“And, in a way, I have nothing left to lose anymore.” You’ve been talking about Megalopolis since the late 1970s. At what point did you seriously start to think of this as a real project?

"I have nothing left to lose." Scott said in the note he would give himself up peacefully to law enforcement on the ground if the plane landed anywhere but Seattle.

He was free when he left the girl, but it destroyed him.” After Janis Joplin’s death at 27 , her version of “Me and Bobby McGee” seemed to take on a new light.

“I have everything to lose here,” he says, referring to this portrait of the decline, fall, and Phoenix-like rise of a civilization. “And, in a way, I have nothing left to lose anymore. ...