From The Virgin Suicides’ clan of sisters suffocating in Seventies suburbia to The Bling Ring's underparented teens on a celebrity-burgling spree, Sofia Coppola conjures the rich texture of girlhood caught in flux like no one else. Her newest subject feels like a cosmic match: Priscilla Presley, the beehived bride of the king of rock and roll. She met Elvis as a 14-year-old schoolgirl and was secreted behind the gates of Graceland when she was still doing homework. Based on Presley's memoir, Coppola's film Priscilla promises the lush palette of 1960s, Cadillac-and-milkshake America with the complicated, hothouse atmosphere of those in-between moments of adolescence the director handles so masterfully. With her impeccable family pedigree, Francis Ford's daughter has long been in her element telling stories on set; now 52, she's one of the most distinctive filmmakers of her generation.
The monumentally influential artist Cindy Sherman tells stories too, equally ambiguous and unsettling ones, plotting eerily familiar scenarios in which she places herself as the medium to dismantle the archetypes around us. Since her breakthrough in the early Eighties, she has freeze-framed small-town housewives and leathery socialites, Hitchcock blondes and Renaissance Madonnas, crime-scene corpses and nightmarish clowns. Her latest digital series reconstructs the features of her face, reflecting back our fractured modern selves in contorted snarls and toothy grimaces. Not unlike a Coppola heroine, Sherman grew up the youngest of five children in suburban Long Island, watching B-movies and playing dress-up in her bedroom. Weaving her deeply uncanny scenes via make-up, wigs and thrift-store finds, the artist is a one-woman crew, wielding camera, lights, costumes and props. Some of those dot the shelves behind her on the day she and Coppola meet over Zoom, Coppola at home in downtown New York, Sherman at her studio in Long Island.
CINDY SHERMAN I loved Priscilla. The costuming, the settings, the period. It was just fantastic to watch.
SOFIA COPPOLA Thank you. That's so nice to hear. It was fun to get into that world. We were shooting in this warehouse studio where we had our costume department and our sets all in one place. I could go and watch them building the gates of Graceland.
CS So it wasn't shot in Graceland, then?
SC No. It's changed a lot — they have themed hotels there and stuff. They like to control all the content made around it so I don't think they'd be open to interpretation. We built it all in Toronto. It was low budget, and if it hadn't been for an amazing art department we wouldn't have been able to do it. Tamara [Deverell], who designed it, was like, “We'll shoot the hospital scene in this corner and then we'll redress it as the baby's nursery.” On the stage she built the Graceland interiors from the real plans of Graceland, so it's all proportionally the same.
CS Priscilla herself was part of the project, right? Did she come to set and was she like, “Wow, this is so exactly my home”?
She never came when we were shooting, but I showed her the movie aftersculptures of big dogs, and in Priscilla's memoir she talks about his bed being really big and tall and intimidating. So her book helped us imagine how it looked. Priscilla's story is unbelievable. She was so young when Elvis picked her out — and they slept together but they didn't actually have sex for many years, until they were married.
