SOUL SISTERS
EMPIRE HAS HOOKED up two old friends. On a Zoom call, at least. “It feels crazy that you’re so far away right now,” Sofia Coppola says to Kirsten Dunst.
It’s late April, 3pm on a Friday in California, where Coppola lives; 10am on a Saturday in New Zealand, where Dunst has been temporarily stuck, having been working on Jane Campion’s new film, The Power Of The Dog, when the pandemic threw everything off balance.
Coppola and Dunst have known each other for 22 years now, have made three beautiful films together, are incredibly close, and are missing each other.
They first met in 1998 when Coppola was auditioning actors for her debut feature, The Virgin Suicides, her exceptionally pretty, plaintive film about five teenage sisters who end up grounded in their family home in 1970s Michigan, with tragic consequences. She was instantly taken with Dunst, whom she cast as the transfixing lead, Lux.
After that, they reteamed for 2006’s Marie Antoinette, a gorgeous, extraordinarily soundtracked study of loneliness and extravagance, and then again for Coppola’s darkly humorous, gothic take on The Beguiled (2017). Theirs is a symbiotic relationship, each collaboration reaping rewards — a perfect partnership.
Coppola has been spending the lockdown with her family, “just trying to get through the day with everything that needs to be done”, showing her young daughters some movies, from Mike Nichols’ Working Girl to Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy (“which was a little ambitious”).
Dunst, eating breakfast in
