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By Raquel Syme
When Eleanor Coppola went into labor with her third child, on May 14, 1971, at a hospital in Manhattan, her husband, the director Francis Ford Coppola, was on location in Harlem, shooting a scene for “The Godfather.” Hearing the news, he grabbed a camcorder from the set and raced over to capture the moment. “When they say, ‘It’s a girl,’ my dad gasps and nearly drops the camera,” Sofia Coppola told me recently, of her birth video. “My mom is there, just trying to focus.” The footage—which has been screened by the family multiple times over the years, and as part of a feminist art installation designed by Eleanor—was the first of many instances in which Sofia would be seen through her father’s lens. When she was just a few months old, Francis cast her in her first official film role, as the infant in the dénouement of “The Godfather,” in which Michael Corleone, the ascendant boss of the Corleone crime family, anoints the head of his newborn nephew as his associates murder rival gangsters one by one.
There are plenty of distinguished bloodlines in the history of Hollywood—the Selznicks and the Mayers, the Warners, the Hustons, the Bergman-Rossellinis, the Fondas—but very few, like the Coppolas, in which one famous director has spawned another. After an early life spent in front of the camera, Sofia Coppola made a career behind it, becoming one of the most influential and visually distinctive filmmakers of her generation, with eight features to her name. Her second, “Lost in Translation,” from 2003, earned her an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and a nomination for Best Director, making her the first American woman recognized in that category. Her career, of course, has been bolstered by an unusual wealth of resources. Francis’s company, American Zoetrope, has been a producer on all her movies. When she made her début, “The Virgin Suicides,” in 1999, she was able to cast an established star, Kathleen Turner, with whom she’d appeared as a teen-ager in her father’s movie “Peggy Sue Got Married.” She got permission to shoot “Somewhere,” her fourth film, inside the clubby Hollywood hotel the Chateau Marmont because in her youth she was a regular there, and even had a private key to the hotel pool. Still, no director can get a project green-lighted at a snap of the fingers, especially in today’s franchise-glutted Hollywood, and especially as a female director in an industry that remains dominated by men. Coppola is self-aware enough to know that it would be bad manners for someone in her position to complain. But she told me, “It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.”
When we first met in the fall of 2021 over breakfast near his West Village home, Coppola had spent the past two years working on his most ambitious assignment yet, a miniseries for Apple TV, based on Edith Wharton. Coppola adapted the book into five episodes and cast Florence Pugh in the lead role of Undine Spragg, a Midwestern upstart desperate to infiltrate Gilded Age Manhattan. Coppola, like Wharton, is known for her depictions of twisted eyes from a rarefied medium and for her vision of the feminine. characters with great privileges but little autonomy. ” Marie Antoinette,” his best-loved film, had a budget of $40 million, still modest by Hollywood standards; For “Custom,” she planned, as she put it, “five Marie Antoinette. “
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Over breakfast, however, he told me, “Apple just pulled out. They withdrew our funding. His voice was calm and his face (prominent cheekbones, Roman nose) was placid. ” It’s a real test,” he says. I guess I had infinite resources. ” During the progression of the project, she had been talking to the executives (“mostly guys”) about everything from the budget to the script. “They didn’t perceive Undine’s character,” he recalls. She’s so “unfriendly. “But so does Tony Soprano! He added, “It was like a date that you know you’ve probably broken up with a while ago. “(Apple did not respond to a request for comment. )
Coppola grew up watching Francisco fight against movie studios. The good fortune of the “Godfather” films hardly allowed him to obtain financing in line with his ambitions, and he struggled to carry out his projects independently, bringing him to the brink of bankruptcy or a nervous breakdown. “Hearts of Darkness,” a documentary co-directed through Eleanor about the notoriously tortured production of “Apocalypse Now,” is subtitled, somewhat hyperbolically, “A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. ” (At the age of eighty-four, Francisco financed a new film, “Megalopolis,” with one hundred and twenty million dollars of his own money, freed up by selling a portion of the family wine business. ) Coppola was absorbed through of his father’s philosophy that it was never worth giving in to the artistic deguyds of executives. In 2014, he agreed to direct a live-action edition of “The Little Mermaid” for Universal Studios, but amid disputes during the progression (even, he said at the time, an executive asked him, “What will thirty bring?—five years?) a one-year-old in the audience? “), he left his job. “I don’t really need a hundred million dollars to make a movie,” he told me about studio contracts with conditions. “I learned that it’s better to do your own thing. ” He refuses to take on projects unless they are guarantees you the right to decide on your artistic team and control the final edition.
In January 2022, after unsuccessfully seeking secure financing for “Custom,” Coppola embarked on a new project, an independent film adapted from Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, “Elvis and Me. ” Presley’s relationship with Elvis began when she was only fourteen years old. Like Marie Antoinette, she unfortunately finds herself married to a king. Flipping through the book while in bed with a case of Covid, Coppola had begun to see the symbol spread in his mind. “It just occurred to me to see her sitting on that shag rug all day,” he recalled. He temporarily wrote a draft of the script and told his longtime producer, Youree Henley, that he hoped to have finished filming before the end of the year. He was not deterred by the upcoming release of Baz Luhrmann’s eighty-five million dollar film, “Elvis,” which was due to be released in a few months. A frenetic biopic, Luhrmann’s film depicts Priscilla as a marginal character and a contented companion. Coppola called Presley and said, “That’s not how I see you at all,” and after hearing Coppola’s vision, Presley signed on as a producer.
“Marie Antoinette” was shot in the real Versailles, a cinematic coup. For “Priscilla,” Elvis Presley’s estate, wary of a film told from Priscilla’s point of view, denied Coppola access to Graceland. Instead, Coppola’s production team built the façade. and interiors of Elvis’ mansion in Memphis on an outdoor soundstage in Toronto. I visited him one afternoon in November 2022, when filming was underway. Offstage, the fifty-two-year-old Coppola dresses in understated elegance: Chanel slingbacks, collared blouses. Now he wore his less subtle, gray New Balance “uniform” and a black Carhartt fleece over a Charvet button-down shirt. He led me through the shed-like area and into Presley’s surrogate house. giant statues of lions. In the eye-catching living room, she showed off a floral arrangement. They’re real orchids,” he says. I was surprised by our budget. How extravagant.
Coppola’s team had planned 40 days of shooting, which was already a bit tight, but at the last minute the investment failed and they had to cut the story to be able to shoot it in just one month, for less than twenty million dollars. A lot of the film is set in the Memphis summer, but they were filming when winter was approaching, which was cheaper, so Coppola had to exercise his actors, shivering in outdoor scenes in bathing suits, to “act warm. “Seeking in Los Angeles, of Priscilla driving a convertible down a palm-lined street and tossing a swan into a pool, Coppola stockpiled cash by borrowing footage from a Cartier ad he filmed in 2018, featuring an actress who looks a bit like “Priscilla” lead character Cailee Spaeny. at least from behind.
Whether set in a luxury hotel in Tokyo, like “Lost in Translation,” or in suburban Michigan, like “The Virgin Suicides,” Coppola’s films are sumptuous but also subtly clinical. One of the visual characteristics of his paintings is a protagonist hunting through a window, isolated from the global beyond. “You know, I can’t resist a trapped woman,” he said. However, even if his female characters are confined, they achieve a certain definition of themselves through modern adventures. No filmmaker has so skillfully depicted the cloistered atmosphere of adolescence or the expressive power of his clothing. She’s a master at staging a messy bedroom: piles of impractical clothes and shoes, walls covered in posters, dressers cluttered with fragrance bottles and porcelain figurines. Director Chloé Zhao, who won the Oscar for best director at the 2021 Academy Awards for her film “Nomadland,” told me that she admires Coppola for “the overall construction that is not only based on facts, but also on emotions”. “His paintings. It’s difficult to dedicate yourself to this kind of femininity. Director Jane Campion, who counts “The Virgin Suicides” among her favorite films, told me that Coppola’s gentle touch with actors and attention to surfaces can be deceptive “His paintings are very difficult for me because it has deep roots,” he said. But Coppola’s films have rarely surprised critics by being longer on flavor than substance, and too close to the privileges they depict to critique them effectively. A few months ago, Coppola sent me a spontaneous email in which he questioned a perception that has resurfaced throughout his twenty-five-year career: “I don’t understand why chasing superficiality makes you superficial!”
Coppola told me she could see herself, in an alternative life, as the editor of a magazine, “like Diana Vreeland,” who commanded Vogue in the sixties. Coppola is an avid curator of images and looks; Campion recalled that once, when they were both judges at Cannes, Coppola offered to help style her, and the next day two huge boxes from the luxury fashion brand Celine arrived at Campion’s hotel. Coppola begins every film project by gathering visual inspiration. In her makeshift office on the soundstage, she had covered a large bulletin board with imagery including the Presleys’ wedding photographs, a glamour shot of Priscilla as a teen-ager, and several William Eggleston pictures of an empty Graceland. There is a famous Bruce Weber photo of Coppola’s stylishly bestrewn home office at the time of “The Virgin Suicides,” and this workspace bore some resemblance. On her desk were pink Post-it notes, a Fujifilm Instax camera, and a half-burned Diptyque candle; on the floor lay wine bottles from the Coppola vineyard (which also makes a “Sofia” champagne that comes in tiny pink cans with individual straws). The director Quentin Tarantino, whom Coppola dated in the two-thousands, recalled her once showing him the look book for “Marie Antoinette.” “It was exquisitely put together, yet you could still tell it was handmade,” he said, “by the loving hands of a fine artist.” He went on, “She had a page of donuts with a pink glaze. I asked her, ‘What’s with the donuts?’ She said, ‘I like that shade of pink, and I want her sofa to have that quality.’ And when I saw the film, sure enough, I wanted to eat the goddamn furniture.”
Coppola led me down a hallway to a room where the film’s costume designer, Stacey Battat, was putting on Priscilla’s wedding dress, which Coppola had commissioned the fashion space Chanel to design for the film as a favor. The dress, with a high bib collar, looks a lot like the original, but among Coppola’s strengths as a filmmaker is an unearthly aesthetic assurance, even when it comes to taking liberties with his source material. “I’ve known what I like,” he told me. The first shot of the film is a close-up of Priscilla’s feet walking on a blurry expanse of shaggy carpet, which she gave a pink tint, though in the genuine Graceland, no such carpet existed. “In my head, it was pink,” she told me. She hadn’t visited Graceland to prepare for the movie, but a friend took a field trip and sent her a picture of a poodle-print wallpaper. Coppola made the decision to recreate it for a shot in which Priscilla languishes in the bathtub, waiting. for Elvis to come back.
“It wasn’t in a bathroom at Graceland,” Coppola said. “But it does not matter”.
The lighting on the set was dim. A playlist of songs, decided daily by Coppola to “set the mood,” was playing on the sound system: Curtis Mayfield, Aretha Franklin and the French indie rock band Phoenix, led by Coppola’s husband, Thomas Mars, who is also a musician. manager of his films. In one corner, crew members were playing pickleball on a court that Coppola had insisted on installing during the first week of filming. She had competed in the Crew tournament and her team, the Smashers, had won. “Pickleball racquets are so ugly,” he said. Maybe I’ll design a new diversity of them. “
Coppola told me that she learned from her father how to create “a warm set,” and borrowed from him a ritual he picked up in drama school: to kick off every production, stand with the cast and crew in a circle, hold hands, and recite the nonsense word “puwaba” three times. But the elder Coppola has what Eleanor, who has been married to him for sixty years, described to me as “an Italian approach—very theatrical, throwing stuff up in the air and screaming.” Sofia said that she finds such flourishes “so unnecessary.” The protagonists in her films tend to observe more than they speak, and Sofia comports herself in much the same way. The people who’ve worked with her, however, describe an impressive resolve beneath the diffidence. The actress Elle Fanning, who starred in “Somewhere” and “The Beguiled,” told me, “She doesn’t freak out, ever. She’s not going to scream at you across the room. But she’s unwavering.” Bill Murray, a star of “Lost in Translation” and “On the Rocks,” gave Coppola the nickname “the velvet hammer,” for her subtle stubbornness about getting her way.
Henley, the producer, who was sitting in a director’s chair near a video monitor, remembers a day when he and Coppola were looking for ice rinks for “Somewhere. “Coppola said of one of them: “It’s great, uh, where do you deserve lunch?Afterward, Henley discussed a few other conceivable tracks to visit, and Coppola seemed perplexed; She had already chosen. Henley said to me, “I couldn’t read her sweetness as well as I do now. “
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Coppola and his team were rehearsing a scene in the Presleys’ bedroom, where a giant mirror hung from the bed. Jacob Elordi, the actor who bet on Elvis, sat on the king-size mattress, his six-foot figure hanging almost overhead. Spaeny, who was twenty-four but small enough to pass for a teenager, floated in the doorway. The scene takes place a while after Priscilla’s arrival at Graceland. She went grocery shopping and bought a dress, but returned it later. Elvis found it unflattering. ” Once again, I had compromised my own tastes,” Presley wrote of the moment in his memoir, which in Coppola’s world is the worst fate.
Kathleen Turner told me, of her collaboration with Coppola on “The Virgin Suicides,” “She would never tell an actor what she particularly wanted and, boy, that can be very difficult. “He added: “Francis is a bulldozer, a very smart bulldozer who knows what he wants. Sophie, if we do, then we’ll know if that’s what she wanted. Twenty-six-year-old Elordi told me that he interpreted Coppola’s lack of schooling as a sign of confidence. She chose him after meeting him only once. “Sofia never filmed herself before filming. She never texted or called by voice, gaze or walk,” he said. When he arrived on set, excited to show Coppola the Elvis prop he’d been wearing for months, she said, “Wow, you look like him and communicate like him,” and left it at that. there.
Coppola called it “Action!” and Elordi looked at Spaeny, “What is that dress?It doesn’t flatter your figure at all. He looked at Coppola, who was standing next to his cinematographer. “Was it okay, Sofia?” he said, slurring his words, staying true to his character. Should I laugh at her?I don’t need to be too dramatic.
“It’s not too much,” Coppola replied. He paused and put his hand on his chin. “Maybe it’s a little Elvis. “
Francisco’s life as a director was itinerant and he did not leave his circle of relatives behind for more than ten days at a time. So, the rest of the nuclear unit: Eleanor, Sofia and their siblings, Roman and Gian-Carlo, or Gio lived away from their home in Northern California for months, if not years. One of Sofia’s earliest memories is being in a helicopter in the Philippines during the filming of “Apocalypse Now. “During the filming of “One from the Heart,” when I was in fourth and fifth grade, they moved to Los Angeles. After that, for “The Outsiders” and “Rumble Fish,” they went to Tulsa, Oklahoma. “Basically, we were circus people,” he said. In a way, I mark my formative years through cinema. “
Coppola never excelled academically, in part because of all the changes. He left one school before learning to multiply and, when he enrolled in a new school, he had failed the same unit. Coppola recalls: “I never really learned math and I’m what they call a ‘fussy’ reader. Anahid Nazarian, a researcher and fabricator who has worked with Francis for 40 years, remembers a time when Coppola didn’t turn in an assignment: “His instructor said he had the most productive excuse, which was: ‘I left it on the plane when I got back. ‘ here. The Oscars. » When it came to taste, however, Coppola was precociously vocal: She gave herself the nickname Domino and insisted that she appear as such in several photographs of her father. On the set of “One from the Heart,” created her “I was the only woman in Napa Valley who subscribed to French Vogue,” she said. Francis described her as having “very, very big opinions” even when she was a small woman, adding: “It was never hard to know what she liked and what she didn’t prefer. ” » Francisco’s most productive and well-known films took place in hypermasculine neighborhoods: the army, the mafia. Coppola was attracted to highly feminine self-expression. At her parents’ dinners, she was more interested in “wives and friends,” he says. “They had the most productive Bakelite jewelry. “
Francis recalled that he and Eleanor had maintained a residence outside of Hollywood to create a semblance of normalcy for the children. Yet many of the stories Coppola told me about his formative years took place in the world of prominent adults: Richard Gere, a star of Francisco’s “Cotton Club,” swam in the family pool; George Lucas was “Uncle George”; Anjelica Huston confided to Coppola that she would poke his nose. Last year, one afternoon, while stopping at a bookstore in Los Angeles, Coppola showed me a volume called “Height of Fashion,” a collection of the most modern photographs of celebrities. Coppola had sent a photo of her at fourteen, lanky and radiant, with an asymmetrical haircut, sitting in the elegant Parisian dining room Davé next to the late fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. “He was a friend of a friend of my parents,” she said.
There’s an old-fashioned flavor to the Coppolas’ dalliances with the family industry: just as shoemakers breed shoemakers, moviegoers breed moviegoers. Roman, Sofia’s brother and a regular collaborator, is a filmmaker who has written screenplays with Wes Anderson. Talia Shire, who starred in the videos for “The Godfather” and the “Rocky” franchise, is his aunt. His niece Gia has directed two feature films. Her first cousins come with actor Jason Schwartzman, whom she played as a fool before Louis XVI in “Marie Antoinette. “Other Coppolas train actors, write screenplays, make music, and produce or distribute films. Sofia attributes the estate’s popularity within the circle of relatives to Francisco’s contagious passion. “My dad is so passionate about videos that he thinks everyone does it,” he said. Even Francis’ father, a composer, ended up singing the music for his films, winning an Oscar (with Nino Rota) for “The Godfather: Part 2. “
Eleanor was a member of a family struggling to find its way in business. In “Notes,” the first of two memoirs she wrote, she describes meeting Francis on the set of her first feature film, the horror film “Dementia 13,” in 1962. He was the director, she was the assistant art director. and she thought they could work together in movies for years. Instead, a few months later, she discovered that she was pregnant with Gio. She and Francis were married the following weekend and Francis, as Eleanor told me, “made it clear that my role was to be a wife and mother. ” She writes in “Notes” about a feeling of living in anticipation – “waiting for Francis to have the opportunity to perform. ” ArrayArray waiting to move there, waiting to move home. (“At that time, I didn’t even know I could have a career, much less if my wife would have one,” Francis said via email, adding, “I knew she was artistic and from day one I gave her full help. ” (babysitting time and a studio for Ellie’s paintings. “) Sofia described a time when her mother visited the set of “Priscilla” and observed a scene in which Elvis prepares to go on tour, while Priscilla remains with daughter, Lisa Marie. Eleanor I said, “I’ve been there. ” Eleanor reminded me, “When Elvis said to Priscilla, ‘You have everything you want to be happy,’ that’s precisely what I felt at that moment. I was to the psychiatrist and I asked him: “Why am I not happy?” No single user told me: “You are an artistic user. ” »
With his daughter, however, Francis made a point of offering creative encouragement, including by exposing her, along with her brothers, to the technical aspects of filmmaking. “There’s a traditional Italian thing with women, but I wasn’t raised like that,” Coppola said. “I was raised the same as the boys.” She and her mother didn’t discuss the gap in their experiences at the time, and Coppola isn’t inclined to analyze the themes that she explores in her work. Roman told me, “I’ve never heard Sofia say, ‘I want to show this isolation through this thing.’ ” Francis has always advised her that filmmaking should be close to the bone—as he told me, “the more personal, the better.” But, when I asked about the personal element of her movies, Coppola often fell back on abstractions or let her sentences trail off mid-thought. (Other writers have speculated about whether her style of communication is cannily evasive or simply a natural product of valuing the visual over the verbal. “I think sometimes she gives people enough rope to hang themselves with just by not responding,” Fiona Handyside, a British film scholar and the author of “Sofia Coppola: Cinema of Girlhood,” has said.) When I told Coppola about the feelings of stuckness that Eleanor had shared with me, and that seemed to percolate through Coppola’s films, she said, “I think so many people can relate to that, especially women.” Then she added, of her mom, “I’m sure seeing my first impression of womanhood as a woman who felt trapped, and her sadness, is related to the women in my films, more than to a side of myself.”
One morning last July, I ran into Coppola in the lobby of the Ritz in Paris, where he was staying before an assembly about an upcoming clothing line he had designed for Chanel’s Scottish knitwear logo, Barrie. (He told me that his father, who made a lot of his fortune from wine and hospitality, “taught us how to make money doing other things, so we wouldn’t have to rely on videos for that. Coppola and Mars spend part of the year in Paris and it’s possible that she simply stayed in her one component on the other side of town. But the Ritz was closer to Barrie’s offices, near Place Vendôme, and she relished the opportunity to stay there alone. “Lost in Translation” and “Somewhere” describe hotels as sites of apathetic suspension and electrical potential. ” I like the points in between,” he says.
When Coppola was fifteen, in 1986, Francis arranged a summer internship for her at Chanel. A month before she was supposed to leave for Paris, Gio, her oldest brother, was killed in an accident. He was twenty-two and had been assisting his father on the film “Gardens of Stone,” set at Arlington Cemetery, and on a day off had gone boating with one of the film’s co-stars, Griffin O’Neal. While driving between two other boats, O’Neal drove into a towline that struck Gio. (O’Neal was replaced in the film and later charged with manslaughter, but was ultimately acquitted.) Francis’s producers offered to shut down the film shoot, but he wanted to press on. In her memoirs, Eleanor recalls his hope that keeping busy “would prevent the torturous reality of Gio’s loss from pervading every moment.” Roman, then a film student at N.Y.U., cancelled his summer plans to step into Gio’s job on the film, but Coppola’s parents decided that she should still go abroad. Eleanor told me, “She was right at that age where she was trying to pull away from me, and so I thought she needed to get away from home, and all the things that surrounded the aftermath, and, frankly, me as a mom.”
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The Coppolas recruited Susie Landau Finch (the twenty-year-old daughter of actor Martin Landau), who worked for Francis’ film company, to accompany Sofia in Paris. Landau Finch recalled that Gio’s young fiancée, Jacqui de La Fontaine (now Jacqui Getty), who was pregnant with their daughter, Gia, had come to live with them in Paris and that they had spent many afternoons in the apartment, dazed. They reminded me a lot of what Sofia would later paint in ‘The Virgin Suicides,'” Landau Finch said. “The boredom of being hit by emotion, this kind of internalization of tragedy. “Finally, Landau Finch invited Rainer Judd, her husband’s niece and daughter of the sculptor Donald Judd, to sign up. and she and Coppola spent the next few weeks “eating croissants and drinking Orangina and staying up until dawn in a nightclub,” Judd recalls. He added: “I think there was an awareness of weight loss and weight, but we were also playful kids hunting Mocking boys and fancy clothes. “
At the Barrie offices, a phalanx of employees was preparing for a model fitting. The following day, the brand would be shooting an ad campaign at the Hôtel de Crillon, where Coppola once filmed a party scene for “Marie Antoinette.” Coppola walked over to a rolling rack of clothes and stroked a pink cashmere jumpsuit priced at nearly three thousand euros. A velvet-lined tray on a nearby table held gold-and-porcelain buttons monogrammed with “SC.” An employee pulled out a double-breasted jacket and handed it to Coppola. She slipped it over her shoulders and looked in the mirror. “Oh, my God, I love it,” she said.
Then, as we passed for lunch in a Blos Angelesck car with driver, we passed by the Concorde de Plos Angelesce de los Angeles. Coppolos Angeles was quietly looking out the window. That’s where Marie Antoinette was guillotined,” he said. “I like to go through that. “
When Francis was starring in “The Godfather: Part III” (1990), Sofia was his style for the character of Mary, Michael Corleone’s daughter. Studio executives encouraged him to settle on Winona Ryder, but when Ryder arrived in Rome, where she was filming the film, she collapsed from exhaustion and she was declared unable to work. Sofia had enrolled at Mills College in Oakland to study art history, but she was in Rome during winter break. Francis told her that she deserved to play Mary. Paramount executives visited the Cinecittá studios to tell Francis that they didn’t think she was up to the task, but Francis stood her ground. Sofia had given that impression in almost all of her previous films, although only in small roles; in “The Godfather: Part II,” she had been “the girl on the boat. ” She found being in front of the camera to be unbearable and she enjoyed movie sets mainly for the chance to hang out in the clothing aisles. Still, she really wanted to play the role of Mary, partly because she was bored at school and her father had promised her that she wouldn’t have to return.
A team of acting and speech teachers was assembled, and Freck Vreeland, Diana’s son, was brought in to train Sofia for a scene in which Mary gives a speech at the Corleone family foundation. Vreeland recalled that Sofia was, in the first place, so shy that “it is possible that she simply did not express her voice much less assert herself as a successful speaker would. ” Sofía told me that she was mortified by a scene that required her to “kiss Andy García in front of his wife, with my father’s status there. ” Eleanor’s memoir cites her own diary from that time, in which she noted how Sofia (who, by all accounts, is not much of a crybaby) rarely burst into tears between filming. She wrote: “Other well-meaning people tell me that I am enabling a form of child abuse. ArrayArray and that, in the end, she will be the target of bad reviews from critics who may simply scare her away for years. The film’s climactic death scene compounds the pressure, when, on the steps of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, Mary Corleone is shot to death by a hitman who was targeting her father. Compared to Pacino, who brought his trademark strident theatricality to the stage, Coppola seemed to be acting a bit.
When the film was released, Eleanor’s fears came true. In 1991, Coppola won two Razzie Awards, for Worst Supporting Actress and Worst New Star. Entertainment Weekly published a story with the headline “Is it wonderful or so horrible that she destroyed her father’s new epic?” Whatever one thinks of Coppola’s functionality (Pauline Kael appreciated his “unusual presence”), the fight lent poignant metatextual size to Coppola’s final moment in the film, when, just before collapsing on the theater steps , Mary looks at Michael and we let out a cry of disbelief. “Dad?” Francis later admitted to the Times: “The woman took the bullet for Michael Corleone; My daughter took the bullet for me. »Sofía absorbed the bad press with her characteristic composure. “It was embarrassing to be publicly criticized for ruining my father’s movie,” she said, but “I didn’t feel devastated, because acting was not my dream. ” And she added: “I think this experience has helped me as a director. I know how vulnerable you feel in front of a camera. Kirsten Dunst, who starred in “The Virgin Suicides” at age sixteen, then in “Marie Antoinette” and “The Seductress,” is her first collaboration with Coppola: “She told me how much she enjoyed my teeth. I thought her teeth were crooked, but she said, “They’re so cute. ” She gave me confidence in things that she didn’t necessarily have and I took them with me.
In the years that followed, Coppola experienced the kind of aimless early adulthood that scions of Hollywood’s elite have. She enrolled at ArtCenter College of Design to study oil painting, but she dropped out after a professor told her that “she was not a painter. ” She had a relationship with photographer Paul Jasmin, whom Coppola cites as “the first user in my family who told me he had tastes. ” She has become something of a Los Angeles It Girl, making appearances in music videos and newspaper-style sections. In interviews, she made cheerful statements. (She Likes: Karl Lagerfeld, hot rods. She Dislikes: bras, the Twelve Steps. ) At age twenty-three, she bought a black Cadillac Seville and called it her “girl princess car. ” the mafia. ” He spent a lot of time floating around the Chateau Marmont pool, employing his username. In 1994, he introduced a fashion line called Milkfed, which produced tongue-in-cheek pieces like a baby T-shirt posted with the word “I ♥ Booze “. That same year, she and her friend Zoe Cassavetes, daughter of director John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowlands, hosted a Comedy Central series called “Hi Octane. ” (When I asked Coppola if she had friends who didn’t have famous parents , he responded, somewhat vaguely, “Definitely not a direct line to all my friends,” though he declared a special affinity for others who have “big, macho, tough artist dads. “) In which the two men went on risky adventures and they interviewed their well-known acquaintances, it was canceled after a few episodes. Francis remembers that Sofia asked him one day: “Dad, am I going to be a dilettante forever?”
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A breakthrough came when Coppola wrote a short film, called “Lick the Star,” about a clique of teen-age girls who revere, and then violently ostracize, their queen bee. Her cast featured some of her father’s associates, including Peter Bogdanovich as a school principal. The finished film, released in 1998, runs only thirteen minutes and is shot in black-and-white, but it contains the seeds of Coppola’s lush cinematic vocabulary. She told me, “I knew a little bit about photography, a little bit about clothing design, and a little bit about music. I was annoyed that I could never pick one thing. And then, when I made my short film, I realized it was a way to work with all of it.”
In New York, Coppola lives with Mars and their two teenage daughters in a red-brick house whose narrow façade gives it a deceptively humble appearance from the outside. One morning last March, he greeted me at the front with the family’s golden retriever, Gnocchi. And he guided me into a giant, white-walled living room. Coppola’s interior design, like his fashion sense, is vintage with a whimsical feminine touch. The hearth on a gray marble hearth contained a giant chinoiserie porcelain vase filled with an architectural ensemble. of pink roses and anemones. (These were high-end fakes. )A floor-to-ceiling library organized into sections on fashion, New York, photography, and the history of France. Among the books, he had placed framed artwork, adding a drawing by director Mike Mills for the poster for “The Virgin Suicides” and a Polaroid of Princess Caroline of Hanover taken by Andy Warhol.
Coppola told me that his least favorite film was “The Bling Ring,” his fifth feature, because the world in which it took place was out of sync with his own sense of taste. The film, based on the true story of a ring of top Los Angeles school students who robbed the homes of the rich and famous, was filmed in part inside Paris Hilton’s mansion, where the camera gapes in front of decorated cushions. with photographs of Hilton’s face. and a “night”. -club room” equipped with a dancer’s bar. The film is one of the best pieces of the millennial era, channeling the crazy intersection between celebrity worship and consumerism at the dawn of social media. But Coppola said, of his milieu of Ugg-wearing teenagers and the TV stars they worship, “I wouldn’t call it horrible – that sounds snobbish – but a big part of my motivation is to create beauty. ” Much to his chagrin, “The Bling Ring” is his daughters’ favorite movie. “They think it’s glamorous and cool,” she says, then adds with a shudder: “They started asking me for boot-cut jeans. ”
She did not show me the girls’ bedrooms, but she later told me that she’s begun photographing their messes for posterity. “It’s like set dressing for one of my movies,” she said. The girls are forbidden to have public social-media accounts until they’re eighteen, but Romy, the older child, had a rogue viral moment last year, when—sounding, many observers noted, a bit like one of Coppola’s restless protagonists—she posted a plucky TikTok video saying that she’d been grounded for attempting to charter a helicopter with her dad’s credit card “because I wanted to have dinner with my camp friend.” Coppola, who values privacy and the mystery it can afford, called the video “the best way to rebel against me.” (She seemed excited, though, to confirm that Romy had filmed a small speaking role in Francis’s upcoming movie.)
Coppola had placed scalloped shortbread cookies on a sensitive plate (“I love fine Italian dishes”) and a stack of paper, the manuscript of a coffee table book, “Sofia Coppola Archive,” which he published last fall. The definitive volume, as thick and pink as a piece of princess cake, is an album of Coppola’s career, with brief elliptical introductions to the film followed by a cascade of Polaroids, handwritten notes, touch sheets, script marginal notes, dress sketches, and other ephemera.
The first bankruptcy begins with a behind-the-scenes symbol of Dunst smiling on the grass of a football field. Coppola was in his early 20s when he read Jeffrey Eugenides’ 1993 novel “The Virgin Suicides,” about five teenage sisters from 1970s Michigan who languish under the restrictions of their ultraconservative parents and all commit suicide in a year of singlehood. Coppola said that when he read the book he thought, “I hope whoever makes a movie with him doesn’t ruin it. “She may be the one to do it.
Coppola had started writing the script before she learned that a pair of producers had already bought the rights to the book and were working with a male writer-director. “I could hear my dad saying, ‘Don’t ever try to adapt something you don’t have the rights to,’ ” she recalled. “He told me to move on to something else.” Instead, Coppola sent her script to the producers and asked them to consider her for the directing job should the current arrangement fall through. A year later, she got the call. “I was young and naïve and didn’t really know what I was getting into,” she told me, “but I was, like, ‘Shit, O.K., now I have to figure it out.’ ”
“Virgin,” filmed over a month in the summer of 1998 on a budget of $4 million, was a remarkably confident start from its first shot: Dunst lingering on the hot street eating cherry ice cream, like a recent Lolita. while the artificial sounds of the Air band come into action. From there, the film unfolds unhurriedly. The sisters’ sadness is slightly externalized, but the fluid of their depression permeates each and every image, adding a striking shot of a wooden crucifix with a pink lace bra hanging over its shoulder to dry. Eugenides framed the story as a hazy memory, told through a refrain of boys from the community who idolize the sisters but know nothing of their inner lives. Coppola’s script used a single narrator and allowed the camera to peek into personal spaces the boys might never go. “Archivo” reproduces an email he received from Eugenides in 1998, expressing considerations that the script lacked “what is obligatory about this story, which of course means the children, the passage of time, the dilemma of the story and the tone correct”. recent message that Eugenides wrote in reaction to his request to print the letter, in which he says: “What a crybaby and crybaby I was in those days”). The film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and garnered critical acclaim. . Array, however, according to Coppola, its American distributor, Paramount Classics, did little to publicize it: “They thought teenage women were going to commit suicide if they saw it,” he said, adding, “It’s come out a bit here. “
Coppola told me that every film he made was a reaction to the previous one. After “Virgin,” he searched for paintings of an original tale. He considers “Lost in Translation,” his next film, to be his ultimate personal commitment. He chose Japan as the setting based on the trips he had taken to promote his Milkfed line and invented the story of a twenty-something American woman, Charlotte, who worries about a prominent older actor named Bob at the Park Hyatt Tokyo. He wrote the script with Bill Murray in mind as Bob and then spent a year looking for him. (Actress Rashida Jones, a friend and collaborator of Coppola’s, recalls, “He had an assistant whose job it was to hold his phone and tell him if Bill Murray called her. “) Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson, is smart but lacks direction. Bob: “I tried to take pictures, but they’re really bad. ” She’s married to a famous music photographer (Giovanni Ribisi) and gets bored in the hotel bar while he chats with the Hollywood guys.
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At the time, Coppola was married to the director Spike Jonze, whom she’d met in the early nineties through her friends Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, of the band Sonic Youth. But the two were in the process of separating. Jonze released his own feature directorial début, “Being John Malkovich,” the same year that “The Virgin Suicides” premièred, and while Coppola’s film had a modest return his became an indie sensation. She recalled feeling, in their relationship, an echo of her mother’s experiences. Jonze and a few of his friends had discussed launching a directors’ collective, and, according to Coppola, they didn’t even invite her to join. “I don’t want to embarrass Spike and those guys,” she said. “I think it’s just about understanding the dynamic there, which was a very nineties, dudes’-club dynamic. I was going around with Spike to promote his films, and I was just kind of the wife.” (Jonze could not be reached for comment.)
She was surprised when “Lost in Translation” became a runaway hit, not only winning her an Oscar but earning more than a hundred million dollars worldwide on a four-million-dollar budget. “I thought I was writing this really indulgent piece,” she recalled. “I mean, who cares about some rich girl trying to find herself?” But audiences connected to the film’s fuzzed-out mood of dislocation and the tragicomic pleasures of two lost people finding each other for a moment in time. At the end of the film, Bob and Charlotte share a kiss, and he whispers something inaudible into her ear. “I never even wrote that line,” Coppola said. “Bill always said that it was something that should stay between them.”
There is an adage in Hollywood that actors want to win awards to boost their egos, whereas directors want to win awards to boost their budgets. After “Lost in Translation,” Coppola found herself courted by the major studios. The producer Amy Pascal, who was a top executive at Sony Pictures at the time, told me, “I was desperate to work with her.” When they met, in 2004, she asked Coppola what project she dreamed of making. Coppola answered immediately: “Marie Antoinette.”
Shortly after the release of “The Virgin Suicides,” Coppola had read an advance copy of a biography of the queen of France, written by British historian Antonia Fraser, and wrote to Fraser asking him to subscribe. “I will be able to explain how a woman recounts the grandeur of a palace, the clothes, the parties, the rivals, and in the end, having to grow up,” she wrote. “I can relate to her role as coming from a strong circle of family members and fighting for her own identity. “At first, Coppola strove to make his screenplay biographically complete, covering Marie Antoinette’s life to the guillotine. Fraser, who later wrote in Vanity Fair, recalled telling Coppola that the script seemed to lose power in its final act, as if Coppola had “not been interested in the tragic fate of the mature woman. “Fraser continued, “When she asked me lightly, ‘Does it matter if I put politics aside?I replied with absolute honesty, “Marie Antoinette would have enjoyed it. “»
Coppola’s film, released in 2006, tells the story of Hitale’s libertine, callous textbook monarch as an intimate coming of age, following her from the moment she set out for Versailles from her home in Austria as a peace of mind. fourteen years. . a provision between nations upon her departure from her palace, nineteen years later, as the French Revolution took hold. Coppola told me that he was looking to capture the concept of “the children taking over the kingdom. ” He allowed Dunst to retain his Americana props and filled the film with anachronistic music and peppy montages, adding a feverish grocery shopping scene set to a remix of “I Want Candy. ” (Her brother Roman, who photographed most of the film’s close-ups, placed a pair of Converse shoes among the rococo mules. ) When an angry crowd complains about the actress’s famous (and probably apocryphal) line, the queen “Let them eat cake,” Dunst tells her friends: “It’s so absurd, I would never say that!” The film is obscenely beautiful at best, with every plan being gifted with a box of petit fours. The bracing opening series (Coppola never missed a single opening shot) was enlivened by Guy Bourdin’s still-style photography: Lounging in a petticoat, with an assistant massaging her feet, Dunst’s Marie runs her finger through the frosting of a layer. The cake then gives the camera an insolent look. When Coppola showed her father a draft of the film, begged him to give Louis XVI more lines. Like Eugenides, he lacked the male perspective. “I like, ‘Uh, Dad, no,’” Coppola recalled, adding: “Honestly, I don’t care about other people’s perspectives. ” . Only his.
Coppola and Mars began dating while filming the film. Mars, who was born and raised in Versailles, recalls: “It’s like living in a museum. You can’t disturb anything. This is not welcome. With “Marie,” there is excitement about seeing Versailles “embrace anything new. ” But not all French people appreciated the result. During a press screening in Cannes, some viewers booed him. Many critics dismissed the film as an ahistorical puff of smoke, a shameless exercise in vibe-driven filmmaking. Others consider it a masterpiece. The reaction was so divided that the Times took the unorthodox step of publishing conflicting reviews from its two top film critics. Manohla Dargis, of the “anti” camp, wrote: “The princess lived in a bubble, and it is from within that bubble that Ms. Coppola tells her story. »For some, however, the film’s reception has only reinforced Coppola’s assertion of its thematic substance, as a woman who knows a thing or two about the distorting effects of public exposure. (One of his close friends, the fashion designer Marc Jacobs, told me: “It’s very easy to publish headlines like ‘nepo baby’. What are you doing, killing yourself because you come from a smart family? Making art?”) Roger Ebert considers the film’s fast-paced attitude a strength: “Every review I have read of this film would adjust its fragile magic and tone down its romantic and tragic intensity to the point of being an educational film. “
How one feels about Coppola’s narrow storytelling technique likely depends, in part, on where one stands in relation to one’s vision box. When “Lost in Translation” was released, some Asian and Asian American critics took note of the film’s depiction of Japanese culture through the eyes of Western visitors. Accented English is played in the film for laughs. Tokyo’s institutions have been described as “shallow, inappropriately erotic, or unintelligible,” as film studies professor Bryn Mawr Howould Arguably King wrote in Film Quarterly. King wondered what point of consciousness Coppola brought to this portrait: did the tone of bewildered orientalism belong to her character or to her? Coppola defended the depiction of him to the Los Angeles Times, saying: “My story is about the Americans in Tokyo. After all, that’s all I know. But he didn’t seem to take into account the sensitivity inherent in representing another culture from a distance. “I wonder if all the adjustments to the ‘r’ and ‘l’ would be offensive,” he said at the time. “But my team thought it was funny. ” (“It was a different time,” he told me. “I have no idea how he techniques it now, but probably not the same way. ”)
Coppola faced a similar backlash more recently, during a film set on U. S. soil. “The Beguiled,” from 2017, is a remake of a 1971 film set during the Civil War, about an organization of white Confederate women immersed in erotic fervor when a wounded Union soldier arrives at their boarding school in a secluded location. The original film and the novel on which it is based also feature an enslaved black woman who works in the household. Coppola, fearful of perpetuating stereotypes, made the decision to forget about the character altogether and explained his absence with a discussion at the beginning of the film: the end of the war was nearing and “the slaves are gone. “In the United States, the premiere was governed by the discourse about the elimination of the character; Slate editor Corey Atad criticized the film for its “whitewashing of slavery. “
The fallout has forced Coppola to realize that there are dangers in writing only what one knows, or in “putting politics aside,” if it means avoiding uncomfortable complexities. Critic Angelica Jade Bastién of New York and Vulture told me, “What Coppola makes most productive is also his greatest weakness: he creates fables about fashionable white femininity. He continues: “Art is political, whether the artist likes it or not. Coppola is someone who studies whiteness, but perhaps doesn’t perceive his own whiteness very well. It is because of this contradiction that his painting does not go any further. Coppola told me, “I admit it was probably stupid to do something about the Civil War. But he also warned that his “creative license” with the original curtains had been “misinterpreted as insulting. “She tried to depict the collapse of an organization of spoiled women when there were no longer men or slaves to care for them. “It’s the kind of global I like, actually claustrophobic,” he said, adding, “They were so used to being taken care of and didn’t know how to do what allowed them to get through on their own. “
During one conversation, Coppola confessed, “Sometimes I feel like I make the same film over and over, and I’m probably becoming a cliché of myself.” In some ways, “Priscilla” resembles her previous movies, but in contrast to a film like “Marie Antoinette,” with its baubles and brocades, the new film is strikingly joyless in its depiction of life inside a gilded cage. In part because Coppola was denied the rights to Elvis’s music, the exuberance of rock and roll is all but absent from the film. Priscilla interacts with Elvis mostly at home, where he’s dressed down, needy, and sporadically abusive. Through the murmurings of tertiary characters, Coppola laces the film with reminders of Priscilla’s tender age, which was troubling even if you believe, as Presley claimed in her book, that she and Elvis did not consummate their relationship until they were married, when she was twenty-one. One of the film’s strongest sequences shows Spaeny trying to occupy herself in Graceland while Elvis is away. She ambles around in a doll-like white dress and too-big matching heels. She tries out various seats in the living room and plunks a single key on Elvis’s baby grand. She is less a kid taking over the kingdom than a child left home alone.
Just as Coppola rarely concerns himself with events beyond the sequestered worlds of his characters, he doesn’t show what happens to those who escape the waiting room of their lives. The final shot of “Priscilla” shows Spaeny walking out of the doors of Graceland. We hear “I Will Always Love You” through Dolly Parton, whether unhappy or triumphant. Coppola hinted at his desire, as he put it in an interview, to “grow up and examine other topics” beyond adolescence, but gave me little information about what that would look like, other than perhaps reteaming with Dunst, who is now has just over 40 years. Films beyond Coppola have emphasized the bonds between famous older men and younger women, but she told me that her attitude toward those relationships has changed over time. Her assignment before “Priscilla,” 2020’s “On the Rocks,” focused on a fortysomething writer, Laura (Rashida Jones, daughter of music producer Quincy Jones), and her money-dealing grandfather. Art, Felix. (Bill Murray). The character of Felix, whom Coppola says he modeled after his “dad and his friends,” is a gregarious guy who wears silk scarves and considers caviar a roadside snack. He also attracts attention and is prone to errant flirtations and chauvinistic soliloquies. “Somewhere” tinged with nostalgic sweetness about fathers and daughters: Coppola asked the film’s protagonists, divorced movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) and his eleven-year-old daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning), to order all the flavors of ice cream in the room. service, “which is precisely the kind of thing my father would do,” and recruited Chateau Marmont’s afterlife “playing song waiter” Romulo Laki to serenade Cleo with “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear. ” . via Elvis, the same song that Laki used. making a song for Sofía when she was young. “On the Rocks,” on the other hand, is funnier and racier, chronicling Laura’s struggle to define herself outside of her father’s crushing orbit. While drinking a Martini at Bemelguys, Félix tells Laura that he goes deaf to the frequency of female voices. Laura shouts at the end of the film, “They’ve given you daughters and granddaughters, so you better start figuring out how to listen to them!” »
Occasionally, Eleanor filmed behind-the-scenes footage of Sofia’s films, as she did for Francis. She has 80 hours left since she filmed “Marie Antoinette,” which Sofía told me she was helping turn into a documentary. In 2016, at the age of 80, Eleanor also released her first feature film, a comedy called “Paris Can Wait”, becoming the oldest American woman to hold her position as director. But in recent years Eleanor has become ill and her circle of relatives has been coming and going to her bedside in California. Last year, on Sofia’s birthday, which fell on Mother’s Day, the two “sat in the hospital and ate tuna sandwiches,” Eleanor told me. Last October, “Priscilla” had its American premiere at the New York Film Festival. The strikes in Hollywood meant that there were almost no actors on the red carpets, but since “Priscilla” did not receive any financing from the primary studios, Coppola was one of the few administrators who received special dispensation for the stars of his film to they would sell Elordi and Spaeny were present at the premiere, but Coppola herself was not there. Henley, her producer, read her a message: “I’m so sorry I’m not here with you, but I’m with my mother, to whom this film is dedicated. “
On a recent afternoon, many Coppola enthusiasts dressed up in costumes at a Barnes store
A young woman dressed in a custom patterned skirt with a photo of “The Virgin Suicides” came to the front of the line and put her hand to her chest. “You literally invented aesthetics,” he told Coppola, slang for the kind of exquisite look teens look for on social media. There was a disconnect between the enthusiasm of the enthusiasts and the understated energy of Coppola. She didn’t say much more than a warm “oh, thank you” or “that’s so sweet” when she earned his praise.
Leaving the bookstore after dark, Coppola said he couldn’t wait to order room service at the Beverly Hills Hotel, whose menu he knew from the breakfasts he spent there during his formative years discussing videos with his father. (The eggs Benedict are top-notch. ) We walked together to a black car waiting for him on the sidewalk. After the fluorescent lights of the bookstore, the streets of Los Angeles seemed pleasantly muted. I showed the sunset, which was a dusty pink hue.
“Oh, yes,” Coppola said, his eyes moving nonchalantly toward the sky. “It’s like I’ve learned it. ” ♦
An earlier part of this article incorrectly stated Jacob Elordi’s height and the year Sofia Coppola and Amy Pascal met.
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