Sofia Coppola - marie claire July 2021
She was the poster girl for Hollywood nepotism who would go on to become the greatest female director of her generation. As the cult filmmaker and fashion darling turns 50, Alexandra English reflects on how Sofia Coppola managed to transcend her famous family name
It was 2002 and the director Sofia Coppola was in Tokyo preparing to shoot her second film, Lost in Translation. The actors were ready, the crew set up, the money spent. All they needed was their leading man: Bill Murray. Coppola wasn’t sure he’d turn up – after all, he’d only said yes once. It wasn’t even a hard yes, more of a maybe. There was no contract or deal agreement. Still, she’d taken a leap of faith and gone to Tokyo anyway.
“People said, ‘You need to have a back-up plan,’” she recalled, “and I said, ‘I’m not going to make the movie if Bill doesn’t do it.’” She’d met him just once but was determined he was the only male actor who could strike the right tone for the lonely-hearts story, which also stars Scarlett Johansson. She was relentless in trying to track him down. The famously elusive actor doesn’t have an agent, just a number for directors to call and leave a message with no guarantee he’ll even check the machine. “I left messages for a year,” she said later. “Stalking Bill became my life’s work.”
One day, while Coppola was in New York, a screenwriter friend called her. “He said, ‘Bill will meet you if you come to this restaurant. Can you come right now?’ I dropped everything and ran over,” Coppola said. “I got there and asked, ‘Do you think you would be in my movie?’ and he said, ‘I might be inclined to.’ That was all. But I went with it, and I went to Tokyo, and we were spending money in the hopes that he would show up.” And then he did. “When Bill showed up, it was like, ‘Oh my God, thank God,’” Coppola said. “And then we shot it in, like, 27 days. We were all delirious.”
Murray expected Coppola to take after her father, the bold and forceful Apocalypse Now and The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola. Instead, he discovered her power was in her shyness. “Don’t let Sofia’s littleness and quietness confuse you,” he said. “Sofia is made of steel. She’s tough, but she doesn’t pretend to be a man. She has a way of getting her way. She’s very polite about it … When you see her movies, you forget that she is Francis’ daughter. She has been able to reinvent what her last name represents.”
…
Sofia Coppola was born into a Hollywood dynasty on May 15, 1971. Her father, the heavyweight director, and her mother, Eleanor, a documentary maker, already had two sons and seemed to be expecting a third. Francis, who was filming the birth, was so excited to have a girl that he dropped the camera. He was making The Godfather at the time, and as if to make amends for failing to capture her precious first moments on film, cast his little girl as baby Michael, who is christened in the climactic final scene.
With that baptism, Sofia was inducted into a world of privilege and opportunities not afforded to many. While being born into a family such as the Coppolas’ would turn out to be both a blessing and a curse, there’s no denying that her childhood was enchanted. She and her two brothers, Gio and Roman, traipsed all over the world to Francis’ filming locations “like a circus family”. “He took us to places that kids don’t usually go,” Sofia recalled. “When I was 16, we went to Cuba and met Fidel Castro; we went to Vegas and Reno,” she said. “It was very magical. My dad did everything in a really big way — like, we went in a helicopter and landed in the parking lot at Disneyland, and security came out and were like, ‘You can’t land a helicopter here.’ Things like that were normal.”
While Gio and Roman gravitated towards careers in the film industry, Sofia wanted to be in fashion. When she was 15, a family friend hooked her up with an internship at Chanel, where she spent two summers in Paris fetching coffee for Karl Lagerfeld. But right as her rebellion was taking hold, 22-year-old Gio was killed in a boating accident, leaving behind his pregnant girlfriend, Jacqui de la Fontaine. Sofia returned to her family and the world of film, though it wasn’t long before she was itching to escape again. In 1990, Winona Ryder pulled out of The Godfather III, and Francis asked Sofia to step in. “I didn’t have any acting aspirations ... I said OK because I was at the age when you want to try everything,” she said later. By all accounts, it was a disaster. “The critics tore me apart,” she recalled. “I remember going back to art school, and I see this issue of Entertainment Weekly. It’s me on the cover, and the headline says: ‘Did she ruin her father’s movie?’ It was humiliating.”
There was a silver lining, though: the photographer Steven Meisel approached her for a shoot and brought her into his inner circle. “People in the fashion world embraced me after everyone else was so harsh,” she said. And so Sofia spent the ’90s modelling, designing and hanging out with the A-list. She was rumoured to be dating Keanu Reeves and was a favourite of photographers Bruce Weber and Peter Lindbergh. She was in a music video for Madonna but turned down Iggy Pop. She sent joke designs to Chanel, who made prototypes of clogs and a gun holster for her. In 1994, she briefly had a TV show on Comedy Central (the grungy Hi Octane), and she started a fashion line called MilkFed. She also met the man who would become her first husband, the director Spike Jones.
In 1999 came the project that changed everything. Sofia read Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, about five teenage sisters who take their own lives one by one. “It felt like [Eugenides] really understood the experience of being a teenager: the longing, the melancholy,” Sofia said. “For me, it was very much about losing my brother … I connected to that teenage time because it’s supposed to be fun and carefree. But mine was exactly the opposite.” She still wasn’t planning on being a filmmaker, but she heard that someone was planning on making a movie adaptation and immediately felt protective of it. Her dad advised her against turning it into a screenplay, but she wrote it anyway. Once she showed it to him, he was so impressed he bought the script.
The night before she started filming, Jones proposed. “That was not the time to be making life decisions,” she said later. She planned the wedding while in Cannes for the premiere of The Virgin Suicides, and they were married shortly after. They held the ceremony at her parents’ Napa estate, where her father also has a winery, with high-profile guests including designer Marc Jacobs and musician Tom Waits. It was a low-key event on the Coppola party scale.
On their honeymoon to Bora Bora, Sofia could finally relax. The Virgin Suicides had received rave reviews, but it had been a rough ride. When the film was announced, critics prickled at her name. Here was the first film from Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter, co-produced by him, backed by his production company and starring actors he’d worked with. The launch of her directorial career landed, understandably, among cries of nepotism and privilege, but it survived. “People told me they liked it, but they were surprised they liked it,” Sofia said. “I suppose that’s inevitable; some people find it hard to separate my history from who I am.”
The Coppolas have always helped each other out (the actors Nicolas Cage and Jason Schwartzman are cousins, and Gio’s daughter, Gia Coppola, is also a director). But while The New York Times referred to the family’s favour exchange as “a chain letter you are happy to receive”, Sofia has always copped the harshest accusations of nepotism. But with each project, she steps further out of her father’s enormous shadow to prove hers is a talent that doesn’t need the surname.
Lost in Translation solidified her position as “one of the most visionary filmmakers of her generation”, according to the Independent. In 2004, she won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for the film and was the first American woman to be nominated for Best Director. In 2010, she was the fourth American to take home a Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival for Somewhere, about a down-and-out actor and his daughter; and in 2017, she was only the second woman ever to be named Best Director at Cannes for her remake of the Civil War film The Beguiled.
She worked hard to set herself apart from her father in both aesthetic and sentiment. “We approach things completely differently,” she said. “[He] told me, ‘You should say “Action” louder,’ … and I thought, ‘OK, you can go now.’” On location, she lights candles and puts up photos of her friends and family, as well as a mood board for the movie. When things aren’t going to plan, she sits and has a glass of wine while she thinks, then comes back and whispers in an actor’s ear, and it works. “I may say it differently, but I still get what I want,” she said.
Still, her father’s influence does permeate her work in concept. She explored father/daughter relationships in her films Somewhere and, most recently, On the Rocks, a fresh take on the buddy-comedy genre with Murray and Rashida Jones. “It’s a big theme to me,” she said. “We talk about mothers and daughters more, but fathers and daughters is such a particular relationship. That dynamic shapes you, what you expect from relationships, and how you look at men.”
In between films, she has kept working in fashion. She’s been a muse for Marc Jacobs since she inspired his first fragrance in 2001, and has worked with Cartier, Calvin Klein, Christian Dior and Louis Vuitton (designing bags and shoes for the latter in 2008). In 2016, she combined directing with fashion in the most epic of ways: by collaborating with Valentino on La Traviata at the Opera of Rome.
After Sofia and Jones divorced in 2003 (“I refer to it as my practice marriage,” she said), Sofia briefly dated the director Quentin Tarantino before marrying musician Thomas Mars in 2010. Sofia keeps her family life out of the public eye, saying that she wants her children (Romy, 14, and Cosima, 10) to have a normal childhood. Until the pandemic hit, the family divided their time between Paris and New York, before joining her parents in Napa. (“I felt like a deserter,” she said of leaving New York.) There, she’s been working on adapting the Edith Wharton novel The Custom of the Country.
And it seems the Coppola film bug may have been passed on to the next generation. Romy and Cosima have started making films, and Sofia can’t help but give input. “[My daughter] took a long shot of our dog, and I was like ‘Can you trim it just a bit? You’ve been in that shot for so long.’”
She is a Coppola, after all.
This article originally appeared in the July 2021 issue of marie claire.
