Francis Ford Coppola will premiere a film at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday. It's a project he has risked everything on, and one that arrives clouded by rumors of production turmoil.On Thursday, Coppola's self-financed opus "Megalopolis" will make its much-awaited premiere. Other films are debuting in Cannes with more fanfare and hype, but none has quite the curiosity of "Megalopolis," the first film by the 85-year-old filmmaker in 13 years. Coppola put $120 million of his own money into it after no major studios offered to finance the project.Forty-five years ago, something very similar played out when Coppola was toiling over the edit for "Apocalypse Now." The movie's infamous Philippines production, which would be documented by Coppola's late wife, Eleanor, was already legend. The originally planned release in December 1977 had come and gone. Coppola had, himself, poured some $16 million into the $31 million budget for his Vietnam-set telling of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness.""I was terrified. For one thing, I was on the hook for the whole budget personally — that's why I came to own it," Coppola said in 2019. "In addition, in those days interest was over 25, 27%. So it looked as though, especially given the controversy and all the bogus articles being written about a movie that no one knew anything about but were predicting it was 'the heralded mess' of that year, it looked as though I was never going to get out of the jeopardy I was in. I had kids, I was young. I had no family fortune behind me. I was scared stiff."Gilles Jacob, delegate general of Cannes, traveled to visit Coppola, hoping he could coax him into returning to the festival where the director's "The Conversation" had won the Palme d'Or in 1974. In his book, "Citizen Cannes: The Man Behind the Cannes Film Festival," Jacob recounted finding Coppola in the editing suite "beset by financial woes and struggling with 20 miles of film."By springtime 1979, Coppola had assembled an edit he screened in Los Angeles — much as he recently did "Megalopolis." "Megalopolis" will be premiering in competition on Thursday. Little is known about the premise of the film or when it will be released this summer.The film stars Adam Driver as an architect attempting to build a city while the mayor, who will be played by Giancarlo Esposito, objects to Driver's ambitions. The film also stars Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, D.B. Sweeney, and Dustin Hoffman.The Associated Press contributed to this report.