Sofia Coppola: Interviews

Sofia Coppola (b. 1971) was baptized on film. After appearing in The Godfather as an infant, it took twenty-five years for Coppola to take her place behind the camera, helming her own adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s celebrated novel The Virgin Suicides. Following her debut, Coppola was the third woman ever to be nominated for Best Director and became an Academy Award winner for Best Original Screenplay for her sophomore feature, Lost in Translation. She has also been awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and Best Director at Cannes.

In addition to her filmmaking, Coppola is recognized as an influential tastemaker. She sequenced the so-called Tokyo dream pop of the Lost in Translation soundtrack like an album, a success in its own right. Her third film, Marie Antoinette, further showcased Coppola’s ear for the unexpected needle drop, soundtracking the controversial queen’s life with a series of New Romantic bangers popular during the director’s adolescence.

The conversations compiled within Sofia Coppola: Interviews mark the filmmaker’s progression from dismissed dilettante to acclaimed auteur of among the most visually arresting, melancholy, and wryly funny films of the twenty-first century. Coppola discusses her approach to collaboration, Bill Murray as muse, and how Purple Rain blew her twelve-year-old mind. There are interviews from major publications, but Coppola speaks with musician Kim Gordon for indie magazine Bust and Tavi Gevinson, then-adolescent founder of online teen magazine Rookie, as well. The volume also features a new and previously unpublished interview conducted with volume editor Amy N. Monaghan in which Coppola discusses her plans for the now-cancelled adaptation of The Custom of the Country. To read these interviews is to witness Sofia Coppola coming into her own as a world-renowned artist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jan 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781496843289

Book preview

Cover: Sofia Coppola, Interviews edited by Amy N. Monaghan

Sofia Coppola: Interviews

Conversations with Filmmakers Series

Gerald Peary, General Editor

SOFIA

COPPOLA

INTERVIEWS

Edited by Amy N. Monaghan

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

Publication of this work was made possible in part due to a subvention from the World Cinema Program at Clemson University.

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Copyright © 2023 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2023

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Monaghan, Amy N., editor.

Title: Sofia Coppola : interviews / Amy N. Monaghan.

Other titles: Conversations with filmmakers series.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2023. | Series: Conversations with filmmakers series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022045167 (print) | LCCN 2022045168 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496834577 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496843272 (paperback) | ISBN 9781496843289 (epub) | ISBN 9781496843296 (epub) | ISBN 9781496843302 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496843319 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Coppola, Sofia, 1971—Interviews. | Motion picture producers and directors—Interviews. | Motion picture actors and actresses—Interviews.

Classification: LCC PN1998.3.C672 S64 2023 (print) | LCC PN1998.3.C672 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/092—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045167

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045168

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Contents

Introduction

Chronology

Filmography

Lost and Found Sound: Five-Year-Old Sofia Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola and Eleanor Coppola / 1977

Coppola Puts Own Career in High Gear: The Daughter of a Famous Director Has a Few Goals of Her Own

Nancy Spiller / 1995

Sofia Coppola

Wes Anderson / 1999

Like a Virgin

Mark Ebner / 2000

Tokyo Story

Anne Thompson / 2003

The Coppola Clan’s Best Director?

Brian Libby / 2003

Encounter / Sofia Coppola: Something Romantic

Mia Hansen-Løve / 2004

Interview with Sofia Coppola: An Emotion Like Nostalgia

Michel Ciment and Yann Tobin / 2004

Interview with Sofia Coppola: Characters Breathing, the Rustle of the Fabric

Jean-Christophe Ferrari and Yann Tobin / 2006

Interview: Sofia Coppola

Todd Gilchrist / 2006

Living in the Limelight

Nicolas Rapold / 2010

Sofia Coppola on Her 3-D Dream for Somewhere and Her Flirtation with Directing a Twilight Movie

Kyle Buchanan / 2010

Sofia Coppola Mimics Hollywood Life in Somewhere

Terry Gross / 2010

Sofia Coppola: Not Just for Girls

Sam Adams / 2010

LA Story

Kim Gordon / 2011

Lost and Found

Carrie Rickey / 2013

Sofia Coppola: The Trials, Tears, and Talent

Stephen Galloway / 2013

Girls with Power and Mystique: An Interview with Sofia Coppola

Tavi Gevinson / 2013

Sofia Coppola and Anne Ross: For The Beguiled, Coppola and Ross Travel Back in Time

Anthony Kaufman / 2017

Art on Film: Sofia Coppola Returns with The Beguiled, Which Builds on Eighteen Years of Considered Work

Stephanie Zacharek / 2017

How Sofia Coppola Reclaimed The Beguiled for Women (and Gay Men)

Kyle Buchanan / 2017

Interview: Sofia Coppola

Nicolas Rapold / 2017

Sofia Coppola Talks the Teenage Dream of Her Striking Virgin Suicides Debut

Rodrigo Perez / 2018

Sofia Coppola on Filmmaking

Annette Insdorf / 2020

How Sofia Coppola and Rashida Jones Put Their Own Family Lives into On the Rocks

Mark Olsen / 2020

Sofia Coppola on the Identity Crisis That Led Her to Make On the Rocks with Bill Murray

Eric Kohn / 2020

Sofia Coppola: On the Rocks

Elvis Mitchell / 2020

Sofia Coppola

Amy Monaghan / 2021

Additional Resources

Index

Introduction

Sofia Carmina Coppola was born May 14, 1971, in New York City—on camera. Francis Ford Coppola first filmed his daughter as she was being delivered. Once home in San Francisco, her parents threw a gala party and showed the film of the birth, which had more elaborate production values than most dads are capable of, reported the San Francisco Chronicle. This same footage was later featured in one of her mother Eleanor Coppola’s 1970s avant-garde art installations: She had me in a room, watching the video of my birth, Sofia Coppola told her friend Kim Gordon in 2010. When I was growing up, my mom always talked about Hollywood values. She really had disdain for that. She’s not glamorous. She’s earthy, and she was a conceptual artist in the ’70s.… She made these cool art films, but it was like the opposite of my dad’s world. So when she had to go into that world, I think she thought it was all full of shit. In valuing Eleanor Coppola’s aesthetics perhaps above those of her maximalist dad, Sofia Coppola sheds light on how a daughter of New Hollywood grew up to be an indie auteur.

The interviews collected here go back further than those of any other filmmaker. The first, a Q&A conducted by her father, was recorded when Sofia Coppola was five years old. She had already moved from northern California to the Philippines for the shooting of Apocalypse Now; and she would spend much of her childhood on location, relocating to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, and to the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in Manhattan for The Cotton Club, like an army brat in service of the seventh art. Credited as Domino, she played small roles in a handful of her father’s 1980s films. At age eighteen, she spent her college holiday break in Italy on the set of The Godfather Part III, where Francis Ford Coppola cast her last moment as Mary Corleone in place of an exhausted Winona Ryder. The reviews of her acting were mostly negative, some of them vicious. But on the record, the younger Coppola was unfazed. She had other interests than performing on camera.

A Los Angeles Times interview from 1995 offered a glimpse of Coppola’s clear-eyed sense of self: I guess I like telling other people what to do instead of being told what to do. She was well aware of how she was perceived: [P]eople have a problem with nepotism, she noted, and no one could deny that she was child of privilege. How would she handle it? As Coppola later told Stephen Galloway, I remember my mom saying, ‘People aren’t going to like you because they’ll think you’re a snob.’ Coppola added: ‘You have to go out of your way to show them you’re not a jerk.’

Coppola left Mills College for CalArts and then studied photography with Paul Jasmin at the Art Center of Design in Pasadena. Building on two mid-1980s summer internships at Chanel in Paris and a stint as costume designer for The Spirit of ’76 (1989), she launched clothing line Milkfed with childhood friend Stephanie Hayman, shot and appeared in music videos, and took fashion photography jobs in Japan. With friend and fellow cinema scion Zoe Cassavetes, she shot four episodes of a video magazine for Comedy Central called Hi-Octane.

Dismissed as a dilettante by many, Sofia Coppola finally found a home for her diverse aesthetic interests as a genuine cinematic talent. She debuted a black-and-white short called Lick the Star at the Venice Film Festival. In a life-altering turn, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, who had appeared on Hi-Octane, recommended that Coppola read Jeffrey Eugenides’s debut novel, The Virgin Suicides. Taken by it, she decided to adapt—as a screenwriting exercise—one chapter of Eugenides’s story about neighborhood Michigan boys obsessed with the five doomed Lisbon sisters and found she couldn’t stop. Then, she discovered that The Virgin Suicides had been optioned, and a director was lined up.

Rather than give up, Coppola exhibited the determination that has since become the hallmark of her singular vision. She tracked down the rights holders, shared her script, made her case, and was hired to direct. In a 2000 interview in Salon, the fledging filmmaker discussed her new career path: I spent most of my twenties worrying, ‘Oh no. I don’t know what I want to do’ and ‘I’ll try this and try that.’ It’s really huge to find something that you really enjoy, something that you can really contribute something to. And I really love doing it, and I feel like it’s something that combines so many other things that I love.

Interview magazine presciently asked another up-and-coming filmmaker to speak with Coppola about her forthcoming feature. The young director of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, Wes Anderson, who knew his way around mise en scène, started the conversation with the visual side of the movie because it doesn’t look like any other. When you read the book, did you see the visual possibilities in it? Coppola responded, Yes. The way it was written just felt cinematic. And I always liked suburbia. It’s an exotic setting to me because I didn’t grow up there. I didn’t want it to be about the ’70s. I wanted it to look timeless.

When The Virgin Suicides debuted, some tongues wagged that any merits were due to the work of father Francis and then-husband Spike Jonze. But this movie was actually a precocious work by a skilled young filmmaker, deftly reframing for the screen a story famously narrated in the first-person plural in Eugenides’s novel. Her style was witty and formally inventive, splitting the screen, animating the sparkle of young Lux Lisbon, and accompanying the entrance of heartthrob Trip Fontaine with the hilariously apt needle drop of Heart’s song Magic Man. Coppola conjured a soft-focus collage of teenage femininity so effectively, in fact, many forgot this movie was told from the point of view of a group of boys.

Her follow-up feature was supposed to be another adaptation, this time drawing on Antonia Fraser’s history of Marie Antoinette. But there was also this original story Coppola was writing, drawn from her time spent in Tokyo in her twenties. Of course, that script became Lost in Translation. The film confirmed the arrival of a major filmmaker and reinvented Bill Murray as the melancholy charmer revered by many today.

No one was more surprised by the success of Lost in Translation than its director: I thought, ‘Nobody’s going to want to hear about an affluent girl who can’t find herself.’ It’s the most unrelatable thing ever. And just about my experiences in Japan—it was just something I wanted to express. What it was like to be there at that moment in life. So Coppola began with the dreamlike feeling of floating in the peaceful atmosphere of the Park Hyatt Hotel, many stories above the noise and neon of Tokyo. Charlotte, who is young, newly married, and does not know what to do with her life, and Bob, a past-his-prime action star in the throes of the same type of crisis, drift into a fleeting chaste romance. Coppola wanted to put Bill Murray in a tuxedo, but she also was not afraid to show us that suave 007 fit is sometimes achieved with a series of binder clips gathering the fabric in the back. The film was funny, melancholy, beautiful, and unpredictable—and it struck a chord with audiences and critics.

One common theme in the Lost in Translation interviews is landing her leading man, another story of persuasion and persistence: using every possible connection to reach the notoriously hard-to-get actor. As Coppola told Anne Thompson, For five months it was like a full-time job, contacting Bill Murray. Later, she confided to not-yet-a-director Mia Hansen-Løve, writing for Cahiers du Cinema, If I were a man, I think I’d be Bill Murray. Jet lag also comes up often, particularly how it’s manifested through the atmospheric Tokyo dream pop soundtrack the director and music supervisor Brian Reitzell sequenced. And then there’s the question that haunts Coppola to this day: what does Murray’s character Bob whisper into the ear of Scarlett Johansson, playing Charlotte, at the end of the movie?

Taking advantage of the opportunities created by Lost in Translation’s three Oscar nominations and one win, for Best Original Screenplay, Coppola returned to her Marie Antoinette script and cast Kirsten Dunst as the teen dauphine. For those paying attention to more than just an errant pair of Chuck Taylors in the frame, the fact that the movie was granted permission to shoot on location at Versailles serves as another example of the filmmaker’s determined approach to her work. (The unprecedented access also came because the overseer of the palace liked Lost in Translation.) Interviews tied to the Columbia Pictures release reveal that the $40 million film proved exhausting to make and, surprise, was controversial when it first screened at the Cannes Film Festival. There were reports of boos from the audience, but Coppola noted to Todd Gilchrist: "[We] got a standing ovation and I thought it went really well and we were on the cover of Cahiers du Cinema, so I thought it had gone well." Yet many critics responded to her third film by calling for Coppola’s head, casting the now-celebrated director as a clueless queen living in a privileged bubble.

In an interview with the French film journal Positif (conducted in English, published in French, and translated back into English here), Jean-Christophe Ferrari and Yann Tobin wanted to know whether the director identified with the French queen: On the human level, Kirsten and I could understand her. But it’d be impossible to identify with the scale of her lifestyle and her protected situation. I grew up with parents who were quite bohemian, in California—totally different! As she said to Todd Gilchrist, I was trying to take away as many kind of period-film-genre clichés and simplify it in a way that could be relatable on a human level, which is where her divisive New Romantic soundtrack choices came in. Who better to evoke that decadent teenagers are running France than Siouxsie Sue and Adam Ant?

With her fourth film, Somewhere, Coppola said she drew inspiration from a black-and-white Bruce Weber photograph of a sullen young Matt Dillon in bed while writing the notoriously short original script. The simplicity of the filmmaking grew out of conversations she had with director of photography Harris Savides about their mutual dislike for shooting coverage, and the production set up in the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, where the main character, movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), is spinning his wheels until his ex drops off their eleven-year-old daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning). When he is not on publicists’ time—appearing at photo calls and awards shows—Johnny is on Guitar Hero time, hanging out in the hotel with Cleo and an old friend. In the Somewhere interviews that appear here, Coppola emphasized the appeal of doing something as minimal as possible from a male point of view, telling Fresh Air host Terry Gross that after Marie Antoinette, I was like kind of overdosed on all that beautiful decoration and the beautiful clothes and so many characters and details.… [T]hat movie was so, you know, my feminine, girly side. The hotel was a familiar setting for the director from her time spent in the city in her twenties. Earlier still, her father had actually owned the Chateau Marmont for a hot second, until a termite report and her mother’s intervention put the kibosh on that plan.

Even with that family connection, in talking with Film Comment’s Nicolas Rapold, Coppola pushed back on some of the lazier characterizations of her work: I don’t think it’s autobiographical. I think all writers use what they know. But I think ‘autobiographical’ would be more if it were more similar to my background. I think it’s easy to say that. In a conversation with longtime friend Kim Gordon for a Bust cover story, she credited Eleanor Coppola with vital advice: My mom, she was always saying, ‘Just make sure you get really great nannies, so you can do your work and not feel guilty about it’—I think because she felt like she gave up her career to raise us. It was nice to take the year off after Romy was born just to hang out with her and have that experience. But then after that, I was missing having my own creative thing. And yet, when Somewhere was awarded the Golden Lion by a Venice Film Festival jury headed by Quentin Tarantino, a one-time boyfriend, cries of favoritism rang out again.

Coppola’s enthusiasm for a less-is-more approach extended to The Bling Ring, her second feature with Savides, who introduced her to Philippe LaSourd, the cinematographer she’s worked with since Savides’s death in 2012. Speaking with the Hollywood Reporter, she said, "After Marie Antoinette, I was over movies. Then I met [cinematographer] Harris Savides, and he gave me a new outlook. He was really into doing things small and as simple as possible. He got me excited about making movies again, in a small-scale way. This time, slow and simple long takes and natural light were put into the service of a less languid based on a true story" movie about criminal excess.

The Bling Ring is the only work to date that Coppola has shot digitally. There’s an apt ugly beauty to the selfies-and-social-media world of these Calabasas, California, teens yearning to trade their beige homes for the nightclubs, glitzy garb, and fleeting fame of the reality stars they see on screen and in the tabloids—by burgling their homes and claiming celebrities’ clothes, jewelry, drugs, and money for themselves. What she liked about digital: It feels more immediate, and since you’re not limited by the film in the camera you can go on and on and have really long shots. What she didn’t like: I spent more time watching the monitor than being on set. It felt passive. I see how it can distance you from the action. I had to keep reminding myself to get back on the set. I’d shoot on film again, if it’s still available. In a DGA Quarterly profile, Coppola acknowledged, This world isn’t as visually beautiful as some of my other films. It’s more Pop.

Carrie Rickey’s 2013 DGA interview is a wide-ranging, expansive discussion of Coppola’s filmmaking process. The writer-director admitted to forgetting how hard it is to shoot from inside a car, arguably her signature shot: You don’t think about that when you’re writing it. And I write it again and again. Rickey beautifully described another hallmark of the director’s style: Hers is not the traditional first-person point of view. In Coppola’s films it’s as though the camera is a balloon invisibly tethered to the nape of the protagonist’s neck, bobbing and floating in her wake as she threads through space. This shot, which requires only one camera, is an umbilical cord attaching the viewer to the character. It creates the effect that you’re not watching a Sofia Coppola movie; you’re inside of it.

Coppola discussed how her father taught her to write a script by collaborating on his Life without Zoe segment of the anthology film New York Stories. Rickey wrote, As she tells it, the takeaway wasn’t so much about how to structure a script, but about being party to the process by which an idea is developed, tweaked, and ultimately executed as the director. With her own films, Coppola "breaks down the script while writing it. ‘I see the movie in three acts and have a sense of how I want each act framed. With Bling Ring, I knew I wanted the early acts to be in wide shots and gradually proceed to tighter shots.’ "

From the start, Coppola’s films have been image- rather than dialogue-intensive. I don’t want my movies to feel like movies, she said. I want them to feel like life. For Coppola, [t]he scripts are notes to let cast and crew know what I want to do. I don’t make a shot list. There’s no sense in that until you see the actors rehearse the scene. So, I’ll say, ‘In this scene I want to show X.’ I feel camera placement is really intuitive. To guide her actors’ performances, she said, Instead of saying, ‘Act tired in this scene,’ I’ll say, ‘You’ve been up all night and you want to go home,’ to set the mood for them.

Following on the heels of 2015’s A Very Murray Christmas, a whimsical, old-fashioned Christmas special on Netflix built around her loosey-goosey muse Bill Murray crooning carols at the Carlyle Hotel, Coppola helmed another adaptation, the small-scale period piece The Beguiled. In a lengthy interview that Time magazine film critic Stephanie Zacharek conducted before and after the filmmaker was awarded the Best Director prize at Cannes, only the second woman to be so lauded—and the first to find out on the phone while at Coney Island with her kids—Coppola again considered her upbringing. Zacharek wrote, [Francis Ford Coppola] always told her that having a personal connection with the material is paramount. ‘That was something to strive for when I was learning about filmmaking.’ Coppola told her, ‘My dad was always fighting to make movies.… I never saw it as being easy for a filmmaker. So I never thought, ‘Oh, it’s harder for me.’ I always saw it as being a fight to make the movie that you want to make.’ Coppola also told Zacharek that Bill Murray calls her the Velvet Hammer, which she loves."

Coppola was advised that she should spend the beginning of her career assembling her team, and she is often most animated when talking about or interviewed with her collaborators below the line. In a 2017 DGA Quarterly interview, Coppola and longtime production designer Anne Ross told Anthony Kaufman that it was Ross who suggested the director shoot The Beguiled—already adapted in 1971 by Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood—from the women characters’ point of view. She’s worked with music supervisor Brian Reitzell since her first feature, and Richard Beggs has sounded out her cinematic worlds from the start. As Coppola told Rickey, I find the movie after the sound mix. The sound adds so much to make you feel you’re really there.

This collection also includes interviews tied to anniversaries of her earlier work and milestones like the Criterion Collection rereleasing The Virgin Suicides in 2018. The woman who in 2006 said she didn’t feel old enough to record a commentary track described the experience of revisiting her debut to The Playlist: [I]t’s hard for me to be objective, but there are things I had forgot about. I can enjoy it without cringing, which is rare when you look back at old things, and you see, you know, awkwardness. Coppola also acknowledged, "A lot of artists make the same thing over and over again. And I’m critical of that, like, ‘Oh, here I am making the same movie again.’ But I just make what I’m drawn to and they build on each other. I don’t set out to make work about this. I just go with what interests me. Looking back, Coppola said, I didn’t have like an agenda. But I was really drawn to doing things that were feminine