Francis Ford Coppola: US politics is at ‘the point where we might lose our republic’

The US, whose founders tried to emulate the laws and governmental structures of the Roman republic, is headed for a similarly self-inflicted collapse, director Francis Ford Coppola has said at the premiere of his first film in more than a decade. “What’s happening in America, in our republic, in our democracy, is exactly how Rome lost their republic thousands of years ago,” Coppola told a press conference at the Cannes film festival on Friday. “Our politics has taken us to the point where we might lose our republic.”“America was founded on the ideas of the Roman republic,” Coppola added. Decline was a theme that Coppola detected not just in US political culture but in its once all-dominant film industry. “The film industry has become more a matter of people being hired to meet their debt obligations, because the studios are in great debt,” he said.