During an interview for GQ, Francis Ford Coppola expressed his opinion on Trump’s proposed 100% tariff on movies produced outside the U.S. The Godfather director addressed the immense “uncertainty” surrounding the Tariffs and that implementing them would be “like slamming the door closed” on potential financial gain for the United States. Coppola’s full comment states:

“All it does is create uncertainty. People don’t understand that the economy in the previous administration? There was world inflation; there wasn’t [just] inflation in America. The entire world was going through a serious inflationary trend. But the country that did the best with it — and which other countries were jealous of — was the United States. So, the United States really banked a lot of money previous to this new administration, and there’s a lot of money in the country, and these tariffs are like slamming the door closed on what was a very prosperous situation.”

In that same interview, Coppola also revealed that since re-election, he’s held multiple sold-out screenings of his most recent film, Megalopolis, which is set in an amalgamation of New York City and Ancient Rome, as a means to compare the U.S.’s future to the fall of the Roman Republic. “It was so prophetic or prescient to say America is like Rome — it’s going to maybe lose its republic,” says Coppola. Coppola also compares the response to Megalopolis to his 1979 Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now, saying, “It’s just like what happened with Apocalypse Now. Apocalypse Now was a big flop; it got terrible reviews, and everyone said it was the worst movie ever made. And yet people never stopped going to see it.”

It must be noted that Megalopolis is currently unavailable to stream online. The director has chosen to continue to tour the film theatrically instead. As an insider told the Hollywood Reporter, “[Coppola] wants it to play in theaters the way it was intended.” He reiterated this in his recent interview for GQ, saying it isn’t streaming “because the film is still being shown in theaters” and that he “doesn’t want anyone to own it.”