“I considered many possibilities, becoming interested in an incident known as ‘The Catiline Conspiracy,’” Coppola says, explaining that “modern America was the historical counterpart of ancient Rome and that the Catiline Conspiracy, as told by historian Sallust, could be set in modern America, just as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness [originally set in the late 1800s amid European colonial rule in Africa] was set in the Vietnam War in Apocalypse Now.”
His next step was to remake some of those figures from history into fictional versions of modern civic leaders. “I began with the essence of a plot: Perhaps an evil patrician (Catiline) plotted to overthrow the republic, but was thwarted by Cicero, the consul. I renamed…
