Sofia Coppola personally recommends three favourite movies
Sofia Coppola is, without a doubt, one of the great film directors of the modern day. More than stepping out of her father’s shadow, the filmmaker has carried the Coppola surname to new and exciting places. Her clear stylistic vision and storytelling prowess will see her written into the history books.
Even with her debut short film, Lick The Star, in 1998, Coppola already seemed to have a fully formed idea of the kind of films she wanted to make. In that first film, so many of her signatures found their origin, from her car window shots to her sartorial soundtracks.
Born into a movie-making family, Coppola was already going to be great. As the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, she undoubtedly enjoyed an astonishing movie education. Not only did she get to watch her father in action, but we can be sure that he showed her no end of important and influential movies along the way.
As for her own favourite movies, Coppola’s picks reveal a lot about her thought process and inspirations when it comes to making her own films. In conversation at the British Film Institute for the release of Priscilla, she shared three of her top picks.
First up, the 1945 romance flick Brief Encounter stands out. An iconic piece of classic British cinema, the tale is all based around a chance meeting on a railway. A perfect story about how small moments can spiral into big ones, it’s easy to see why Coppola loves the movie, often centring her own work around small-town suburban living.
However, it is when Coppola gets to her second choice that her picks become revealing. As a real insight into her own process, her next choice was a major source of inspiration for her latest film, Priscilla. “I love the John Schlesinger film, Darling,” she says, referencing the 1965 romantic drama. Upon its release, the film swept awards, taking home four Baftas and receiving five Academy Award nominations.
While the film is fictional, Coppola looks to it for real-life storytelling as she adds, “I think about it a lot when I’m doing biography movies because it jumps in time in a really clever way.” With several of her movies being based on real people, including Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring, she must call upon this film a lot.
Her third choice is another interesting insight into Coppola’s influences. “All That Jazz by Bob Fosse. That is one of my favourite films,” she says. Bob Fosse is probably best known as a choreographer with his distinct and influential style of dance colouring films like Chicago, Sweet Charity and Cabaret. But in 1979, he directed his own movie partly based on his own life. For Coppola, it’s the technicalities of this film that stand out. “I love the editing,” she says, especially connecting it to her 2006 film, “In Marie Antoinette we kind of reference it with the, I think it’s Vivaldi? There’s a repetitive sequence of every morning being the same that I love and I feel like I reference a lot.”
Sofia Coppola’s Favourite Films:
- Brief Encounter (1945)
- Darling (1965)
- All That Jazz (1979)
