The Californian hotel Sofia Coppola described as “rite of passage for an actor to live” in
Location has long played an incredibly important role in the work of Sofia Coppola, who often condenses narrative action within location-specific frameworks, like the Palace of Versailles or an American Civil War-era girls’ school, with her movies often emerging as rather insular, preoccupied with a certain moment in time and or a specific, introspective experience.
From the stifling conditions of a Detroit suburb in The Virgin Suicides to the bustling streets of Tokyo, which simultaneously overwhelm and alienate the characters in Lost in Translation, her worlds become microcosms, shrouded in pastels and haziness; there’s always a distinctive sense of being adrift, where a particular location might set the scene, but her characters never seem truly at home there.
It makes sense, then, that her 2010 film Somewhere draws on the feeling of being lost against a backdrop of Hollywood, honing in on a father-daughter relationship that must have certainly taken inspiration from her own upbringing as the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather.
Having grown up surrounded by stars and frequenting film sets, the younger Coppola has long known a thing or two about the industry, and in Somewhere, one of her more underrated and meandering films, so to speak, she draws on the world of Hollywood in a way that only a true insider would be familiar with.
Naturally, she chose the Chateau Marmont as the backdrop for this tale of malaise and uncertainty, the iconic Los Angeles hotel steeped in cinematic history, an emblem of fading glamour and opulence which sits, castle-like, nestled among billboards, tarmac, and palm trees.
The hotel can be found on Sunset Boulevard, having first opened in 1929 as a go-to location for Hollywood stars, some living there temporarily, and others taking up much longer residencies.
It’s almost the LA answer to the Hotel Chelsea in New York, with a few famous figures meeting their deaths at the Chateau, like John Belushi and Helmut Newton, while everyone from Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor to Bob Dylan and F Scott Fitzgerald having spent time at the Chateau, which Coppola believes is “sort of a rite of passage for an actor to live [in]”, as she told the Los Angeles Times, “It means you’ve made it, but you’re still ‘down-to-earth’”.
In another interview with NPR, the director further revealed why she chose to set the movie at the Chateau Marmont. “It has a lot of history, but a lot of movie stars have lived there, and it’s almost been like a rite of passage,” she emphasised, yet again. adding, “Even Stephen [Dorff], the actor in the movie, told me his story of when he lived there. And so it has a lot of stories, but when I was writing this character, I thought that’s where this guy would live.”
The Chateau Marmont has been referenced in many other movies and songs, too, becoming an intrinsic location in Lana Del Rey’s version of Los Angeles, while movies like La La Land and books like Eve Babitz’s Eve’s Hollywood all find a place for the iconic hotel, which has forever been immortalised in popular culture as the ultimate marker of Hollywood.
