and do something crazy. And not every movie has to be perfect. Some of the perfect movies are the most boring ones. And sometimes the mistakes are interesting, too. And look, I mean, I’m also just enough of like a, you know, movie fan where it’s like, new Francis Ford Coppola, how may I not gonna be sort of excited about that? At the very least I’ll rewatched, you know, The Godfather or Apocalypse Now or you know The Conversation and I’ll take that excuse. And so yeah, I mean I guess there’s also, being that this is the Financial Times, I guess there’s the monetary question of whether it’s worth it. And that’s hard to say, but millions are spent on much worse movies . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s true.

Nicolas Rapold
 . . . that do not have a personal stamp and . . . 

Danny Leigh
That should absolutely be the tagline, that they’ve missed a (inaudible) . . . Millions are spent on much worse movies.

Nicolas Rapold
So what the hay, dot dot dot.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Why not?

Danny Leigh
I feel the same way. I mean, I feel the same way. I feel like . . . I mean, actually, it’s so rare to find a movie where you can, hand on heart, say, which I can. I’d like to see this film again fairly soon. You know, you’re right. It was interesting what you just mentioned that actually, if nothing else, it made you think of Coppola’s other films and made you revisit them mentally. So it has, you know, genuinely it served a purpose in that sense.

And also I do want to see how this film holds up in 20 years’ time, you know, if we’re all (inaudible) . . . It’s almost too easy. It’s like the narrative around it being a flop, the narrative where then in 20 years’ time actually, everyone discovers it was this work of unparalleled genius after all. That’s a little too pat, I think, but I’m interested . . . I’m really sincerely interested in what I and two, the three of us and everyone else in the world makes of Megalopolis in the future.

Again, it comes back to the future and you can’t say that about, you know, every film that comes along and we’re here talking about it and we could actually, I think, you know, we’ve had a semi-coherent, for me, fascinating conversation about the film that you can’t do that about a lot of films and we could say, we could very easily sit and talk for like another two hours about the movie. So and this is not something which often happens.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, that’s true. Well, Danny and Nick, thank you so much. We will be back in just a moment for more or less.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[THE RUN THROUGH PODCAST TRAILER PLAYING]

Welcome back for More or Less, where each guest says one thing they want to see more of or less of in culture. Nick, what do you have?

Nicolas Rapold
I mean, this is maybe more of just a way of taking in culture. And I guess I just want to see more of just pulling a book off the shelf that, you know, it doesn’t have its everything paved out for you, you know, in terms of, you know, everything about it, you know, and you know the author super well or even that it came out last year. I mean it sounds very mundane, but you know, I’m reading like a book of fairy tales right now from 1920s Japan, and it’s just very refreshing. And it sort of shifts your framing of things and is a form of what I think about some newer books as well. So yeah, it might sound mundane, but it’s reliably been a way to kind of reset for me.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, don’t just book, pick the buzzy book necessarily, yeah . . . I love that one. What is the fairytale book?

Nicolas Rapold
The author is Keiji Miyazawa. They’re not straight-up fairy tales. They’re this kind of enigmatic sort of stories, but they have a lot of talking animals. I think that’s why I went back to it as well, because I was like, you know, I just wanted another way to think about animals.

Danny Leigh
That’s fantastic.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, that’s fantastic. Danny, what about you?

Danny Leigh
I guess it sort of spins off the conversation we’ve had about Megalopolis, but I think it can be applied more widely and I think there should be more three-star reviews and not necessarily formal reviews. All of our approach to culture. I think that the militantly dispassionate three-star is something which there needs to be more of. I just, you know, you could get quite pompous and earnest about this quite quickly and talk about, you know, the curse of polarisation and the world being at its own throat the whole time. But also, I just think, I think taking an approach which, you know, no longer wanting or expecting to be saved by a piece of culture or a work of art, but also no longer wanting to grind it into the dust and laugh at it. I think we should strive for that a bit more to just kind of, to just settle for the militant lukewarm water.

Nicolas Rapold
Yeah, I would second that. Sometimes it feels like people want to work themselves up about something. Like, it’s OK if you’re just fine with it, too.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Well, and the funny thing is, even like, even, Danny, your three-star review about Megalopolis didn’t mean that you felt “eh, whatever” about, right? It didn’t mean, it was totally dispassionate. And there’s hours of conversation behind those three stars.

Danny Leigh
Yeah. I mean, sometimes, I mean, “Meh” is a really valid and profound response, but also just that . . . I mean, listen, I mean, full disclosure. I mean, I spend my life, you know, in a state of a sort of mixed-bag-ness and feeling kind of vaguely ambivalent about pretty much everything. And it just certainly feels with culture like, yeah. And then it’s, the this and the that of it is what is fascinating, surely. And I mean, if something just, you know, if something just confronts you with its own status as a masterpiece straight away. I don’t know. I tend to think that’s a little boring. And actually the three-star approach to life is a bit more nutritious, I think, in the long term.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes, I think so, too. Mine is very short. It’s a less. It’s really a PSA. It’s less last-minute Halloween costume decisions. It’s a PSA to start thinking about your Halloween costume now. Because if any of you have ever been to one of those, like, temporary spirit Halloween costume places on Halloween, it’s like the most depressing place in America, maybe the world. So do it now. Buy your wig. You know, buy your wig on the internet before you have to put it on your head.

Nicolas Rapold
And yeah, it’s true. But it also makes it more fun because it becomes like this creative project, you know? Don’t be a Megalopolis. Don’t take, you know, don’t leave everything to last minute.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, exactly.

Danny Leigh
But wait, surely. I mean, I have to ask now from however many thousands of miles away. I mean, so what are you two wearing for Halloween?

Lilah Raptopoulos
It doesn’t mean I know yet. I just realised on my walk in today that it’s time for me to decide because last year I was Marty McFly from Back to the Future because it was easy to just like put on a red vest and wear jeans. And it made me sad. I thought, I think I’m better than that.

Nicolas Rapold
Yeah. I also, I too do not know yet, we’re still in the development stage. Still looking for funding. I don’t know how it’s how it’s gonna go.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Just sell a couple bottles of wine (inaudible) for your costume. Danny and Nick, this was really so much fun. So interesting. Thank you for coming on the show.

Nicolas Rapold
Thank you.

Danny Leigh
Pleasure.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. Do check out the show notes this week. We have Danny’s review of Megalopolis. We have a link to Nick’s movie newsletter and podcast. Also in the show notes, you can find my email address and I’m on Instagram @lilahrap where I love chatting with all of you about culture.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here’s my wonderful team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend and we’ll find each other again on Monday.