The real architect of “Megalopolis” is the wife of billionaire Bill Ackman

In MegalopolisFrancis Ford Coppola's polarizing box office flop, a futuristic development is the wild utopian imagination of Adam Driver's protagonist, Cesar Catilina, a controversial urban planner who invented a new building material called Megalon. To evoke the film's stunning biomorphic cityscape, the director worked with Neri Oxman, a lauded 48-year-old Israeli-American interdisciplinary designer known for her practice in “material ecology.”

Oxman, whose work has been exhibited at MoMA and the Center Pompidou and who previously collaborated with Bjork on a 3D-printed mask that externalized the singer's musculoskeletal system during a performance, says on his website that he drew inspiration for the film's utopian cityscape from Manhattan's pre-colonial pastoral past: “The hills are the remnants of skyscrapers and the valleys follow the streets of the city grid.” In Coppola's film the municipality from the alternative dimension was renamed New Rome.

Oxman, who did not respond The Hollywood journalistRequested to discuss her work on the film, she posed with Coppola on the red carpet in New York City on September 23 Megalopolis Before. (Years ago, paparazzi spied on her after noted architecture enthusiast Brad Pitt came to visit her lab while she was a tenured professor at MIT; the photographers thought they might be dating.) She also has a brief role but fundamental in the film as a doctor. “Most of Dr. Shira and the science behind the Megalon remained on the cutting room floor,” her husband, billionaire activist investor Bill Ackman, later wrote on social media.

Ackman, a prominent critic of DEI initiatives and self-styled Big Ideas man, is himself an outsized figure straight out of Coppola's New Rome. Her advocacy campaign to remove Harvard's then-president over plagiarism allegations rebounded this year with Oxman apologizing for citation errors in her doctoral thesis. Previously, Oxman's problems accepting a donation to his MIT lab from sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein were prolonged when Ackman's private attempt to silence his academic boss on the matter became public.

While it's unclear when Coppola signed Oxman to the project, it's unlikely that the recent run-ins she and her husband have had with the scandal have bothered the director – perhaps the opposite. He clarified this ahead of Megalopolis releases that he purposely chose to work with people on this project who had been, in his opinion, “cancelled”, noting: “What I didn't want to happen is that we're considered a woke Hollywood production.”