The $1.5bn movie Sofia Coppola had no interest in directing: “It never went anywhere”
While Sofia Coppola has always benefited from the fact that her father literally directed The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, you can’t deny how vital her own cinematic voice has become since she started making movies in the 1990s.
After dipping her toes into various different pools, from acting (not her finest work) to modelling to fashion designing and TV presenting, it was filmmaking that proved to be her calling. The apple really doesn’t fall that far from the tree, does it? She made her debut with The Virgin Suicides, and over 25 years later, it’s still coveted by many teenage girls and young women across the globe, who found a sense of understanding in its nuanced depiction of girlhood.
Rarely had the experience of teenage girls been presented on screen quite like this, with Coppola refusing to forgo an overtly feminine aesthetic in order to tell this story of patriarchal, familial, and religious oppression, which ultimately claims the lives of these young girls. With her next film, Lost in Translation, Coppola further proved herself best at depicting isolated young women, translating pain and loneliness onto the big screen with complete understanding.
Marie Antoinette was another big hitter for Coppola, blending anachronistic imagery with her signature doses of melancholy. That innate sadness, or rather, this distinctive sense of contemplativeness, is always present in her work, even her pop-culture-soaked LA girl crime comedy The Bling Ring. No matter the project, Coppola puts her stamp on it, but one thing she has always stayed away from is a big blockbuster.
She’s not the kind of filmmaker to make a franchise, to helm movies that’ll generate billions. Sure, she has the talent, but that’s not really her style. She has long existed within a specific niche: not one that’s particularly obscure, but certainly one aimed at younger female audiences rather than a widespread, mainstream one designed to earn as much money as possible.
The filmmaker also anchors her work in the real world, staying far away from fantasy and mythical creatures, apart from her abandoned attempt to bring The Little Mermaid back to the big screen, which proves the point. Those themes don’t typically concern her, which is why it’s rather surprising to discover that she actually agreed to a meeting to direct the last instalment in the Twilight franchise in the early 2010s.
Yes, Coppola is good at making movies directed at teenage girls, but Twilight just didn’t seem like her thing. Luckily, she quickly realised that it was not something she wanted to be part of at all, finding the concept, quite frankly, ridiculous, regardless of how well it would have no doubt paid. The vampire romance series was a huge phenomenon back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and people couldn’t get enough of the love triangle between Bella, Edward, and Jacob.
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In the final movie, however, this ends with Bella and Edward’s baby, Renesmee, growing up rapidly and getting with Jacob, who ‘imprinted’ on her when she was born, making them soulmates. I’m not sure what that means, either. Coppola thought this was all a bit much for her, revealing to Rolling Stone, “We had one meeting, and it never went anywhere. I thought the whole imprinting-werewolf thing was weird. The baby. Too weird!”
“But part of the earlier Twilight could be done in an interesting way,” the director subsequently admitted, praising Catherine Hardwicke’s original. “I thought it’d be fun to do a teen-vampire romance, but the last one gets really far out.”
The final instalment in the franchise, the two-part Breaking Dawn, would make a combined total of over $1.5 billion from cinemas, but it wasn’t meant to be for Coppola, who’d shift her attention to The Bling Ring instead.
